Trump Administration

Floor Speech

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Mr. SANDERS. Will my colleague yield for a question?

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Mr. SANDERS. Let me thank Senator Merkley for today pointing a finger at one of the great crises our country--one of the greatest crises our country has faced, I think, since the Civil War; and that is that, every day, we have a President who is moving this country into an authoritarian form of society.

You know, as a nation, what we have always expected in our democracy is that if you disagree with me, we debate the issue. You don't think I am a good Senator? Run against me. You think I am wrong on an issue? Write a letter to the editor. Do a podcast. Be critical of me in any way you want.

But what very few people in America believe is that we should give more and more power to a megalomaniac who sits in the White House, who disrespects every day the Constitution of the United States and the rule of law.

And what saddens me very much is when we think back on the history of this country, going back to the extraordinarily brave men and women who put their lives on the line and sometimes died during the Revolutionary War. Tens of thousands of Americans took on the greatest military power on Earth, led by the King of England, in order to say: We are tired of your rule. We want to rule ourselves.

And then, in 1789, these brilliant people came up with the Constitution, and the essence of that Constitution--having learned their lesson from the King of England, who had absolute power--is what they said: We are going to create a Constitution that will never give absolute power to any one person or one entity.

So they created an executive branch, the President, the legislative branch, Congress--House and the Senate--and a judiciary whose function is to provide checks and balances on each other. It is a rather extraordinary document--1789.

Since then, we have had so many millions of men and women putting their lives on the line and sometimes dying in order to defend that Constitution, to understand that what freedom is about is the right to disagree, that we do not have to live under the control of one person.

In an unprecedented way--and I know my colleague from Oregon has been talking about this--every day, there is another attack on basic American freedoms.

The First Amendment--not the Second, not the Third; the First Amendment to the Constitution--is freedom of the press. And that was not an accident. They understood that in order to maintain a free society, you have to have the right of people to express their point of view, to write what they wanted to, to rally people around their point of view.

Yet we have in an unprecedented way a President who has sued one major media after another--ABC, CBS, Meta; defunded PBS; defunded the NPR. This is a President who does not want to be criticized.

Well, guess what, Mr. President. In a democracy, you will be criticized, I will be criticized, and the Senator from Oregon will be criticized. That is what a democracy is about. And if you don't like criticism, get out of the White House, get out of politics.

We are not going to sit back and allow one media after another to be intimidated, frightened. And if they stand up alone and run a story critical of the President of the United States, oh my God, they may be sued.

You have an FCC chairman, I think, I say to my friend, who, during the Jimmy Kimmel episode, was threatening to rescind licenses of networks if the White House did not like some of the content that was coming out. That is not the America we love, not the America we are prepared to defend.

But it is not just the media. You have a President who is suing law firms. And what was the crime of these law firms? What did they do that was so terrible? Well, they had clients who went to court against the President. Gee, the last thing I heard, that is what happens in a country, you know? People go to court. And we don't then try to blackmail and intimidate law firms by saying: We are going to sue you. You better not have clients who are going to attack me.

We have a President now who is going to war against universities, trying to break freedom of speech, freedom of dissent on college campuses. You stand up. You protest.

Hey, we are going to take away money from you. We don't like the content of your courses. We don't like your teachers, the faculty, the president of the university. Your views on gossip? Sorry, you are not going to get Federal funding.

We have a President who is usurping the powers of the U.S. Congress. Every fourth grader understands Congress has the power of the purse. The President, if he likes it, signs the bill, but when you sign that appropriations bill, that money goes out. You don't have the right to say: Oh, California, New York, Vermont, you voted against me. You ain't going to get the money that was appropriated.

That is not what this country is about, and it is not what the Constitution is about.

A few minutes ago, Senator Blunt Rochester asked I thought a pretty profound question, and that is, what is the relationship between authoritarianism and the healthcare crisis that we are in right now?

As the Senator from Oregon has mentioned, when Trump was inaugurated, sitting right behind him were the three wealthiest people in the world.

Remember that, the Senator from Oregon?

It was Mr. Musk, Mr. Bezos, and Mr. Zuckerberg. And right behind them were some 14 or 15 other billionaires.

There is Mr. Zuckerberg, Mr. Bezos, Mr. Musk, and a couple other billionaires there as well.

I was at the inauguration, kind of up front, and as I listened and I saw what was going on and heard Trump's speech, I was thinking about Abraham Lincoln in Gettysburg, one of the pivotal battles of the Civil War to end the abomination of slavery. Lincoln gets up a few days, I think, after that terrible war, blood still on the ground, and he says to the American people a few days after that battle:

These brave soldiers--in so many words--did not die in vain because they died in order to maintain a government of the people, by the people, and for the people--not as Trump would have us: a government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, and for the billionaire class.

