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Floor Speech
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, well, we are in interesting times, and we are beginning to see the corporate and billionaire takeover of the U.S. Government.
And in that corporate and billionaire takeover of the U.S. Government, the nominee Russ Vought to run OMB has a key role, and that key role--to do the work for the billionaires and the big corporations--is what makes him unfit and dangerous and what compels us to come to the floor tonight to warn the American people of what this guy will do and who he is.
Let's start with a little history. This is the guy who violated the Impoundment Control Act by withholding 214 million appropriated dollars from the soldiers fighting and dying in the trenches of Ukraine against Putin's thug army. It was that stunt that led to the impeachment of President Trump.
This is the guy who caused lives to be lost in those Ukrainian trenches by withholding funding they needed desperately, withholding the funding they desperately needed illegally, and withholding that desperately needed funding illegally in order to support a scheme by President Trump to put pressure on the Ukrainians to give him dirt on his political opponent. That is a little bit of history of where this guy will go.
The OMB is the nerve center of the Federal Government, and to have someone there of that character is dangerous.
Vought is also lawless. The Impoundment Control Act that he violated, the Government Accountability Office said this:
Faithful execution of the law does not permit the President to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law.
He violated that, and they specifically find:
. . . therefore, we conclude that OMB violated the [Impoundment Control] Act.
Is he repentant about that now that the Government Accountability Office has called it out as being illegal? Never mind the Ukrainian lives that he caused to be lost. No. He continues to say the Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional, even though no court has ever said so.
He was pressed on this question in the Budget Committee and answering the Appropriations Ranking Member Senator Murray's questions about this, he said:
President Trump has stated that the [Impoundment Control Act] is unconstitutional . . . I agree with the President's position.
Again, no court has said this. He said:
If I am confirmed as the Director of OMB, I will follow the advice of legal counsel, and ultimately the President, with respect to the implementation of the [Impoundment Control Act].
Pay attention.
I will follow the advice of legal counsel, and ultimately the President.
Not ``I will follow the law,'' not ``I will follow court decisions that say what the law is.'' No. ``I will follow the advice of legal counsel, and ultimately the President.''
So let's just have a quick look at who his legal counsel is. People may remember this. This is a painting that was commissioned by this guy, the billionaire Harlan Crow. As you may remember, the billionaire Harlan Crow has been funding the lifestyle of the next person over-- Justice Clarence Thomas. Millions of dollars in secret gifts to the Thomas family.
And the next guy over in the painting--by the way, if you saw Kristi Noem sworn in by Justice Thomas, he has a picture of this right behind them. He is so pleased with it that he has got his own version of it, him with his billionaire sugar daddy, and with Mark Paoletta. This is the guy who is going to be the legal counsel whose advice Vought is going to listen to.
This guy is neck-deep in the billionaire court capture scheme; of course, his advice is going to be what the billionaires say.
The next guy over is Leonard Leo, the court-fixer. This is basically a panorama of the corruption of the Supreme Court: the billionaire who funds it, the Justice who secretly accepts millions of dollars in billionaire gifts, the guy who cooks up the whole scheme and travels with Justices on these billionaire-funded trips and is here at the billionaire's estate in the Adirondacks with them, and, of course, Mark Paoletta.
That is whose advice he is going to take. Again, he was careful to say: not the courts, not the law--the billionaire court-fixer guy who is now his counsel and the President, who has already said he thinks the law is unconstitutional.
This guy, on this question of the Impoundment Control Act, he hasn't said he is going to follow the law either. In fact, he said the Impoundment Control Act is a stupid law, and he tweeted at Russell Vought: ``Impound, baby, impound.''
Yes, you are going to get sober legal advice from a guy who says, ``Impound, baby, impound,'' and hangs out with billionaires who fund the capture of the Supreme Court as part of Leonard Leo's scheme.
This is an illustration of how this guy, Russell Vought, is a creature of the far-right, billionaire dark money world. Before he went to OMB the first time, he worked as vice president of Heritage Action.
What is Heritage Action? Heritage Action is a billionaire-funded dark money group that advocates for the things that dark money billionaires want, and he, for years, worked for them.
