One Big Beautiful Bill

Floor Speech

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Mr. MARKEY. Mr. President, first of all, I just want to say how powerful the presentations were talking about the tragedy in Minnesota and how all of our hearts go out to the families and to the entire State because it is obviously something that had a profound impact upon the entire community, and it is something that has all of us grieving for them. I was just touched, as I think everyone who heard them was, with the presentations that we heard.

Mr. President, I rise today in opposition to the Republican's ``Big Billionaire Boondoggle,'' which is economic sabotage and climate denial masquerading as fiscal policy.

Last night's Senate Finance Committee text doesn't just double down on repealing smart clean energy tax credits, it erodes our progress and our chance at a livable future.

Senate Republicans are doubling down on egregious attacks against historic investments in the Inflation Reduction Act, cutting more than $500 billion in investments and programs, threatening hundreds of thousands of jobs, and raising monthly household energy bills.

In 2024--this is the big number--in 2024, 94 percent of all new electricity generation added to our country was wind and solar and batteries. I want to repeat that. In 2024, 94 percent of all of the new electricity generation capacity added in our country was wind and solar and batteries. That is 50,000 megawatts of solar, 4,000 megawatts of wind, and 11,000 megawatts of batteries. Compare that with the fuels of the past. Last year, only 2,500 megawatts of natural gas were added and zero from coal.

That is the present state of affairs for electricity generation installation in our country in 2025 as we begin this debate in the Senate over the reconciliation bill--over the tax policy for our country.

Unfortunately, it is why the oil and gas and coal industry, through the Republicans, are using the budget bill to rig the game while eliminating incentives that lower energy costs and reduce collusion, but they are not going to remove the tax breaks for the fossil fuel industry.

So what is about to unfold is that we are going to see the pursuance of a vendetta against wind and solar energy by cutting incentives for the cleanest and cheapest sources of electricity, all to pad the pockets of the big oil and big gas industries.

This bill eliminates the residential clean and efficient energy incentives. Let me say that again. If you want to put solar panels on your roof, that tax break is going to be gone. If you want to make your home more energy efficient, that tax break is going to be gone. Heat pumps, all of it, is gone. Robbing homeowners--homeowners--of the ability to save money on energy bills, breathe safer air indoors at home, and ensure a livable future for their families. And it also removes support for families looking to buy a clean vehicle, an electric vehicle, and saving money at the pump.

It imposes draconian restrictions on large-scale solar and wind incentives. That is the solar and wind installations that the utilities may want to install in our country. So it is a multipronged attack upon what is--in 2024, and it is already unfolding again in 2025--the future. It is wind and solar and batteries.

And it is unfolding in a way which, again, threatens the incumbent energy sources. And in place of these programs, there are no solutions. There is just more pollution that is going to be what happens as a result of what the Republicans are trying to do with this bill.

And you wind up with higher prices. You wind up with fewer jobs. If this bill passes, solar deployment is expected to drop nearly 40 percent by 2030 than what was expected before.

And as energy demand increases driven by power-hungry AI data centers and natural gas LNG exports, Republicans are choosing to strangle America's supply of cheap solar and wind, which we are going to need for the AI revolution. The estimates are that AI itself over the next 10 years could double the need for electricity in our country.

And what this bill will do is take wind and solar and batteries off the field and then say to the natural gas industry and oil industry: You figure out how to get it done.

But that is not what, obviously, people in our country want. They are making decisions that have resulted in 2024 with 94 percent of all new electricity being wind and solar and batteries. So it is heading in just the opposite direction of where the American people are headed.

So this is just economics 101: High demand plus low supply means higher energy prices for everyone. That is what they are setting up if we take wind and solar out of the mix, forcing families, on average, to pay $150 more per month on their energy bills just in 5 years, and $260 per month more each month in 10 years because there won't be the competition, and there won't be the supply.

And the less the supply is the higher the price for the remaining electricity in our society. And it will also destroy 840,000 American jobs by the year 2030, jobs that would have been people up on roofs installing the solar or having offshore wind work or electricians off the Atlantic Coast or installing coal efficiency into homes across our country and just going through the home to make it more energy efficient, solar installation, and fewer manufacturing jobs for solar and wind all across our country.

Republicans want to frame their cuts as eliminating wasteful Democratic spending, but the communities and constituents they were elected to represent, they are going to stand to lose a great deal. The States with the highest spikes in energy prices are going to be South Carolina, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Louisiana under this bill. We are taking out the alternatives that could have helped them moderate the prices in those States.

And the States with the largest job losses: Texas, Florida, Indiana, and Georgia. So this isn't a red State or a blue State issue; this is creating a national economic crisis. Eighty percent of the IRA funding has gone to red States--80 percent, only 20 percent to blue States. And by the way, that is how the bill was designed.

