'I Rise Today A Bit Angry': Sheldon Whitehouse Lets Loose On 'Crooked' Big Beautiful Bill

Forbes Breaking News

On the Senate floor, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) tore into the Big Beautiful Bill.

Transcript

00:00from Rhode Island. Mr. President, I rise today, and I will confess, I rise today a bit angry

00:10about this bill. This bill cooked up in back rooms, dropped at midnight, cloaked in fake

00:23numbers with huge handouts to big Republican donors. It loots our country for some of the

00:34least deserving people you could imagine. When I first got here, this chamber filled me with

00:51awe and wonderment. Our leader Harry Reid frequently called me his happiest senator. Such was the

01:03awe and wonderment that I felt here. Today, I feel disgust. This piece of legislation is corrupt.

01:17This piece of legislation is crooked. This piece of legislation is a rotten racket.

01:28This place feels to me today like a crime scene. Get some of that yellow tape and put it around this

01:38chamber. The midnight transfer of wealth in this bill is disgusting.

01:50There's a backdrop here. The backdrop here is the wealth inequality in our country already,

02:00in which the wealthiest 1% of our population own 30% of the wealth, and the poorest half of our

02:13population together only own 3% of the wealth. Top 1%, a third of the wealth. Bottom half of the population,

02:26by income 3% of the wealth. And against that backdrop, this bill transfers wealth from middle-class families

02:37to giant corporations, billionaires and mega-billionaires. And it transfers wealth from our children and grandchildren

02:51to present-day billionaires to present-day billionaires by adding $5 trillion to the debt limit to run up the debt

03:00of the country to fund the tax giveaways to these special interests and wealthy billionaires. How do they do that?

03:11Take away health care from 16 million Americans. Give huge tax breaks to billionaires.

03:28Most families have someone sit down once a month and go through the bills,

03:33and you try to figure out what bills you can pay. You may not pay the whole insurance bill. You may

03:43just pay the minimum. You may not pay your whole credit card bill. You may just pay the minimum.

03:49You're aware of exactly how much money you have because you need to make those payments. That's

03:58kitchen table world. Billionaire world is different. You have a family office. You never see bills.

04:03You don't even know how much money you have, not even to the nearest hundred thousand dollars.

04:09And you don't care. Because you have more than you could ever spend in your life.

04:18You could pay taxes, like regular people. But there's something about your acquisition of wealth

04:28that can't stop. So you won't pay taxes like a normal person. You demand special treatment. You pay less

04:42of a tax rate than a firefighter, for God's sake. And that's not enough for you. Now you come here to

04:49this Senate floor, wanting even more favors. You already don't know how much money you have.

04:58You could pay regular taxes, and it wouldn't take a day from sunning on your private island,

05:03a day from cruising in your private yacht, a jet trip on your private jet, a ski trip to your private

05:10chalet. Nothing in your life would change if you had to pay taxes like a regular person. But you just

05:17don't want to. And the third is, oh, I should add, on the tax breaks, a lot of it goes to corporations.

05:28This bill doesn't just give big tax breaks to big corporations. It gives big tax breaks to big

05:37corporations that move jobs and investment offshore away from America.

05:42It gives tax breaks for doing that. It gives tax breaks for offshoring American jobs

05:59and offshoring American investment. It is the world's worst tax policy. It takes an already

06:08corrupted tax code and bends it even further in the favor of mega billionaires and big offshoring

06:17corporations. And last, what does this bill do that causes this transfer of wealth from regular

06:24people to the wealthy? It raises your costs to raise their profits. And I'm here to talk about

06:34one way that that happens. Because of this bill, your electric bills will go up.

06:47The people behind this bill are counting on you not to know how that works.

06:54So I'm going to take a minute here and I'm going to tell you how that works.

07:04There are some rules for the grid about how this works. Generators who want to sell power to the grid

07:15put in a bid, put in a bid, and they give a price at which they will sell their electricity.

07:22You can imagine on this graph that each of these little hash marks

07:26is a different generation facility and each has made a bid at its best price.