Then he went into OMB. And I submit, he still worked for them, although they weren't paying his paycheck at the time.
He gets back out after Trump won, and he sets up something called the Center for Renewing America--again, a billionaire-funded, dark money enterprise whose purpose is to advocate for the things that the dark money billionaires want.
It also, by the way, took care of the refugees from the first Trump administration--that creepy character Jeffrey Clark, who was in the Department of Justice and tried to wrangle his way into the Attorney Generalship by proposing that he would put the Department of Justice into the election fixing scheme that President Trump was running down in Georgia--that guy? Where did he land? Right, at the Center for Renewing America, courtesy of Russ Vought.
Who else is a senior fellow there, funded by the billionaires? Oh, Mark Paoletta, the guy who is going to be his legal counsel and was chumming it up with the billionaire and the Justice.
Who else? Kash Patel, the guy who has threatened publicly, over and over again, to turn the FBI into a political weapon for Donald Trump against his adversaries. He went so far as to repost a tweet of himself chainsawing the heads off members of his enemies list.
Yes, this is the guy who published an enemies list of who he was going to get in what he called a manhunt. ``The manhunt begins now,'' he said, of his enemies list.
And Trump wants to put him in charge of the FBI so it becomes his personal, political weapon. And Kash Patel has shown, time after time, instance after instance, that he is all too willing to do that.
And where did he land? Yes, right, at Vought's Center for Renewing America.
So this guy Vought is neck deep in the billionaire, dark money operation that is working right now to take over the U.S. Government and run it its own way.
The way it wanted to do this is through a plan that it cooked up and paid for called Project 2025. And if you look at the first couple of weeks of the Trump administration, you see Project 2025 playing out again and again and again and again. And who was the central architect of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025? Oh, yes, Russell Vought. Paid for with $120 million--you know, in Rhode Island, that is still a pretty big number--$120 million from a couple of rightwing billionaire families to cook up a scheme to run the government. And Vought both writes it and now goes in to implement Project 2025.
If you want to look at the guy's lawlessness from another angle, he doesn't believe in independent government Agencies. So the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, for instance, that is an independent government Agency because it adjudicates disputes in the energy sector and because it makes policy and has to do a number of things, but it has to be independent to have this adjudicative function, or the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Federal Reserve--he doesn't believe that any of them should be independent. He says:
What we're trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them--
``Seize them''--for the corporate and billionaire takeover, they want to seize the independent Agencies in government so that they are under the control of the big donors who put this administration in.
He said specifically about the Federal Reserve:
It's very hard to square the Fed's independence with the Constitution.
Except that the Supreme Court of the United States has squared the Fed's independence with the Constitution for decades. The decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court supporting the existence of independent Agencies goes back to the Humphrey's Executor case in 1935. This has been a long run of Supreme Court precedent in which literally dozens of cases involving independent Agencies have come before the Court, and it has never said that it is hard to square the independence of Agencies Congress has deemed to be independent with the Constitution.
This is an eccentric and illegal lawless view, and they intend to impose it, notwithstanding the law.
There are--``Number one'' he says, ``is going after this whole notion of independence. There are no independent agencies. . . . [The] SEC, or the FCC, CFPB . . . that is not something that the Constitution understands.''
Oh, yes, except for those 90 years of Supreme Court precedent interpreting the Constitution to understand exactly that.
In addition to the billionaire ``stoogery'' that he has been involved in for decades, in addition to his penchant for lawlessness where there is clear Supreme Court precedent, he is just a little bit strange. Here is what he has said about the men and women who work in the Federal Government. ``We want'' them, he said, ``to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains''--your postman, the villain; the meat inspector who makes your steak safe at the USDA, the villain; the health inspector; the people who do the tests on pharmaceutical drugs; the people who do brain cancer research--yes, we definitely want them to be viewed as the villains and to not want to go to work.
He goes on. ``We want their funding to be shut down so that''--and, of course, he picks the EPA because we are dealing with mostly polluter billionaires--``so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.''
If you think that is normal, you might want to go have just a little look in the mirror.
He wants mass firings, which we are already seeing threatened. He wants to eliminate the civil service, fire staffers so that they can be replaced with loyal partisans.
