00:00With that, I yield to the ranking member, Mr. McGovern, for any comments he wishes to make.
00:06Well, thank you, Madam Chair.
00:07The chairwoman just said that Democrats were going to say that the sky is falling.
00:12Well, I'm not going to say the sky is falling.
00:14I'm going to say that health care is going to get ripped away from millions of people.
00:19I'm going to say that food is going to be taken off the table of many families in this country
00:23who rely on SNAP as a way to make sure that they don't go hungry.
00:28And I'm going to say that the richest among us are going to get a tax cut.
00:32So it has nothing to do with the sky.
00:34It has everything to do with what is right and what is wrong.
00:37We are here today on a bill that just dropped from the Senate, hot off the press, passed only an hour ago.
00:44It's massive. Here it is, nearly 1,000 pages long.
00:49And I've got to ask, have any of you read it this time?
00:53Because last time we met on this legislation, many of our Republican colleagues had not.
00:57And that's no accident. It's by design.
01:01It's a direct result of Republican leadership and the White House jamming this bill through Congress with zero transparency.
01:08Now, let's be totally honest.
01:10This entire process has been legislative malpractice.
01:15It's been negotiated in the back rooms from the start.
01:18In April, conservatives argued for and ultimately got aggressive instructions in the budget for committees to slash spending.
01:24I wonder how they feel now that the Senate has violated their hard-fought instructions by over a half a trillion dollars.
01:32And let's not forget, this bill was jammed through the House in May so quickly that some Republicans said they would have opposed it if they'd known what was actually in it.
01:42And now, after another series of backroom negotiations in the Senate, we're getting jammed again, without any chance for the public, or independent experts for that matter, to fully review the bill.
01:54And let me make a prediction.
01:56If this ugly bill passes, it's going to get a lot uglier when people realize what's in it.
02:01And not even Donald Trump's new $300 bottle of cologne will cover the stench.
02:08This bill will hurt people in every congressional district in this country.
02:13And Republicans are racing to get it passed before the American people can figure out what's in it.
02:19There's no real deadline.
02:21There's no real deadline that we're working against.
02:23None.
02:24July 4th is just an arbitrary marker that Trump made up.
02:28He wants a victory lap on Friday, just weeks after throwing himself a military birthday parade, complete with tanks rolling down Constitution Avenue, one that cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.
02:41He now wants to have a 4th of July signing ceremony at the White House for this dumpster fire of a bill.
02:47We're rushing.
02:48We're rushing, not because the country demands it, but because he wants to throw himself yet another party.
02:55This isn't policy.
02:57It's ego management.
02:58So why not slow down?
03:00Why not actually do the work?
03:02Why not fix the problems instead of pretending that we're in the middle of some five-alarm emergency?
03:08I mean, Vice President Vance just had to break a tie in the Senate.
03:13Many of the Republicans who voted for this bill acknowledge that in its current form, it is seriously flawed.
03:22And listen to this quote from Senator Murkowski, who just caved and voted for this bill.
03:26And you've got to love this.
03:27She said, quote, my hope is that the House is going to look at this and recognize that we're not there yet, end quote.
03:35I mean, my question to her is, if you really believe that, then why the hell did you vote for this bill?
03:41It doesn't make any sense.
03:43It's a dereliction of your duty as a United States senator and as a representative for the people in Alaska.
03:49I mean, when was the last time this current House of Representatives has fixed or solved anything?
03:57I mean, where have you been, Senator Murkowski?
04:00This Republican House is dysfunction on steroids.
04:04And let me say to my Republican friends, I understand that the Senate just jammed you, but you don't have to be complicit.
04:11I get it.
04:12I know the Republican leadership and Trump don't want scrutiny.
04:15They don't want the American people to understand what's really happening here.
04:19This bill is a middle finger to millions of Americans.
04:23It isn't just a bad bill.
04:25It is the most dangerous piece of legislation in modern history.
04:29Dangerous because of the very real damage it will do to real people, sick people, hungry kids, families just scraping by.
04:37If this is Republicans' top legislative priority in this Congress, it tells us everything about where your values lie.
04:45And it's not with working families, not with struggling communities, but with megacorporations, billionaires, and Donald Trump.
04:53Madam Chair, I know that once I'm done, you will say, as you did at the beginning, that I'm fear-mongering.
04:59That Democrats, nonpartisan scorekeepers, analysts, experts in industry, doctors, children's hospitals, food banks, utilities, organized labor, and journalists,
05:10what they say about this bill, every legitimate critique that we have heard about this bill, you will say that it is hyperbole.
05:19But just because you say that, it doesn't make it so.
05:23Facts still do matter.
05:26And the facts say that this bill is terrible.
05:29Now, we know Republicans are about to gut Medicaid and cut Medicare.
05:33That's a fact.
05:34That's not an opinion.
05:35This bill rips health coverage away from roughly 17 million people.
05:40Of those, 11.8 million will lose health care due to the Medicaid and Affordable Care Act cuts.
05:46Another 5 million will lose their health care because Republicans are allowing premium assistance to expire for those who qualify for help
05:53with paying for health insurance on the ACA exchanges.
05:56Now, that's not my opinion.
05:57That's the conclusion of the CBO and every single other credible budget expert across the country.
06:04The Joint Committee on Taxation, Penn Wharton Budget Model, Yale Budget Lab, Tax Policy Center,
06:10and even right-leaning organizations like the Tax Foundation and researchers at the American Enterprise Institute.
06:17This bill will devastate rural hospitals, shut down nursing homes, hammer community health centers.
06:24It will punish people we ought to protect, the elderly, the disabled, low-income kids, and working families just trying to survive.
06:33It will end nutrition assistance for millions.
06:36We are the richest country on Earth, and you will be taking away food from our own children.