07:33Once it's got the stack of bids, the grid manager, as the load comes onto the grid, dispatches the cheapest

07:45generators first and then goes up the stack to the more and more expensive ones. As demand rises,

07:53the costs go up. The last one that's called on, the most expensive one that's called on, sets the price

08:02for the whole grid.

08:05And this last one, the one that the price setter on the grid, almost always a fossil fuel plant.

08:14It's almost always a fossil fuel plant. So if you look at this graph, you'll see here, this measures

08:23the price that's charged to put those electrons on the grid for consumers. And this is the energy demand.

08:31How much consumers are asking? What does the grid need to supply? And if you look at the top line,

08:36this is the world without renewables. This is an all fossil fuel system, let's say. Baseload,

08:42Nuke. Okay, throw that in. And as the demand goes up, the prices go up because more and more

08:52of these generators have to come online. And eventually, let's say you get to this point

08:59where you've got this much load on the grid and you've got this much supply and the price is set

09:05by that generator. That's the world without clean energy. Now you add clean energy, you add renewables

09:15to this equation. What do we know about the renewables? They're almost always cheaper. They're

09:22almost never the price setter. So they fill in down here. And they fill in below the price of the fossil

09:33fuel plant. So if you've got load requirement X and you live in fossil fuel only world, you're going to be

09:45repaying that price for energy on the grid. All of it, because it's set by that price setter generator.

09:57But if you've filled in with renewables, then you're down here for price for that much load.

10:07You're saving huge amounts of money. The grid is way more efficient with renewables in the mix.

10:17By the time you get to the same price that you had here for fossil fuel, you're all the way out here.

10:25You've got all this extra load served before you raise that price. That's the theory.

10:32That's how the system works. Let's see how clean energy fits in in a specific area. Let's look at

10:43Texas. Oh, and by the way, last year, 95% of the power that came on the grid that filled in here

10:52was clean energy. If this bill kills clean energy growth, which is its intention,

10:58then it's going to kill off the power source that provided 95% of what was added to the grid

11:08last year. It is going to be a big, big hit. So let's look at the Texas grid, which is easy to

11:14talk about because it's a standalone grid. And somebody just did a study of the Texas grid.

11:23And they found that with renewables, and Texas is 30% renewables, okay? So we're in the with

11:35renewable situation. With renewables, the average price last August was $39 per megawatt hour.

11:48And then they calculated what happened if you backed out all the solar that had been added.

12:00If it weren't for the solar driving this price down, instead of $39 per megawatt hour, it would have been

12:09somewhere between $55 and $90 per megawatt hour. Minimum $25 differential. Maybe more than twice the cost.

12:26The punchline, quoting from the report,

12:29had there been no growth in solar energy between 2018 and 2024, wholesale electric prices in 2024

12:40would have been at least 40% higher.

12:46Without the clean energy growth of that 95% of supply that came onto the grid that was clean energy last

12:54year, electricity prices would have been 40% higher. And where would that 40% have gone?

13:00It would have gone into the pockets of the fossil fuel industry that was setting that price,

13:03as everybody had to pay more and more and more. So when you see the fossil fuel industry come here

13:08and take this shot at its clean energy competition in this bill after having flooded that side with

13:14political money, they're going to make a fortune off of this and consumers will pay. That's how this bill

13:25robs you. It puts you back onto the fossil fuel side of that curve, not onto the clean energy added part

13:36of the curve, which lowers prices so dramatically. And as the report concluded,

13:43I'm quoting again, this isn't speculation or modeling. It's what actually happened in one of

13:51America's largest electricity markets. And by the way, while the fossil fuel polluters are out trying

14:00to damage their competition using the power of government and the influence of their dark money

14:07operation to do so, they're also damaging America's competitiveness against China.

14:13China's already putting 25 times the solar that we are putting onto their grid.

14:19That gives them huge advantages as they construct solar panels, design solar technologies,

14:25and offer that to the rest of the world. We're in a world market for solar technology,

14:32just like we're in a world market for electric vehicles.