So let's say you are a big polluter. Let's say you are a big oil company. Let's say you are not cleaning up your methane leaks. You are spewing waste methane into the atmosphere for everybody else to breathe, and the Environmental Protection Agency or perhaps the Department of the Interior, who may be your landlord, comes to you and says: You know, you have got to clean up your mess here. You are spilling methane into the atmosphere. It is poisoning people. You have got to knock it off.
Nope. Out you go. Bring in the sycophants. Bring in the loyal partisans. Bring in people who will tell the corporate and billionaire takeover artists that are at work now: Never mind. We got your back here. You just keep leaking that methane.
And here is one that kind of stunned me, a pretty simple question. I ask him:
Did Joe Biden win the 2020 Presidential election?
What was his answer?
I believe that the 2020 election was rigged.
No court has ever believed that. People got their bar ticket removed for telling courts falsehoods that the election was rigged. This was the first big lie of the Trump administration, and he is not over it, and he wants to go and run the nerve center of OMB.
He even wants to invoke The Insurrection Act, bring in the U.S. military onto domestic soil, to break up people who are protesting the Trump administration.
This is not a normal guy. This is not a guy who respects the law and the Constitution. This is a tool of a very small, rightwing billionaire elite, and he has proven himself with his participation in the Trump scheme to hold back urgently needed money from Ukrainian warriors trying to defend their country against Putin so that he could put pressure on Zelenskyy to develop dirt on Trump's political opponent. He was part of that scheme--what a guy.
The last thing that I will mention is that he has described Joe Biden and his administration as having engaged in climate fanaticism--climate fanaticism--this from the slow, cautious, temperate, noncombative Biden administration. I wish they had been a little bit more fanatic, but they sure weren't. They were slow. They were cautious. They were temperate. They were noncombative. And he found that to be fanatic.
Well, I will close with what is coming because what is coming from climate change is a beginning meltdown in property insurance markets all around the country, which is going to cascade into a problem in mortgage markets around the country because you can't get a mortgage if you can't get property insurance. And unless you are selling billionaire-to-billionaire Palm Beach estates, if you want to sell your home, you have got to find somebody who can get a mortgage. If your home can't get a mortgage because it can't get insurance, you can't find a buyer, and so your property values crash.
And the chief economist for Freddie Mac has warned that this ``insurance to mortgage to property values'' crash is going to happen, and it is going to hit the U.S. economy as hard as the 2008 mortgage meltdown. So somebody who takes this not seriously at all is the wrong person to lead us as we head toward disaster.
Here is some of the work that we have been doing on this out of the Budget Committee. Here is where we are seeing massive non-renewal rate increases. That is the insurance companies telling people who have paid their premiums for years: You are fired. We don't want you anymore; we are not going to insure your property any longer; you are done--or jacking up the rates. You can see where the high-percentage places are; they are in coastal and wildfire areas.
Here is another one. This followed our Budget Committee report that I just referenced. This is where home insurance premiums are predicted to go because of climate change--up to a 300-percent increase. That is quadrupling. If you have a $6,000 home insurance policy, that is $24,000.
It is all over. It is in the hot spots for wildfire, and it is in the hot spots for coastal property damage from storms and sea level rise.
When you raise home insurance premiums by that much, what do you do? You knock down the value of the home because when you buy a home, if you are buying into a let's say $24,000 expense every year, the present value of $24,000 out of your pocket year after year after year comes off the value of the house. So it will knock down property values.
Indeed, it is predicted that in many of these areas, homes are going to lose as much as 100 percent of their value. A home that people have invested in--purchased, loved, raised their children in--will lose its value in some places completely because you can't get insurance, you can't get a mortgage, and you can't find a buyer. The place is going to burn. The place is going to flood.
It is not just me warning of these things. Here is an article from The Economist magazine--not exactly a liberal, green publication-- predicting globally that the next housing disaster is going to come from climate change.
Severe weather brought about by greenhouse gas emissions is shaking the foundations of the world's most important asset class . . . real estate.
The world is facing roughly a $25 trillion--trillion--hit.
