Remarks by House Speaker Schumer on the floor of the House about…

Washington, DC – Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) spoke on the Senate floor today to urge his Republican colleagues in the House to stop wasting time on a CR proposal intended to lay the groundwork for dangerous Project 2025 proposals and instead work with Democrats on a bipartisan package to avoid a damaging and unnecessary government shutdown. Below are Senator Schumer’s remarks, which can also be viewed here:

Our Republican colleagues in the House of Representatives are suffering from a serious case of Groundhog Day.

The government is facing a critical funding deadline in a few weeks. If that deadline is missed, the government will shut down. Only bipartisanship will help us meet that deadline.

But instead of pursuing bipartisanship, Speaker Johnson is again—again—wasting time pandering to the hard right, despite his razor-thin majority. Hasn’t he learned? This is what has gotten Republicans into trouble the last few times: that we need to fund the government, and they’re appealing to the right wing and their kind of strict, narrow, partisan ideology that they think can force everyone—even dissident Republicans, let alone Democrats and the president—to go along with them.

But of course that doesn’t happen. And then we get a bipartisan agreement. Oh yeah, it’s definitely Groundhog Day again, because the Republicans are repeating the same mistake they’ve made over and over again. And that’s the Republicans in the House of Representatives, led unfortunately by Speaker Johnson.

As I said, we’ve seen this before. Is it any surprise that the Speaker’s purely partisan CR seems to be in trouble?

The answer is very simple: The House needs to stop wasting time on a CR bill that can’t become law. The House needs to stop wasting time sitting down with each other, even all of us, to put together a bill without consulting Leader Jeffries, me, or the President. But that’s what they’re doing. And it’s not working. It’s just not working.

Instead, Republicans should work with Democrats on a bipartisan package, a package with input from both sides, a package that avoids damaging cuts, a package that is free of poison pills. We are ready to sit down with them and deal with them right away.

To be fair, the Speaker’s proposal wasn’t all bad news. I was encouraged to see that Speaker Johnson’s proposal adhered to the bipartisan topline spending agreement I reached with the Speaker earlier this year. It’s a good sign that Speaker Johnson seems to be accepting the reality that any CR we produce in the coming weeks will have to include that level of funding.

Unfortunately, the good news ends there, because on the whole, the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives is an unserious and undercooked product.

It’s not serious that Republicans are saying they want to delay funding the government for six months. Funding the government is the most basic responsibility we have in Congress, so saying “let’s delay it for six months” should be a non-starter.

It’s also not serious that Republicans would put forward a proposal that would jeopardize troop readiness, jeopardize troop pay, and hamper our efforts to outpace the Chinese government. You can’t run a military on a six-month CR. You can’t put everything on hold for six months, freeze defense contracts for six months, and let Russia and the Chinese government catch up to us. It’s that simple. And the head of the Joint Chiefs sent a letter saying just that.

It’s not serious that Republicans are saying they want to pass a CR that doesn’t properly extend E-Verify, H-2B visas, and other border security programs that stop drugs like fentanyl. They talk a lot about the border, but they ignore the fundamental ways in which we are tightening enforcement at the border and in the interior with E-Verify. It shows how political this document is.

It is particularly outrageous that the President’s own proposal would destroy a crucial law enforcement operation to stop drug trafficking, drug cartels and money laundering.

But the procession of horrible things goes on and on, and doesn’t stop there.

It’s not serious that Republicans are saying they want to pass a CR that forgets to fund critical health programs. The Republican proposal would hurt telehealth. We know how important telehealth is, especially for rural Americans. It has made health care much better, cheaper, and more effective in rural areas. But they don’t fund it. Wait six months to tell someone in a rural area who needs medical attention? People with diabetes would struggle to get the care they need. And Community Health Centers—often the only source for millions of working-class Americans to get their health care if they don’t have insurance but fall above Medicare or Medicaid eligibility—would be in jeopardy.

And if that wasn’t enough, Republicans have no plans to extend Farm Bill funding.

One of the consequences of not passing the farm bill is that we will cross the so-called “dairy cliff,” which is what happens when the Dairy Margin Coverage Program dries up.

If this were to happen, it would decimate farmers across the country, and I know farmers in my own state have told me that some of them would go bankrupt if we went over that dairy cliff. Monthly payments that help farmers close the gap between the price of milk and feed would stop. It wouldn’t just hit our farmers, it would hit our consumers. The cost of milk, which is necessary for our babies and healthy children, all of us – I love milk, I look forward to drinking a lot of it – could potentially double if we went over that dairy cliff. It would cause seismic disruptions in our supply chains and cause panic in the marketplace.

These are just some of the dire consequences of continuing with Speaker Johnson’s six-month, non-serious CR proposal. It’s no surprise that the White House has already vetoed it.

As for their timeline, let’s be very clear about what the Republicans are trying to do with this six-month CR. They’re trying to lay the groundwork for Project 2025 in the hopes that they’ll get a favorable outcome in the election. That’s why the right wing is pushing this. It’s not just, you know, they don’t like government funding. They have this horrible document, Project 2025, that would turn America inside out. I believe it would create enormous economic problems, social problems, all sorts of problems, problems with protecting freedom. But that’s what they want to do. That’s their goal. Why Speaker Johnson would sign off on it is beyond me.

By launching a funding battle in March, right-wing Republicans hope to gain the opportunity to hold government funding hostage in exchange for some of the most heinous and damaging policies Donald Trump promises in Project 2025.

Let there be no mistake: Project 2025 is the Trump Agenda. Some of his top advisers helped put it together. Some of the leading figures in the field are being mentioned for high positions in a Trump administration, should it, God forbid, happen. More than 140 people who worked in the Trump administration contributed to it.

To call the ideas in Trump’s Project 2025 radical would be an understatement.

Project 2025 would pave the way for a nationwide ban on abortion by the far-right, restricting access to FDA-approved medications.

Project 2025 would abolish the Department of Education, decimate our public education system by eliminating school lunch programs. Hungry kids? Sending kids to school on empty stomachs? They can’t learn. Oh, we have to spend a little to provide a nutritious breakfast, which by the way helps our farmers? Isn’t that terrible, says the right wing. They would rather see their billionaires – who help fund all of this – pay even less money to the government. It would defund public schools, it would end student loan forgiveness. All the young people who have the burden of student loans on their shoulders, you, me, others, are trying to reduce or eliminate that burden. Forget it, if this right wing budget goes into effect.

Project 2025 would make healthcare less affordable for tens of millions of Americans, it would strip our veterans’ benefits, it would attack small farmers and small businesses, and much more. The list, unfortunately, goes on.

These ideas are not theoretical, oh no. They are not abstract ideas in the clouds. They are real proposals that the hard right will want to push if they come to power.

They are so narrow-minded and focused on their own agenda. As I said, largely over the years, funded by billionaires, greedy. Not all rich people are greedy. Many of them understand their obligation to help the country that has been so good to them. But they are a narrow-minded group, very greedy. They don’t want to pay taxes, some of them. Let’s have a national sales tax, some of them say, which would cause huge inflation on the average middle class. They don’t have to pay income tax? Lord help us.

And Republicans now hope the fight over funding will devolve into a hostage negotiation early next year between keeping the government open and pushing through the dire measures of Project 2025.

But let me assure the American people that we Democrats are not being fooled. Let me assure our mainstream Republicans, who quietly grit their teeth when they hear about this, that the American people are not being fooled. A surprising number of Americans have heard about Project 2025 and they don’t like it. The more people learn about Project 2025, the more they will realize how devastating it is and how terrible it would be for our economy, how disastrous it would be for public safety, and how catastrophic it would be for our country.

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