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[Page S2898]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Healthcare
Now, Madam President, on healthcare and our friends creating the
Senate graveyard, as well as the abortion bill in Alabama, the House
has passed over 100 pieces of legislation, many of them with bipartisan
support, only to get buried in this graveyard of a Chamber. Leader
McConnell, who controls the calendar, prefers to run it as a
legislative graveyard.
Let's take healthcare as an example, the No. 1 issue the American
people care about. Our colleagues in the House passed a modest bill to
protect families from getting charged more if they have a preexisting
condition. It should be bipartisan, and most Republicans--or many of
the Senate Republicans say they agree with that policy when asked.
Well, we have a bill that does it, and what does Leader McConnell do?
He just deep-sixes it and sets aside another tombstone for his
legislative graveyard.
What about today's House vote on another set of healthcare bills to
protect people with preexisting conditions and help them sign up for
insurance? What is the fate of those bills in the Senate? Will Leader
McConnell sentence them to the same legislative death as all of these
other proposals or will Leader McConnell actually allow us to debate
something of great importance to the American people, to amend it, and
then vote on it? Hopefully it will pass. I believe it would.
What is Leader McConnell afraid of? Is he afraid the American people
will get protection from preexisting conditions? Is he afraid he might
anger some special interest? Is he afraid he might anger President
Trump? We have a higher obligation here.
Instead of debating those crucial pieces of legislation, Leader
McConnell has treated the Senate like a rubberstamp for the Trump
administration's often radical nominees. For 3 straight weeks, we have
only processed nominations, including several judges who are merely
unqualified ideologues or merely unqualified.
This matters. The judges we have heard from are narrow. Many have
offered bigoted remarks in the past, really bigoted. They are not who a
judge should be. A judge is supposed to walk in the plaintiff's shoes
and the defendant's shoes, and then come up with a decision that is
governed by existing law. These people are ideologues, many of them
stooges and acolytes for the Federalist Society. Now we have in Alabama
the most radical anti-abortion bill in the country, inviting a
challenge to Roe v. Wade in the courts. So the effort by the Republican
leader to remake the Federal judiciary into a conservative redoubt has
a direct impact on these legal challenges.
If you ask most of the Republican Members in this Chamber ``Are you
for repealing Roe v. Wade, hook, line, and sinker?'' they would say,
no, they are not or they would mostly be silent; they would be afraid
to answer. Then they vote for judges who want to do it, either
frontally or by various deep cuts. When our Republican friends vote for
these radical, hard-right judges, they are saying they want to repeal
Roe v. Wade, even if they will not say it directly.
So I say to my colleagues, much as you prefer to remain silent on the
Alabama Republican abortion bill, your votes for the hard-right, anti-
Roe judges speak volumes--volumes. I would say the whole impetus of the
Alabama bill is now that we have very conservative, anti-Roe judges on
the Supreme Court, supported universally by the Members of the other
side, they feel they have the boldness to introduce a bill that
actually repeals Roe instead of just curbing it.