14:35And the fossil fuel industry's desire to destroy the American solar market and to destroy the American

14:45electric vehicle market is about as unpatriotic as you can get, because it is taking these two

14:52technologies and saying, go for it, China. We're out. We're out. Have the entire international market for solar

15:02and for energy. We're not going to compete. We're going to load up our people with new taxes. We're going to tear away the subsidies.

15:10And by the way, the fossil fuel industry that's telling you this,

15:15they're the recipients of the biggest subsidy in world history.

15:19They get $700 billion a year in the United States alone from being allowed to pollute for free.

15:29It violates market economics to pollute for free. Milton Friedman, the most conservative economist,

15:36will tell you it's not proper market theory. When somebody is polluting for free, the cost of the

15:43pollution should be in the price of the product. So they already benefit, the fossil fuel industry already

15:49benefits from the biggest subsidy in world history, $700 billion with a B, $700 billion every single year

16:01to compete unfairly against clean energy. And on top of that, they want to rip away the investments that

16:08have been made. And they want to put a new tax on clean energy. And they want to drive consumer prices

16:14back up to their fossil fuel model. There are some really big losers in this big loser of a bill.

16:29Anybody who cares about adding $5 trillion to our national debt, that's a big loss. It comes through

16:35in interest rates for people with car loans and home loans. Health care. 16 million people getting

16:42chucked off their health care. Hospitals and nursing homes facing receivership as their revenues dry up

16:50from a nearly trillion dollar hit to their revenue streams. Taxpayers getting clobbered by an already

16:57corrupt tax code that this makes even worse for the individuals benefiting the most from the corruption

17:05of the tax code and who are the least deserving of our solicitude and who are the most able to pay.

17:13I promise you, there are people who will not know they even got this $300,000 individual

17:21billionaire benefit because they're so rich already it won't even count. And on the flip side of the coin,

17:28if they had to pay taxes like a normal American, they wouldn't even notice that either. They'd still be

17:35able to sun on their island, cruise on their yacht, ski and their chalet and jet in their jet.

17:40And yet, we're breaking the bank to the tune of $5 trillion to take care of those people.

17:50Creepy billionaires who can't even count their wealth, but for some reason insist on coming to

17:57Congress and just seizing even more, looting the public trough. Offshoring corporations who get a

18:06special tax benefit for offshoring jobs and investment, moving them away from America. Remember,

18:12this was the America first agenda, not when you look into the weeds of this crooked bill.

18:19So creepy billionaires, offshoring corporations, and of course, fossil fuel polluters who want to

18:29pollute. They've got all the money in the world. They've made massive profits. They could do their

18:34own carbon removal and make their products safer. They choose not to. They choose not to because they

18:43want to pollute and they want to kill their competition so they can pollute more and profit

18:50more and drive up consumer prices, as I showed here. And guess what? The creepy billionaires,

18:58the offshoring corporations and the fossil fuel polluters, what do they have in common? Huge donors

19:05to the Republican Party. That's what this bill is about. It's not about taking care of the economy.

19:10It's not about taking care of the public. It's payback to big special interests and billionaires

19:18who provide the dark money funding that floats the Republican Party. And now they're demanding

19:25payback for the majorities that they bought. There is a WASP, Mr. President,

19:34that lays its larvae inside another bug. And the larvae of the WASP inside that other bug

19:52are able to take over the nervous system of that other bug. They can take over the command and control

19:58system of the bug and they start driving the bug around from the inside. They make it do what the

20:04larvae wants it to do. They make it go where the larvae want to be. They make it hang where the larvae want

20:12it to hang. And then the larvae consume it from the inside. They eat it and they turn into the next generation of WASPs.

20:20That's a pretty good analogy for what has happened here. Those creepy billionaires,

20:29those fossil fuel polluters, those big offshore incorporations have taken over the command and

20:36control system of the Republican Party. The bug over there is being marched around by those special

20:44interests doing exactly what it's told. And it doesn't care about the 16 million people coming off

20:51insurance. It doesn't care about the added pollution. It doesn't care about the increased cost. It doesn't

20:56care about the unfairness. It doesn't care about making the tax code more corrupt. Because the special

21:02interests are in that bug running that show. I yield the floor.

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