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Floor Speech
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Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, we are now in the 38th day of a government shutdown. That means that Federal employees all over this country who have to feed their families are not getting paychecks. It means that air traffic controllers are forced to work crazy hours. We worry about the safety of our flights right now. We worry about Capitol Police officers right here in DC having a hard time feeding their families. These are hard-working people who are doing important work. They deserve respect. They deserve to be paid. This shutdown must end as quickly as possible.
On top of the fact that we have hundreds of thousands of workers not getting paid, we now have a President who, for the first time in the history of this country, is willing to allow our kids--low-income, working-class children--to go hungry in order to try to make a political point--a point, by the way, that the American people are seeing through.
The cause of this shutdown is not complicated. For the first time ever, the majority party in the Senate, which needs 60 votes to pass a budget, is refusing to negotiate. It is their way or the highway; take it or leave it; we have the majority; we are not talking to you-- despite the fact that they only have 53 votes.
To make the situation even more absurd and to show the American people the contempt the Republicans hold for negotiations and democracy, you have a Speaker of the House who has now given his Members a 6-week paid vacation. The country is in the midst of a major crisis, and Republican Members of the House are nowhere to be seen. They are on a paid vacation. If that doesn't tell you everything you need to know about whether Republicans are willing to negotiate, I don't know what will.
Everybody in this country knows that our current healthcare system is broken. They know that we pay by far--not even close--the highest prices in the world for healthcare, and some 85 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured. They know that we are the only major country on Earth not to guarantee healthcare to all people as a human right, something which must change.
What they also know is that Donald Trump and the Republicans, through their horrendous One Big Beautiful Bill, are making a broken, dysfunctional healthcare system even worse, taking it to the verge of collapse. That legislation is doubling premiums for over 20 million Americans who are in the Affordable Care Act exchange.
In my State, we are hearing from Vermonters who are being asked to pay a tripling of their rates and even a quadrupling of the rates. Who in God's name, at a time when healthcare costs are already so high, can afford a doubling, a tripling, or quadrupling of their rates? That is insane. Nobody in my State or, I expect, in this country can afford to pay that.
Further, that One Big Beautiful Bill willh throw 15 million people off the healthcare they now have, as a result of massive cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. According to studies, that would result in some 50,000 Americans dying unnecessarily every year--low- income, working-class people who have chronic illnesses who will no longer be able to get healthcare. That is what is being discussed.
Does anybody think it is a good idea to allow 50,000 of our fellow Americans to die unnecessarily each year?
And all of this is being done in order to give $1 trillion in tax breaks to the 1 percent.
No, I do not believe that Elon Musk and Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Bezos and the other multibillionaires deserve a trillion dollars in tax breaks in order to throw 50 million Americans off the healthcare they have and double premiums for over 20 million Americans. I don't believe that. The overwhelming majority of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents don't believe that either.
The American people understand that the Republican Party controls the White House; they control the Senate; they control the House of Representatives. And, understandably, for that reason, poll after poll shows that Americans hold the Republicans accountable for this shutdown.
But it is not just polls. On Tuesday, there was an election in which Trumpism was overwhelmingly rejected from Maine to California and a lot of States and cities in between. And one of the key reasons is that Americans want Democrats to make certain that they do not experience huge increases in their healthcare premiums or get thrown off the healthcare they have. That is what they are saying: We cannot afford a doubling or tripling in our healthcare costs. Stand with us.
That is what that election was significantly about.
President Trump claims to be a dealmaker. In fact, he wrote a book called ``The Art of the Deal.'' Well, Mr. President, the ball is in your court right now. Help negotiate a deal. Show us what a great dealmaker you are. Help us negotiate a deal which protects the healthcare of tens of millions of Americans, and let us end this shutdown today. We can end it in the next few hours.
That is what this struggle is about. That is what this shutdown is all about. It is whether Republicans succeed in making a broken and dysfunctional healthcare system even worse by making healthcare unaffordable for working-class and middle-class Americans. It is about whether millions of our fellow Americans no longer have health insurance and that many of them will die unnecessarily.
Mr. President, we are hearing right now--every one of our offices--we are hearing tragic stories of families having to decide whether they can pay for their parent's cancer treatment, for example, or whether they will see a parent die without that lifesaving care. There are millions of Americans now dealing with chronic disease. They are dealing with cancer. They are dealing with diabetes. They are dealing with Alzheimer's. They are dealing with heart disease. And they are wondering, if they get thrown off their healthcare, if premiums go so high, how are they going to stay alive? How are they going to take care of their parents, their kids?
That is what this shutdown is about.
And whether it is in Maine, New Hampshire, Nevada, or Vermont, the American people want us to stand with them and that is what this whole debate is about. We cannot fail the American people. They are looking to us to make sure that they continue to have healthcare. Let us not betray them.
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