-9999

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, this is exactly what it looks like. The President of the United States is going out of his way to make sure that people don't have enough to eat. And it is hard to believe because it does sound crazy; it does sound partisan. But he really is using hunger as a political weapon.

Let's back up for a second. On September 30, this administration, the Trump administration, released a plan saying that they were going to use a contingency fund to pay SNAP benefits during the shutdown. This is the way it has been done every time there is a shutdown.

There is a pocket of money that is literally there to pay SNAP benefits in case there is an emergency of any kind, including a lapse in appropriations. Then 3 weeks later, they said: Never mind. We are not permitted to pay these benefits during a shutdown.

That was clearly not the case, and they had already issued guidance saying: We are going to use this funding.

They pulled it because they wanted to create leverage.

Then, they went to court to argue against paying these SNAP benefits. Then, two separate judges said: Not only are you permitted to use this contingency fund to pay nutritional assistance benefits to the working poor, children, the elderly, the disabled--not only are you permitted to do that--you are required under the statute to do that.

Now you have two Federal judges saying the law is clear. It is not a question of whether you are permitted to do it or not. It is actually whether you are permitted to not do it. The judges both said you have to do this; it is what the law says.

This week, they announced that they are only going to pay half of the benefits. They are going to pay half of the SNAP benefits that 40 million Americans need. It is kind of even worse than that because SNAP goes through State Agencies, and State Agencies, in a lot of cases--the unemployment system is like this--they have these antiquated computer systems. So any change in the benefit structure has to be reprogrammed into their computer systems and then loaded up onto the EBT cards.

Some States are going to be able to implement this half benefit within a few days. But there are several States with antiquated computer systems that are saying it could be weeks or even months.

I just want to make this point extremely clear: None of that is necessary. They are clearly feeling some amount of heat and urgency to end the shutdown. Usually, what you do if you are the President of the United States and you feel an urgent need to cut a deal is you try to get the people with whom you would need to make a deal into a room and begin a negotiation. But Trump really doesn't want to do that. He thinks we are evil. His senior adviser has called the Democratic Party a domestic terrorist organization or some such thing. So he is just like--I don't know if he is incapable or, at least so far, unwilling to do the basic blocking and tackling required by being a political leader at any level--county council, mayor, State legislature, Lieutenant Governor, House, Senate, whatever. You have to interact with people that you have disagreements with.

But he doesn't want to do that. His theory of change--Stephen Miller, Russ Vought, some of these folks--is we are just going to squeeze Democrats.

That would be like normal hardball politics, except for this. What they mean by ``squeezing Democrats'' is they mean threatening to shut down or throttle air traffic. What they mean by squeezing Democrats is canceling long-planned, long-approved projects that benefit everybody across the country. What they mean by squeezing Democrats, in this particular instance, is that 40 million people are going to not have enough to eat.

Look, I don't always want to be the partisan warrior. I like interacting with my Republican colleagues. I come from the State of Hawaii, where there is a decisive majority of Democrats. So one of the muscles I had to develop over the last 13 years was sort of how to interact with the other party and make arrangements, cut deals, compartmentalize the problems that I have with some of these folks on other issues and find common ground.

My appeal to my Republican colleagues is very simple: Can we just leave the kids harmless? Can we leave the hungry harmless? We are clearly in a disagreement about how the appropriations process and this Affordable Care Act subsidy question should be wrestled to the ground. My own view is like, let's just be adults and convene; and then wrangle and argue and shout at each other a little bit; and reconvene and then cut the deal. That is how the country is supposed to work. But separate and apart from that, can we please say that using hunger as a weapon is out of bounds in the United States?

There is a long and pretty dark history, an evil history, of politicians--some popularly elected, some not elected--using food as a means of political control. I think that is not a road that we want to go down. I think we want to say that whatever else we are fighting about, if there are Americans who are hungry, then we should hold them harmless.

Just to be clear, there is no shortage of money in the United States of America. The stock market is booming. You have these AI data centers racking up $100 and $200 billion capital expenditure plans. There is enough money sloshing around in the public and the private sectors to pay for food. There really is.

If you are a regular person trying to put food on the table for your family, if you are trying to keep your health insurance premiums from more than doubling, if you are struggling to pay your bills to make ends meet because everything is getting more expensive, there is no money for you. But there is enough money for a golden toilet, and there is enough money for a $173 million new aircraft for the Secretary of Homeland Security. And there is $40 billion for the country of Argentina, to bail them out, which, coincidentally, is about the amount of money that it would cost to extend these Affordable Care Act tax credits.

So it is not a question that the economy is contracting and our debt is out of control and all the rest of it. This body just passed a $1.5 trillion deficit increase in the form of a tax cut, where the benefits go, not exclusively but disproportionately, to wealthy individuals. It is not a question of there not being enough money. The problem is that they have decided that there is not enough money for you.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source