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Floor Speech

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Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, I thank my colleagues for this unified support for a measure that is eminently reasonable, and I thank the leader of our side, Senator Schumer, for advancing this proposal.

It is a compromise. It is simple and plain. And I will be very blunt: It is not everything I would have wanted. Like the Senator from Wisconsin, my friend Senator Baldwin, I would have wanted the healthcare tax credits to be permanently guaranteed. I would have wanted a guarantee as well that there be no rescissions or impoundments of funds, as this President has done repeatedly. I would have wanted a reversal of the firings, the so-called RIFs, the reductions in force that have been eminently unfair and a guarantee of backpay to everybody who has been furloughed. There are other provisions that, for me, were profoundly important. It is a compromise. And ``compromise'' is not a four-letter word; it is the way to get things done.

This picture of unity is worth a thousand of my words, but it is also a clear response to a crisis that we face, and we face it today. It is a crisis in healthcare. It is a crisis in hunger. It is a crisis in air transportation.

For millions of Americans, it is a crisis of affordability. Nobody in America needed Tuesday's elections to tell them that the cost of rent and electricity and food and all the other necessities in life are spiraling out of control.

And, yes, healthcare costs are spiraling out of control. They are at the kitchen table right now across America, looking at the exchanges, and concluding they simply can't afford those spiking premiums, multiples of three and four times--and at least twice--what they were paying. Many of them are taking the risk that they will go without insurance.

This measure guarantees an outcome. The majority leader Senator Thune has said he can't guarantee an outcome. All he can promise is a process. And I am unwilling to accept a promise of some vote at an indefinite point on an undefined bill sometime in the future because the urgency of now for American families means they are making choices about whether they can afford insurance at this moment for next year.

In fairness to the majority leader, he can't promise anything for either the Speaker of the House or the President. They have been absent without leave. They have been AWOL. They have refused to talk.

We are presenting them now with a reasonable compromise that the majority leader can accept and our colleagues on the other side of the aisle should embrace.

The problem here is one of trust. What we have seen from the administration is a strategy of maximum pain to magnify political pressure.

In just minutes from now, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, this administration will argue that SNAP benefits should be ended after the President himself promised that they would be paid in full in compliance with the district court orders in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. There is no way to trust that SNAP benefits will be provided without a guarantee from the courts.

The urgency that we face is also in air transportation. We all want people to be able to reach their destinations safely. It has to come first. And we need to make sure that the TSA and air controllers are paid. They are heroes for having worked for so long without pay.

We need to stop the madness of this trend line. It is a through line in the administration's tactics here. It is a through line of cruelty and stupidity that has magnified the costs for the American people not just in blue States but all across the country.

We should seek reform and improvement in the ACA, eliminating any kind of fraud and stopping the spiraling increase in healthcare costs. But I should warn my colleagues: We will not sacrifice the ACA.

Very revealing yesterday in the hearing of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations was the commentary from a number of my Republican colleagues in effect saying that we should kill the ACA--an effort that has been part of their relentless campaign over the last 15 years to decimate this resounding and important law that now is embraced by the vast majority of the American people.

We put in the record stories of individuals from Michigan and Pennsylvania and Iowa.

Aaron Lehman, a fifth-generation farmer, told us: I grow corn, soybean, oats, and hay with my family. The Affordable Care Act has been one of the best investments in rural healthcare in decades.

We cannot afford, as a nation, to go back to the days when preexisting conditions were a pretext for denying healthcare. If someone had a history of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, HIV, asthma, depression, pregnancy--the list goes on--insurers could force patients to pay more or refuse to offer them coverage at all.

Standing strong for the ACA very simply means providing healthcare to Americans. Extending the healthcare tax credits for 1 year is a compromise that makes sense. It will put the government back to work fully and capably and fairly.

I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting this reasonable compromise.

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