McCollum Opposition to H.R. 1, One Big Ugly Bill

Mr. Speaker, Republican’s big ugly, shameful bill is back on the House floor today. 

Congressional Republicans and President Trump are pushing a massive transfer of wealth from American families in need to the wealthy elite of this nation. 

This bill will make devastating cuts to our communities in exchange for massive tax breaks for President Trump, Elon Musk, and their billionaire buddies. 

I will be joining every Democrat in the House and Senate in voting against this travesty.

My colleagues across the aisle who support this bill are voting to cut 17 million Americans off from their healthcare —including 173,000 Minnesotans. 

What will happen when those Americans delay preventive care and treatments they can’t afford because they have no health care? 

The ugly consequences of this bill include tens of thousands of premature deaths a year.

This bill will also force millions more Americans to pay higher premiums, higher co-pays, and higher deductibles for the health care they do receive. Republicans are voting to deliver bigger medical bills to their constituents while President Trump continues to ignore his promise to cut costs for everyday Americans.

And because these cuts weren’t harsh enough for the Senate, they also slashed hundreds of billions of dollars in critical support that keep hospitals and nursing homes open, especially in rural and underserved communities. Roughly one in four nursing homes and hundreds of hospitals are at risk of closure without those funds. Do any of my colleagues really think that their constituents want fewer hospitals and a shortage of nursing homes in their communities?

Another ugly reality of this bill? It will make the largest cut to nutrition assistance in American history, jeopardizing access to SNAP benefits for 40 million Americans, including at least 32,000 of our neighbors in Minnesota.

Millions of children, seniors, people with disabilities, and veterans are at risk of going to bed hungry if this bill passes.

The deeper you dig into this bill, the more ugly, cruel, and completely avoidable consequences you’ll find. 

It weakens our public school system and makes higher education more expensive.

It gives sweetheart tax deals to dirty fossil fuel companies and makes it cheaper for them to extract gas and coal from our public lands.

It attacks our federal investments in clean energy, which will cost over 790,000 jobs over the next decade and raise household energy bills, all while adding to air pollution and worsening our climate crisis.

And even after all that, it will add $4 trillion dollars to the national debt with interest costs over the next decade, saddling future generations with the cost of tax breaks for the wealthy.

Apparently, Republicans are content with continuing to ignore Americans across the country who have flooded our offices with calls and taken to the streets to tell them to keep their hands off our healthcare, our education, and food assistance for our children, our elders, and our neighbors in need. 

They certainly haven’t held the townhalls where they would hear that no one wants them to give $1.3 trillion in tax breaks to the wealthy elite—the top 1 percent—and pay for it by cutting roughly $1.3 trillion from our healthcare and food assistance.

This is not the direction the American people want our country to go.

Mr. Speaker, I am voting no on this betrayal of our values and our constituents, and I will continue to oppose all Republican efforts to take away food, healthcare, and basic government services that Minnesotans rely on.

I yield back.