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Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I would like to react to the statement of my friend and colleague from Wyoming. I am against fraud. That is it. On the record: I am against fraud. I am a Democrat, and I don't know where he reached this different conclusion, but I want to make it very clear.

Having said that, I am also a realist. I know that the families I represent in Illinois and across the Nation are facing budgets, family budgets, which are impossible to live with. They are not only struggling paycheck to paycheck, they are also watching the price of groceries go up. They know the price of gasoline goes up and down, and now it is on the upward trend because of the President's war in Iran. Utility bills in my State are up 15 percent this year over last year because of President Trump's energy policy, which is opposed to sustainable, renewable sources of energy, which are the most affordable. The list goes on and on.

The Big Beautiful Bill, which Republicans brag about, was a bill that ended up with millions of Americans losing their health insurance because the cost of premiums had gone up too high.

So I think it is just great that we have tipped income exempt from taxes and that other breaks are given to working people. I would support those any day. But the bill that created those also gave the biggest tax cuts in the history of the United States to the wealthiest people in the United States--nothing, very little, for families in comparison. That is the difference.

I think we ought to be honest with the American people. The No. 1 issue in this campaign is the affordability that families worry about every single week. There is an issue I am going to address here more particularly, which gets to the heart of this as well.

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