06:41Why?
06:42To shovel tax breaks to billionaires and corporate executives?
06:46I mean, give me a break.
06:47This bill will kill thousands of clean energy jobs and raise Americans' energy rates while rewarding big oil with billions in subsidies.
06:55Because Republicans think welfare is okay if you're ExxonMobil, but not if you're a family struggling to pay your skyrocketing power bill,
07:04or a grandma who stays in assisted living, or our parents struggling to put food on the table.
07:09It gives $150 billion more to the Pentagon, not for peace or security, but to line the pockets of defense contractors.
07:19This is on top of record levels of defense spending that we already provide the Pentagon in our annual spending bills.
07:27For all you budget hawks out there, let me ask you, when was the last time the Pentagon passed an audit?
07:33The answer is, never.
07:36You're worried about someone on SNAP who gets an average of $2 per meal, might get $2.75 per meal,
07:44but you couldn't care less when millions of dollars are wasted by defense contractors and cost overruns.
07:52There is $900 billion for giant corporations.
07:55Corporations that are known to lay off hundreds of workers as they stash their inflated checks in offshore tax havens like in the Cayman Islands.
08:04And this bill showers the wealthiest Americans with tax cuts.
08:08Get this, a family making less than $50,000 per year, they'd get less than $1 a day in tax cuts.
08:17I mean, you can't buy a damn cup of coffee with that.
08:19But those making a million dollars a year or more, well, they'll get more than $250 a day in tax breaks or $96,000 tax breaks on average in a single year.
08:32I mean, that's even worse than the original House bill.
08:36That's how rigged this bill is to benefit the wealthy.
08:40The average millionaire gets more in tax cuts than most families earn in an entire year.
08:45And to be clear, there is deep support on the Democratic side for extending the middle-class tax cuts and passing no tax on tips.
08:53We'd be happy to work with you on something that delivers just that.
08:57But Republicans are holding bipartisan initiatives hostage to provide handouts to billionaires and gut Medicaid and SNAP.
09:05Now, meanwhile, the new standards for the child tax credit leaves one in every three eligible children behind.
09:13Because this bill doesn't invest in children, it abandons them.
09:18All this and Republicans are adding more than $3 trillion to the national debt.
09:23You hear that?
09:25Over $3 trillion.
09:28Now, I know some of the Republicans on this committee consider themselves real fiscal hawks.
09:33Well, you cannot with a straight face say that you care about deficits and the debt if you vote for this bill,
09:39whether that's out of this committee or on the House floor.
09:41This bill even raises the debt ceiling by $5 trillion because Republicans know that policies in here will explode our debt.
09:50I mean, you can't make this stuff up.
09:53This is the biggest transfer of wealth in American history, stealing from the poor to give to the rich.
09:59This is Republicans' let-them-eat-cake moment.
10:02It robs for the most vulnerable to pay off the already powerful.
10:06It tells every kid without wealth, this government has nothing for you, that the American dream is only for trust fund babies.
10:14And here's what baffles me.
10:15You all know the truth.
10:17You all know the truth.
10:18You know this bill is cruel.
10:20You know that it will hurt millions of Americans.
10:23But Trump wants you to fold.
10:25And the sad fact is that many of you will fold in a nanosecond.
10:29You'll vote for this even though you know it's bad for your own constituents.
10:34You're absolutely terrified that the guy in the White House will get mad and try to find someone to run against you in a primary.
10:41Like one of our Republican colleagues said this weekend on CNN, and I quote,
10:45everyone in the House knows the peril they're in if they vote no on this thing.
10:49They know that their jobs are at risk.
10:51End quote.
10:51You're terror-stricken that what happened over the weekend to Senator Tom Tillis will happen to you.
10:58Well, Senator Tillis did the right thing, speaking truth to power.
11:01You should listen to him when he says that the Senate's version of this bill betrays President Trump's promise not to take Medicaid away from its rightful recipients.
11:11He decided to retire because he wanted to put his constituents first.
11:15And quite frankly, I think he's tired of dealing with the relentless MAGA threats and BS.
11:20Yes, truly, I've never seen anything like this in my life, the kind of petrified fealty we're seeing on the right,
11:28scared by a man who called voting against this bill the ultimate betrayal.
11:33Like, what kind of president talks like that?
11:36That's the language of dictators, not the language of a president.
11:40But let me remind you all of something.
11:42The people you should be afraid of betraying are not in the White House or dining at Mar-a-Lago.
11:50They're back home.
11:52The people in Boone, North Carolina, in Moorhead, Minnesota, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, in Austin, Texas, in Salem, Indiana, in Jamestown, New York, in Tifton, Georgia, in Abington, Virginia, in Noonan, Georgia.
12:05They're the ones who hired you.
12:08And if you vote for this bill, you're voting to screw them over, plain and simple.
12:13When their kids go hungry, when their health care is gone, when their energy bills skyrocket, when they watch big oil rake in profits while they get pink slips,
12:22when they realize that billionaires like Jeff Bezos are getting 40 times the tax breaks that they're getting,
12:27when they watch the wealthy get richer and they're left behind, they are going to feel the pain that you brought on them.
12:35And I think you're going to see that reflected in the next election.
12:39The American people are watching.
12:41They deserve better than this.
12:43They deserve certainly better than this cowardice, better than this cruelty, better than this betrayal.
12:48So I'm asking all of you to have a spine.
12:51Find your moral compass.
12:53Vote no on this bill and come up with something better.
12:56There's still time.
12:58Work with us on tax relief for people who are not making millions and billions of dollars.
13:02Let's go back to the drawing board.
13:04We can come up with a bipartisan consensus.
13:07And so, Madam Chair, for a million reasons, from process to substance,
13:14and quite frankly, to give Republican members a chance to read their own bill,
