Democrats Thoughts on Vote to Reopen Government

Democrats Thoughts on Vote to Reopen Government

Listen:

• mediaBrew Media Player: ( 13 Min. mp3)
• Default Device Player: ( 13 Min. mp3)

Summary

The recent vote by eight Democrats alongside Republicans to advance a continuing resolution has raised significant concerns regarding healthcare and its implications for millions of Americans. This resolution is projected to increase healthcare premiums for over 20 million people, potentially doubling or even tripling costs. Additionally, it threatens to remove Medicaid support for 15 million individuals, with studies indicating this could lead to approximately 50,000 unnecessary deaths annually. Critics argue that this move primarily benefits the wealthiest 1% through substantial tax cuts at the expense of essential healthcare services.

The backdrop to this vote includes a broader political context marked by the recent elections, where the public expressed a clear desire for a stand against what they perceive as harmful policies associated with the Trump administration. Voter sentiment has shifted, reflecting discontent with the government’s handling of healthcare issues and its impact on working-class citizens. Despite a strong Democratic push to restore critical healthcare funding—including Affordable Care Act tax credits—Republicans have largely resisted these efforts, leaving millions vulnerable to inadequate coverage.

As the resolution moves to the House for further consideration, the situation highlights the ongoing struggle between party lines and the critical importance of citizen engagement in shaping policy outcomes. The Democratic response to the recent elections emphasizes the need for grassroots activism to counteract what many view as undemocratic practices under the current administration. Ultimately, the future of healthcare and government accountability hinges on public mobilization and participation in the electoral process.

Transcript

Tonight, eight Democrats voted with the Republicans to allow them to go forward on this continuing resolution. And to my mind, this was a very, very bad vote. What it does, first of all, is it raises healthcare premiums for over 20 million Americans by doubling, and in some cases tripling or quadrupling.

People can’t afford that when we are already paying the highest prices in the world for healthcare. Number two, it paves the way for 15 million people to be thrown off of Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act studies show that will mean that some 50,000 Americans will die every year unnecessarily. And all of that was done to give a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the 1%.

As everybody knows, just on Tuesday, we had an election all over this country. And what the election showed is that the American people want us to stand up to Trumpism, to his war against working class people, to his authoritarianism. That is what the American people wanted.

But tonight, that is not what happened. So we’ve got to go forward, do the best that we can to try to protect working class people, to make sure that the United States not only does not throw people off of healthcare, but ends the absurdity of being the only major country on earth that doesn’t guarantee healthcare to all people. We have a lot of work to do.

But to be honest with you, tonight was not a good night. Last night, we voted on a bill to end the shutdown and fund the government until January. It was a bad deal that will leave millions without access to affordable health insurance.

And I voted against it. Nevertheless, the bill passed and I’ve received countless inquiries from people wanting to know what happened last night. What is the consequence of this? What does it mean for the future? And how did we get here? So to explain, we have to go back to the beginning of the year and the beginning of the Trump presidency, when we witnessed in those first few months, the administration engaging in countless lawless acts, withholding illegally impounding money for government programs and for services for the American people, laying off doging mass numbers of federal employees, also in violation of law, starting to engage in indiscriminate immigration raids, and other countless acts that were in violation of law norms, and were just plain cruel.

So that was the context in March when the first government funding ran out. And we had a debate over what to do, how to fund the government for the future. Now, when the parties can’t agree on funding levels, they often rely on something called a continuing resolution.

That means let’s keep funding the government at the pre-existing level. There are several problems with funding the government this way. For one thing, you can’t take into account change circumstances.

But for another, and in the context of the Trump administration’s lawless acts, it meant in that case, giving the government six more months, a six-month continued resolution to keep illegally withholding funding, to keep engaging in lawless acts, essentially to give them six more months of running room to engage in their corrupt conduct. I strongly argued against supporting that funding agreement back in March. For one thing, they were telling us they were going to cheat on the agreement.

They were telling us they were going to continue to rescind whatever funds Democrats put in that bill for our priorities. You might remember, though, a sufficient number of Democrats joined Republicans in voting for that bill in March, and that funded the government up until September. But during that interim, between March and September, Republicans passed what the president calls his big beautiful bill, that big ugly bill that cut trillions of dollars out of health care, predominantly out of Medicaid, but also out of the Affordable Care Act, eliminated the tax credits that people rely upon to be able to afford to buy insurance on the exchanges.

So it made massive cuts to health care to fund a tax cut for super wealthy people and large corporations. So they took the money away from health care, gave it to rich people and companies, added massively to the national debt. That was the big ugly bill.

Now that set the stage for September, when the funding ran out again. And the question was, what should be done now? When you have now even more experience of lawless actions by the Trump administration, you have the attacks on universities and on law firms, you have attacks on the media, you have the first family engaging in rampant corruption. All of these things going on, all of this is backdrop to the funding bill running out in September.

But there was one other thing that was key to the fight that began in September. And that is we got to see the first impacts of that big ugly bill, because insurance companies in the exchanges started posting what their new premiums were going to be. And by getting rid of those subsidies, people’s premiums shot up by 50%, 100% or more.

Millions of people, 20 million people saw their premiums double. Those notices have gone out just in the last few weeks. So we got to see the real price.