The extra tax breaks went to the States that would be energy transition States, and there has been an explosion by the hundreds of thousands of new jobs. And the Republican bill would make the United States the laggard, not the leader in innovation.

Already China is investing four times more than the United States in renewable energy. Here is China's plan. They plan on investing $1 trillion a year for the next 10 years every year--$10 trillion--and the same thing is true for Japan. They have already made an announcement that they are going to invest a trillion dollars over the next 10 years.

So we might as well just be gift wrapping the clean energy industry, gift wrapping it for China and other countries to be the global leader.

So that is where we are. Instead of catching up and overtaking China, this bill will cede more jobs and more progress, and Republicans are putting our health and our planet up for sale. This bill would increase emissions equivalent to putting 72 million more cars on the road and eliminates pollution-reduction programs, leading to approximately 930 additional premature deaths every single year.

So that is the plan when it comes to clean energy, and it is going to be an absolute disaster for us. And, additionally, as affirmed last night, Republicans want to slash over $1 trillion from our healthcare system, and the House already passed cuts that would rip $800 billion from Medicaid and $500 billion from Medicare.

The Senate Republicans released text last night that doesn't just support these cuts but makes them actually worse, and their changes would make it harder for people to stay on their insurance. It would create more paperwork for patients to fill out. It would make it more difficult for States to fund their healthcare programs, and it would leave less people with access to healthcare across our Nation. It would take 16 or 17 million people and take away their insurance in our country.

So this isn't just line items or a spreadsheet; this is people's lives. If we cut people off their health insurance and less money goes to hospitals, nursing homes, health clinics, people will not be able to get healthcare. People will lose their local hospitals, nursing homes, and clinics. Health workers will lose their jobs, and rural communities could lose their biggest employers.

People will be forced to make impossible decisions about whether their healthcare is worth going into bankruptcy or medical debt. And if Republicans pass this bill, instead of addressing our country's healthcare crisis, we will be supercharging it.

But they don't need to listen to me. Here is what the experts have found. A study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that Republican cuts would increase the number of people skipping medical care because of cost from nearly 129,000 people to nearly 839,000 people a year.

A study from Yale and Penn found that Federal cuts from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act would lead to 51,000 deaths per year. And just last week, I released data produced by the Sheps Center at the University of North Carolina about how substantial cuts to Medicare and Medicaid could force 338 hospitals across the country into financial distress, leading them to cut services or close the hospital altogether.

Where are those hospitals? Well, in Kentucky, there are 35 of them that could be at risk for their viability. Louisiana is 33 hospitals. These are rural hospitals. They rely upon Medicaid. They rely upon the Affordable Care Act to pay the bills.

So this is something that is going to be very, very dangerous, hundreds of rural hospitals put on the brink because of the decisions made by Republicans in this Congress and in this White House. This is a lethal risk to take on to pay the tax breaks for billionaires.

If this bill passes and even one patient loses their insurance because of burdensome paperwork in a single hospital or nursing home, the responsibility will fall on anyone who voted yes on this bill.

And our State and local public health officials know this risk, which is why they are asking to stop these cuts. The Louisiana State house, with a Republican majority, passed a resolution just this week asking Congress to ``oppose sweeping or indiscriminate cuts to Medicaid and to instead work in partnership with states to strengthen and preserve the program for the future.'' That is the Louisiana State house Republicans.

The Houghton County Board of Commissioners in Michigan voted to oppose Medicaid cuts. Mr. President, 52 organizations in Alabama, including the Alabama Cancer Society, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, churches all across the State, wrote to the Governor urging opposition to healthcare cuts, citing the need for more care and less bureaucracy.

And on June 12, 900 State and local elected officials from across the country--including mayors and State senators and representatives, attorneys general--all stood up to come out against ``the damaging and reckless plan.''

And these proposed cuts are as dangerous as they are pointless.

So I am going to conclude on this: Donald Trump and Republicans only need to rush these cuts through to guarantee tax breaks for billionaires. So the people who will benefit the most are the upper 0.1 percent. And as millions more Americans lose their healthcare, billionaires who can afford concierge medicine will get a handout from the government.

The rich will get richer, while the sick who are the poorest are going to be left without their healthcare. The other ones are going to lose their insurance.

This is what this billionaire boondoggle is all about. It takes financial security from children, rips dinner off the family table, and crushes people's opportunities for health and financial security and sells it away to the ultrawealthy.

This is not a big beautiful bill, as Donald Trump would call it, it is a big billionaire buyoff and a bludgeoning of our health, our economy, our future.

We don't have to do this. Making these cuts is optional, and I am asking my Republican colleagues to please vote no. We can do a lot better with this legislation. Please--please--let us negotiate a sensible resolution of this legislation.

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