Amy Klobuchar Warns Farmers Will Take Major Financial Hit Due To SNAP Cuts In Big Beautiful Bill

Forbes Breaking News

In Senate floor remarks on Saturday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) urged her colleagues to vote against the Big Beautiful Bill.

Transcript

00:00Senator from the great state of Minnesota.

00:08Mr. President, are we in a quorum call?

00:10No.

00:11No, we are not.

00:12Mr. President, I rise today to speak in strong opposition to the recently revealed

00:20Senate Congressional Budget Bill.

00:23I will note that this is a 940-page bill that was just put out there at midnight.

00:31For me, that was a moment because, one, I realized that nothing has changed in terms of the proposal.

00:38It's actually added to the debt.

00:41And two, from about $3.4 trillion to one analysis says $4 trillion, and it actually adds more

00:48Medicaid cuts, another $100 billion, up to $900 billion in Medicaid cuts.

00:54Those are the top lines.

00:55I don't think anyone's had time to look at every single detail of that bill.

00:59But for me, it meant something else.

01:01That meant that I knew that I was going to stay here, along with my colleague, Senator Smith,

01:06because we have a job to do that is really important on this budget.

01:12But it was hard to not go home and grieve for one of my very good and beloved friends, Melissa

01:19Hortman, and her husband, Mark, whose funeral was held today in our state.

01:25And I would have been there in person because of the gravity of the legislation we are considering

01:31today, but I was able to watch it online.

01:35One of the things that I most remember and will always remember from that funeral, in addition

01:40to the beauty of it, in addition to the trees and the bushes that awaited the guests outside,

01:49because Melissa loved the beauty of the world and cared a lot about the world around her.

01:55But it was the words of our Archbishop, Archbishop Hebda.

01:59It was a very religious service, full mass.

02:02My husband got to be there and take part in that mass.

02:05But Archbishop Hebda said at the close of the ceremony, he quoted the new Pope, Pope Leo,

02:12who recently said that politics is one of the greatest forms of charity.

02:17Melissa always believed that.

02:19She believed that in how she lived her life and got things done for people,

02:23whether it was school lunches or better paid family leave or more fairness for people in our state.

02:30She believed that to her core and her husband did too.

02:34When their kids wrote just a few days after their parents were murdered by a madman,

02:41their two kids in their 20s, one is going to get married in December,

02:45his fiance was there, Melissa was planning the wedding.

02:48They asked people to make the world just a little bit better.

02:53They said plant a tree, pet a dog, hopefully a golden retriever because they love dogs so much,

03:00do something small or big.

03:02So I figured that's what we're going to be doing the next few days.

03:06And this is big, but it's something that's going to make a difference to people in this country

03:12if we don't do something about this bill right now.

03:15What does this bill do?

03:18It kicks 16 million people off their healthcare.

03:2116 million people off their healthcare in order to finance tax cuts for the wealthiest,

03:28in order to give multimillionaires a $400,000 tax cut.

03:33That doesn't make the world a better place.

03:36Adding $4 trillion in debt, a trillion of it is interest,

03:42which is going to make mortgage rates go up.

03:44It's going to make it harder for young people to be able to maybe get their first house

03:49or pay their rent.

03:51It's putting it on their backs.

03:53It's putting it on their shoulders.

03:56That's why I don't see this as a big, beautiful bill.

04:00I see this as a big, beautiful betrayal of the hardworking people of this country.

04:07Why are our colleagues scrambling to get this done in two days just because the President

04:13sets a deadline and says, jump, and they say, how high?

04:17Why are they always rubber stamping things that they don't actually believe in?

04:22We still know this newest draft, the 940 pages that no one's really read.

04:30We know that the bill still rips away healthcare from millions of Americans

04:35and closes hundreds of rural hospitals.

04:38It still shifts costs to states and threatens food assistance for families across the country.

04:44It still adds trillions of dollars to the federal debt.

04:49People in this country, the more they hear about this, the more they don't like it.

04:55A Fox News poll recently, 60% of the people don't like it.

05:00Two to one, people say, this isn't going to help me.

05:03It's going to help wealthy people.

05:05People on Medicaid, they don't want to lose access to healthcare.

05:09One out of two people in assisted living are actually on Medicaid.

05:16You know, when my dad was in assisted living, he had some savings.

05:20He was married three times, so a lot of that money had gone away.

05:24Better to talk about another time.

05:26But I knew the exact day that that savings was going to run out.

05:30I knew the exact saving day because I was going to move him over to a Catholic Charities place

05:35that actually took Medicaid because that was the day that his Medicaid would kick in.

05:40And it gave me some solace even though he was in a place that didn't take Medicaid,

05:44that I had a plan for him.

05:46I had a place for him to go.

05:49He worked hard his whole life.

05:51Grew up in a hardscrabble mining town.

05:54He deserved to have the end of his life be a life of dignity.

05:59This is not what the American people voted for.