I got to hear it from my constituents who wrote to me who called our office to explain how they have pre-existing conditions, how they were not going to be able to afford insurance and couldn’t afford to be without insurance. This was the crisis that was created by Republicans, by the president in that big ugly bill. And this was the backdrop for the fight over the funding bill.

Well, we didn’t agree on how to resolve it. And so the government shut down. And during the course of the shutdown, Democrats made it very plain.

We were going to fight to restore healthcare funding in that government funding bill and in particular, restore funding for those Affordable Care Act tax credits. And the reason these tax credits were so important is it’s not just for the people who are getting the tax credits, but also for others, because if people don’t get the tax credits and can’t afford coverage, and it’s going to be particularly young people, healthy young people who decide, I’m just not going to be insured. That means those remaining are going to be older and sicker, and the price is going to go up for everyone, including people who don’t even get the tax credits.

And that’s exactly what we have seen. So Democrats made it plain. You want our votes for this thing.

You’re going to have to provide these tax credits again. And that’s where we were for 40 days fighting over healthcare. And given that the Republicans control the White House, the House and the Senate during the course of that 40 day shutdown, the American people properly gave responsibility to the majority party for the shutdown.

They held them accountable for the shutdown. And indeed, when people went to vote last Tuesday and had the first real opportunity to express themselves about the Republican shutdown, about the Republican attacks on healthcare, it was a route. It was a route.

Democrats won in governor’s races in Virginia, in New Jersey. Mayors, Democratic mayors, won in cities that had never had a Democratic mayor. In California, Prop 50 passed overwhelmingly.

It was not only a terrible rebuke of the president’s policies and Republican policies, but we also had some very, very strong candidates running throughout the country who brought different strengths to these different races. But it was in the aftermath of that election that we had the vote last night. When the American people believe rightly Republicans had caused the shutdown by failing to negotiate an end to the healthcare crisis they created, when voters had just handed Republicans a historic defeat, that we had that vote last night.

Now, we had just made an offer to the Republicans two days earlier, that is, give us a one-year extension of the Affordable Care Tax credits, and we will pass the CR until January. They refused to budge. And not only that, during the course of the shutdown, the president decided to do something no president has done, not this way, and that is to maximize the pain the American people were feeling.

So he cut off SNAP benefits, food assistance benefits, for hungry people. And in fact, when that was challenged in court and he lost, he appealed and appealed all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. The president fought all the way to the highest court for the right to cut people off from food.

This is how cruel the president was and is during this shutdown. And not, of course, just during the shutdown, during the course of his one-year presidency thus far, but nonetheless, during the shutdown, he sought to maximize the pain. Firing workers illegally during the shutdown, threatening others that they wouldn’t receive back pay when the shutdown was over, as is required by law.

In every way possible, the president sought to maximize the pain. But here’s the thing. You cannot back down in a fight against a bully.

They will simply view it as an invitation to do even worse in the future. This is why I was so adamantly opposed to that deal last night, because that deal last night offered nothing to solve the health care crisis. The most it offered was a vote on the Affordable Care Act in the Senate, which is sure to lose.

It didn’t even require a vote in the House of Representatives. The House of Representatives has been on vacation, a paid vacation, for the last two months. While federal employees were not getting paid, while the staff in the House were not getting paid, House members were on a two-month vacation, courtesy of Speaker Johnson.

So it was a bad deal. Tragically, the Democratic caucus was divided, and therefore, that deal passed. So where does that leave us? Well, this deal will, at some point this week, now go over to the House.

The House will have to return for the first time in months to actually do some work. They will have to swear in a new Democratic member from Arizona. That will be the deciding vote to release the Epstein files, part of what has kept them away for the last two months.

But they will also take up this bad deal. Now, they may be some Republicans that hold out for a while, but they will cave to the President, as Republicans always do. And so I expect that ultimately, this will pass.

It will kick the can down to January. But frankly, in January, I expect we will have less leverage than we did last night. And that’s going to leave millions of people trying to figure out right now how to pay for their health care, high and dry.

That is the tragedy of the Republican Big Ugly Bill, of their willingness to keep the government shut down so they could insist on taking health care away from people. So what is the remedy? What is left to be done? And at this point, I think the only thing that is left to be done is the same thing we saw last Tuesday, and that is you, the citizens, you ultimately have all the power here that’s necessary to save this country. Because the fight over health care last night wasn’t just about health care.

The fight back in March wasn’t just about government funding either. It was also about our democracy. It was about standing up to a president who is dismantling one check, one balance after another, who wants to make himself some kind of king or dictator.

It is also about fighting for our democracy. One of the reasons I felt so strongly about voting against the bill last night is that to me, it seemed the same fight that our universities and our law firms that are media organizations, even late night comedians, are engaged in the same fight. And much as I called my university president when these attacks on universities started and said, stand tall, stand firm, do not give in to this president.

Much as I called my law school president and saying the same thing, much as I called my own law firms to say the same thing, I would have had us stand firm and reject this extortion by the president. But ultimately, the only real check on this president’s power is you. Ultimately, it’s not going to come from Senate Republicans who are too much in his thrall, too unwilling to stand up to anything he does.

It’s not going to come from House Republicans who frankly have been AWOL for months. It’s not going to come from the Supreme Court that has rubber-stamped so much illegality in this administration. Certainly not going to come from any change of heart by this cruel and corrupt president.

It is going to have to come from you, the most important players in this democracy, citizens. And you will have your opportunity next November.