“We can give, instead of take. We can build, instead of tear down. We can recapture once again the sense of possibility in this country.”
Washington D.C. — U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) spoke on the Senate floor to highlight how President Donald Trump and Republicans’ One Big Ugly Bill betrays hard-working Americans, while giving a massive tax cut to wealthy people and corporations. Schiff laid out how this bill will kick millions off their health care, slash food assistance, shutter hospitals and clinics, increase energy prices, and add to the national debt and deficit.
He emphasized that instead of borrowing from our kids and our grandkids to fund a tax cut for wealthy people, we must focus on lowering costs, expanding health care, and creating economic opportunities for future generations.
Watch his full remarks HERE. Download remarks HERE.
Read the transcript of his remarks as delivered below:
Today, we meet at the center of a great debate, at a crossroads that will determine the direction of the country for another generation. And this debate, this choice, goes to the heart of a central question that has been plaguing families in America over the last three decades, but that is now just coming to the forefront. And that question is this:
If you are working hard in America, can you still earn a good living for yourself and your family? If you are working hard in America, can you still buy a home or pay your rent, buy your food and medicine, get the health care you need, afford fuel for your car, get a decent education, or go on a family vacation? And if the answer is no, and for all too many millions of people, the answer is no, what do we do about it?
When I was a kid, my father was in the clothing business. He was a traveling salesman and made $18,000 a year. On the strength of that single income, my parents bought our first home for $18,000. He made $18,000 a year, and my parents bought a home for $18,000. It was the American dream, and it came true for our family.
Today, I am a U.S. Senator. That too is part of the American dream — that anything is possible in this country. But could anyone buy a home for the cost of the annual income even of a U.S. Senator? Not a chance in the world. An average home in California costs three or four times that much. My kids are paying thousands and thousands of dollars a month in rent. Could they find a home for the cost of their annual income? There is even less of a chance of that. And what about your grandkids? At the rate we are going, at the rate housing prices are rising, what chance will they have to afford a home at any income?
And, of course, it’s not just a home. Health care costs are rising even faster. Millions of families are only one health care crisis away from failing. And it’s not their fault. It is not their fault. They are working hard, harder than ever, and they can’t keep pace with rising premiums, out of pocket costs, hospital stays, drug costs or charges at an emergency room.
Energy prices are going up. It costs more to heat your home in the winter and a lot more to cool your home in the summer. Utility bills have been rising by double digits while incomes have remained comparatively flat.
It’s too much. It’s too much. Why is this coming to a head now? Why, when we are not in a Great Depression and not even a Great Recession, although with Trump’s destructive tariff wars we may get there soon enough, why now? Why now is this coming to a head? And the answer is that people feel more squeezed than ever, more pressure than ever, more like a failure than ever because they are doing their best, working their hardest, and they are still hanging on by a thread.
And you know something, it’s not their fault. It’s not their fault. They are doing everything they can to provide for their families, and it’s just not enough. It’s not their fault, but it is someone’s fault, it is someone’s responsibility, there is someone who should be held accountable for the fact that this generation is the first to renege on a compact between generations that we would leave the country better off to the next generation than the one that came before.
And you know who that someone is? It is us. It is us. The world has changed, the nature of work has changed, and we have not changed with it. We have not kept pace, and in too many ways, through our policy failures we have moved the country in the wrong direction.
And the question before us today is whether we continue to barrel down that track towards higher home prices, bigger health care costs, more hunger and greater hardship, or whether we change direction — much too late yes, requiring an even more profound course correction, certainly — but finally steer this country to a better quality of life for all our citizens.
Is this bill that change of direction? Does it lead our country on a new path towards affordability and prosperity? And the answer, the simple, terrible, but clear as day answer is no, it most emphatically does not. No, it does nothing to bring down costs. No, it does nothing to make it easier for your kids or mine to buy a house, pay their rent, buy groceries, afford their medicine, or fill up the car for a family vacation.
Instead, it throws more coal in the engine, barreling down a track to nowhere.
Donald Trump promised he wouldn’t cut Medicaid, but this bill cuts hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid. It is shredding the president’s commitment, made again and again. In January, the President said that Republicans will “love and cherish” Medicaid. In February: “We’re not going to touch it.” Even just a few weeks ago, the President said: “We’re not changing Medicaid. We’re leaving it.”
But we see it in black and white in the text they released in the dark of night, that that simply isn’t true. This bill will result in millions losing their healthcare from cuts to Medicaid. We know that. The Republicans here know that. Tom Tillis has made this point over and over again tonight, as have other Republicans in this body.
This bill will close down hospitals in the poorest counties and states. It raises health care costs for families everywhere and by the thousands of dollars. It takes food away from the hungry. It kills clean energy so we have to rely on oil and gas for everything, enriching that industry and impoverishing the rest of us with higher prices at the pump.
It raises taxes on working families and the middle class while lowering taxes on the very wealthy and corporations. If you are in the top 0.1 percent of income earners, making more than $5 million a year, you will get a $346,000 tax cut. How is that fair? How is that right? And it borrows the money from our kids to pay for that $346,000 tax cut. To pay for the habits of really rich people. Where is the fairness, the morality in that? When is enough, enough?
My father was part of the greatest generation. We, it would appear, are part of the most selfish. And I’m fed up with it.
What happened to any sense of responsibility in this generation? What happened to love of country? Can we love our country if we impoverish it? Can we love our children and grandchildren if we take from them only to give to ourselves? In this bill, we borrow trillions from our kids, and for what, so the rich can have a bigger boat, so corporate CEOs can have more money, so a company can buy back more of its stock, so we can be richer than our neighbor, while his neighbor has no home at all?
“The test of our progress,” Franklin D. Roosevelt said in 1937, “is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
Last week, a landscaper in Los Angeles was tackled to the ground because he was undocumented. He is the father of three Marines. Three Marines. When one of those Marines was finally able to speak to his father after his detention, he had one ask of his son: please go back to the worksite and finish the job. That was his ask. That is the work ethic that has made this country great, not the ethic that brought him to the ground. Raising three Marines, that is the patriotism that has made this country great, not the rancor that beat him while he lay there.
But if this bill is not the answer, and it most certainly is not, if this bill only makes matters worse, far worse, then what is the answer, what direction shall we go, how can we begin to make the country work for people once again?
We can give, instead of take. We can build, instead of tear down. We can recapture once again the sense of possibility in this country. If Eisenhower was part of the generation that won the war and built the roads and highways, let us be the generation that wins the peace by creating the next giant boom in housing in America. Making the investment necessary. Tapping into the great potential of the government and industry working together. Breaking down each obstacle in the way. Millions and millions of new homes that my children can afford, and your children.
Let us build new hospitals instead of closing them down, and in so doing, bring the cost of healthcare down with them. Let us train new doctors and nurses so it is not so expensive to visit them, and new home health care workers to take care of us, even as we take care of them.
Let us grow more food, and feed more people, at home and abroad, and bring down the cost of our groceries. Let us thank our farm workers, instead of chasing them through the fields to separate them from those they love.
None of this is beyond our capacity. It may mean that we cannot afford yet another tax break for the wealthy, or a giveaway to the oil industry, or a giveaway to any other industry and its corporate titans. It may call for some sacrifice on our part, but a fraction of what our parents and grandparents gave to this country.
It means that we pay more attention to our kids and their needs, and less our own. That we once again show concern and compassion for our neighbor and remember that we were once strangers in a strange land. That we show humility about our own achievements and recognize that none of us got here on our own, that all of us can prosper without someone else being made to suffer. You know, the way it used to be. The way it could be once again.
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