06:03When I get out to rural Minnesota, I visit all of 87 counties every single year.

06:09I've done 49 so far, so I've been in a lot of our rural counties in the last six months.

06:15They are scared to death of what this is going to do to rural hospitals because the debt is so huge in this bill,

06:22it actually triggers some rules on Medicare that will cut $500 billion in Medicare.

06:29In addition to the Medicaid cuts I already laid out, which are now up to $900 billion, that's devastating for rural hospitals.

06:37It's projected 300 rural hospitals will close.

06:40This is the lifeline, the lifeline for people in rural America.

06:46When they get something, a very, very serious illness, yeah, they'll go to another hospital in a maybe bigger area, bigger town, metro area.

06:57But when they need emergency care, unless they're going to get a helicopter coming in to get them,

07:02or they break a leg and there's a lot of people working outside in rural areas, farming, logging, you name it,

07:09they need to have a local hospital there.

07:12They need to have local doctors there.

07:17There is no avoiding the facts.

07:1916 million people cut off health care, closing over 300 rural hospitals and 500 nursing homes across the country.

07:30Republicans want to say the updated text will help rural providers with additional funding,

07:35but the bill is now making over $900 billion in cuts instead of the $800 billion when it comes to health care.

07:47I've heard from a working mom of two whose parents rely on Medicaid for health care.

07:51She told me she doesn't think it's fair to shift the cost of care to families like her to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy.

07:57Duh!

07:58She said we need to draw the line and say this is enough.

08:03I have heard from so many people across my state about the food assistance cuts.

08:10Four million people off of food assistance.

08:14You know what the majority, vast majority of people on food assistance?

08:17Veterans, seniors, people with little kids, old people, those are the people on food assistance.

08:26Grocery stores, in rural areas you may have one grocery store in a town, more likely in a county, more likely in four counties.

08:35They are operating already, many of them are independent groceries, on thin chains.

08:40You make these kind of thin margins, you make these kinds of cuts, you make these kinds of cuts to snap,

08:48the results are going to be that you're going to lose these grocery stores.

08:54As a ranking member of the Senate Ag Committee, I have heard over and over again from farmers who are already facing headwinds.

09:02The Trump tariffs, they don't have markets now that they had markets before.

09:07The cuts to the international food assistance that we were always so proud of in this country.

09:13That was other organizations buying American farmers food.

09:18The input costs, what's happening with avian flu and other things, and now you add this?

09:25This is food that's produced by American farmers when you cut $200 billion, as the Senate bill does, from the SNAP program.

09:35The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has confirmed that the Senate bill would add and SNAP for 2.9 million Americans,

09:43including over nearly a million seniors and 270,000 veterans.

09:51The bill passed by the House would add $3.4 trillion, as I noticed, to the national debt, and this Senate bill is now up to $4 trillion.

10:02And it uses this funky budgeting, which, let me just explain it an easy way, it's called baseline budgeting.

10:09Everyone that looks at this from the outside says, this is a $4 trillion debt adder.

10:14But they use something where they say, okay, let's say, Washington Post did this today.

10:19You go to a movie and you buy a movie ticket, let's say it's $10 bucks.

10:23Then you get some popcorn, then you do that one week, and then, because you want to see that F1 movie, the new movie,

10:29then two weeks later you go and you want to see it again, but you get some popcorn for $5, small popcorn for $5.

10:37Okay, instead of saying you're paying your $10 bucks for the ticket and your $5 bucks for the popcorn,

10:44they say, oh, it's only $5, because that's how much it went up over the last few weeks.

10:49That's the funky budgeting. That's the joke. That's the faux budgeting that's going on on the other side.

10:57$4 trillion in 10 years, that is what it costs.

11:02This is not what Americans voted for. The president promised to lower costs and stand up for the middle class.

11:09This bill does the opposite. It raises costs. It takes from working people to pad the pockets of the wealthy.

11:16And that is why this bill is so unpopular. Whether it is a mom from Louisiana whose son has Down syndrome and counts on Medicaid,

11:24or a bus driver from Kansas, like the one I met, who uses SNAP to feed her kids, the American people are speaking out against this bill.

11:33We will have the weekend to fight this bill. And I think people in the middle of the summer, maybe they're not tuned in, but they better tune in.

11:42Because we should be protecting health care, not taking it away, defending food assistance, not raising grocery costs.

11:50We should not be giving tax breaks to the wealthy. We should be helping out the middle class and hardworking Americans.

11:57That's what our job should be. It's not what this bill is.

12:02Thank you, Mr. President. I yield the floor.

12:05Thank you, Mr. President. I yielded, Mr. President.

12:12It is your pleasure.

12:14I owe you a bo DANA EACH disk.

12:18And now, when I come here, I have a whistle.

12:21I love the joke. This bill suffered the restrictions depending on how mess you are.

12:24And when you're doing a joke, you should meet the policies that put97.

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