The impending bill is so huge, in fact, that it will have grim applications, not just for personal prosperity, but also for the financial system. Climate change [in short] could prompt the next global property crash.
If you look back here to Florida, you see how acute the trouble is as that insurance market melts down. Home insurance in Florida--the average annual premium for a typical single-family home in the State is likely to hit nearly $12,000 this year, says The Economist magazine.
Citizens Property Insurance Corporation has become Florida's largest home insurer. Its exposure is now $423 billion, much more than the state's public debt.
This is a high-risk situation.
The Financial Times report says that billion dollar-plus disasters occur once every 3 weeks now on average, compared with every 4 months for equivalent events in the eighties. As insuring high-risk homes becomes increasingly hard and costly, cracks in the U.S. housing market will widen.
This danger of housing value collapse is already underway. Residential properties in the United States are overvalued by $121 billion to $237 billion for flood risks alone--not for wildfire risks out West, the flood risks alone. That is the Financial Times.
The New York Times:
Without insurance, [it is impossible] to get a mortgage; without a mortgage, most Americans can't buy a home.
Headline: ``Insurers Are Deserting Homeowners as Climate Shocks Worsen.''
Bloomberg News: ``US Home Insurance, Real Estate markets Teeter on Financial Crisis.''
Here is what they say: It is hard to overstate the role that insurance plays in the modern economy. Banks won't make mortgage loans for uninsurable properties. Without those loans, the real estate market slows to a crawl, which in turn eats away household wealth and the tax revenue that State and local governments rely on. For insurers to play their part, they have to feel confident predicting how much damage they might have to cover. To do that, they build models of the future based on what has happened in the past. They don't have to be right all the time, just enough to win by more than they lose.
Climate change has made that much harder. A warming world is more dangerous and unpredictable. In the eighties, the United States experienced roughly three disasters a year that did at least $1 billion in damage. Now the annual occurrence is closer to 18.
It is not just news reports. Here is the Congressional Budget Office analysis:
The Risks of Climate Change to the United States in the 21st Century.
As emissions of greenhouse gases of human activities accumulate in the atmosphere and oceans, climate conditions are changing throughout the world. In the United States, those changes will have consequences for economic activity, real estate, and financial markets.
Here is the Financial Stability Board. It is the global board that advises banks on how to stay sound.
Climate-related vulnerabilities in the financial system, when triggered by climate shocks, could threaten financial stability. . . . Climate shocks can interact with existing [financial] vulnerabilities in the real economy or in the financial system . . . [and lead to financial losses]. Climate shocks could also affect the real economy through damage to real assets or the creation of stranded assets or disruption to economic activity that can feed back to the financial system.
I will cut to one of the end points here: The projected physical risk impact from climate change could cause global GDP to decline versus the baseline by 5.3 percent by 2030 and by up to 15 percent by 2050.
That is a global recession, folks, driven by climate change, pounding insurance markets, which pound mortgage markets. And this guy thinks that taking climate science seriously is fanaticism.
Here is what the American people think about some of this stuff. Penalties on high-pollution imports--letting high-pollution Chinese products into our country, putting a penalty on that: 12 percent oppose, 74 percent support--a 62-percent positive swing.
Carbon pollution limits on big companies: 12 percent disapprove, 72 percent support.
Impose a fee on big polluters: 10 percent oppose, 74 percent support--a 64-percent swing.
The American public wants to solve this climate problem, which is why the billionaires need to come in and take over the government from the inside with people like Russell Vought, so they can defeat the American people, continue to pollute, and let the economic mayhem ensue.
I will close with this last image just because I really love it. Here are the MAGA guys standing outside the wall of Trump's Mar-a-Lago palace:
We sure showed those elites who's in charge.
Meantime, inside are the helicopters from Wall Street, Big Tech, Bezos, pharma, Big Ag, Musk, coal, Big Oil, crypto bros.
This is what is happening. MAGA may have thought it won the election, but here is who really won the election: the looters and the polluters; the Musks, who are running into our information systems, looting data out of them for their own purposes; and the polluters, who want to pretend that this climate change threat is not real.
Russ Vought is dangerous because he won't face the facts on these things because he belongs to the billionaire looters and polluters.
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