Senator Blunt Rochester asked the question, what is the connection between authoritarianism and healthcare? I will tell you what the connection is. Right now, under the Trump administration, the billionaire class has never ever had it so good. These guys sitting right behind Trump at his inauguration are now a combined hundreds of billions of dollars richer. They donated to Trump's campaign. They have given him gifts since. They are doing phenomenally well, while, at the same time, 60 percent of our people--working-class people, low-income people--are struggling to put food on the table, pay for childcare, send their kids to college, pay for the basic necessities of life, pay for housing, et cetera. The billionaire class, under Trump, never ever had it so good, and then we have a working class in America struggling to survive.

In particular, let us never forget--and I know the Senator from Oregon has mentioned it many times--that the reason Trump and his Republican friends made $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid to throw 15 million people off the healthcare they currently have--and studies, by the way, suggest that when you throw 15 million low-income and working- class people off of their healthcare, some 50,000 people a year will die unnecessarily.

So why did Trump and his friends do that? Well, the answer is obvious. In that same terrible bill, they gave $1 trillion in tax breaks to the 1 percent, to the people sitting right behind the President when he was inaugurated.

Does anybody in America really believe that it makes sense to give $1 trillion in tax breaks to the richest people in America and at the same time throw 15 million working-class people off of their healthcare?

As the Senator from Oregon indicated, right now in Vermont and all over this country, people are receiving notices from their insurance companies. In my State, a few days ago--the southern part of the State--it wasn't a doubling of their premiums; it was a quadrupling of their premiums.

So at a time when we are already paying the highest prices in the world for healthcare by far, people are going to look at these bills and think it is insane. And, again, in Vermont, we are seeing now families are going to be paying 45, 50 percent.

I say to my friend from Oregon, 50 percent of their income on healthcare--how do you survive when you are spending 50 percent of your income on healthcare? What do you have left for food or for anything else?

What the connection is between authoritarianism and oligarchy is that these billionaires not only don't want to pay their fair share of taxes, they want tax breaks. Not only do they want to, with impunity, be able to break unions and throw workers out on the street, but they want in many ways what existed in the 1700s, what our forefathers fought against: They want the divine right to rule.

The King of England thought that they had a God-given, divine right to rule. These guys think that as multibillionaires, they have the right to do anything--no accountability. They are bringing forth hundreds of billions of dollars right now, investing in AI and robotics, which will, if we don't deal with it, have a devastating impact on the working class of this country. They are going to have more factories in America. But do you know what? Ain't going to be human beings working in those factories.

Elon Musk--I don't agree with Musk on anything. But just the other day, Musk made it clear--he said: Hey, AI and robotics are going to do away with jobs. There are not going to be any jobs. They don't need jobs in America.

Well, that is great if you are worth a couple hundred billion dollars. But if you don't have a job and you are a working-class person, how do you feed your family? how do you afford healthcare?

Do you think anybody at the White House will stay up nights worrying about you when you lose your job? I don't think so.

So we are in an unprecedented and difficult moment in American history. And I want to thank the 7 million people just this Saturday, all over this country, who came out and said loudly and clearly: No more Kings. And we are going to keep that movement going. And I don't care if you are a conservative, a progressive, a socialist, a Democrat, whatever you may be, we understand that what makes our country great is, in fact, freedom, the right to dissent, the right to argue, and I don't care what your politics are, that is what we have to maintain.

I want to conclude simply by expressing a very great deal of disappointment in my Republican colleagues, with few exceptions. The vast majority of Republicans in the Senate and the House are not authoritarians. They believe in the Constitution. They believe in the rule of law. But they, at this moment, at least, with very few exceptions, simply do not have the courage to stand up to this authoritarian President.

How many times have the Senator from Oregon and I heard that our Republican friends believe in small government, in federalism, in the right of the local government. They don't want that big, bad Federal Government overruling the needs of cities and towns in the States. And now you have a President of the United States sending Federal troops into Portland, OR, and Chicago, IL, usurping the rights of Congress, threatening to impeach judges who rule against them.

So this is a very difficult, unprecedented moment in our history, but I have every confidence that when the American people stand together and they do not let Trump and his friends divide us up by the color of our skin or where we were born or our sexual orientation; when we stand together, defend the Constitution, and defend American democracy, we will prevail, and we will defeat authoritarianism, and we will defeat oligarchy.

I would simply ask my friend from Oregon a profound question: Do you agree with me?

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