During a town hall on Monday, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) spoke about House and Senate Republicans' budget proposals.
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00:00I'm going to mention two specific things in case they don't come up during the questioning.
00:13The first is reconciliation, which is the process through which the Republicans and the Trumpsters can jam stuff through without us being able to stop it in the Senate with a Democratic filibuster.
00:27And we're in the middle of that process, and it's the dangerous process that allows them to do things like slaughter Medicaid,
00:36which covers a third of Rhode Islanders, half of Rhode Island's children, 60% of nursing home folks in Rhode Island,
00:44many of the childbirths of women and infants.
00:48So you've got to watch that process very, very carefully.
00:52Where they are is that they have really got themselves in a difficult situation.
00:59They have passed budget numbers for various committees to instruct them to come back and send in the actual laws that will get rid of Medicaid and do other bad things.
01:11And they couldn't even agree on the numbers to send to the different committees.
01:16So the House is sending one set of numbers to House committees, and the Senate is setting another set of numbers to Senate committees.
01:23That has never been done before.
01:25And in the Senate, they bypassed the parliamentarian because they don't think what they're doing is actually lawful.
01:32So what they're headed for is a pretty serious collision where the House and the Senate haven't agreed on the numbers.
01:39They haven't agreed on the language that they're going to have to draft to do all this damage.
01:43They have tiny margins of four in each House, and they have a parliamentarian who's probably going to rule them out of order,
01:50which means that they'll probably then have to overrule the parliamentarian, the so-called nuclear option,
01:56all of which puts immense pressure on the Republicans who have over and over again said they don't want to do those things.
02:04So watch that reconciliation process carefully.
02:07We're going to be putting every possible piece of pressure on these Republicans so that they can't get away with that stuff.
02:16And you being here tonight is a signal and a symbol of what is happening across the country.
02:22And they're seeing it in Republican districts as well, where they can't even have town halls anymore because they've annoyed people so much.
02:30So being here matters. Thank you.
02:37The second thing is that Trump is kind of a dazzler.
02:40He likes to shock and titillate and annoy and outrage because he has figured out that to win the political debate, you can win the narrative.
02:50And to win the narrative, you win the attention wars.
02:53Everybody's always looking at you.
02:55But let's remember that for all of his failings and defects behind him, he has that same crew of creepy right wing billionaires who brought you climate denial,
03:07who brought you a captured Supreme Court and who brought you an American politics polluted with massive amounts of dark money.
03:15That is a baseline that we need to remedy as well.
03:21And the thing I'll close with is watch particularly the climate denial stuff.
03:27This guy saying that climate change is the hopes?
03:31Yeah, not.
03:33What's happening is that insurance markets are starting to melt down where climate change is making life so unpredictable.
03:41Florida is probably the worst.
03:43It's in full meltdown.
03:45That is, you know, in the movies they say preview of coming attractions.
03:48Florida is our Rhode Island preview of coming attractions.
03:52So we're going to keep fighting to make sure that this climate denial stuff stops.
03:57And to get that done, we've got to completely go after this dark money operation that is running.
04:04The climate denial fraud has captured the Supreme Court, riddled our Congress with unlimited dark money spending and all of that.
04:12So we've got the Trump problem, but we also have the creepy billionaires problem, and we're going to fight both of them.