I am honored to accept the Inaugural John and Rita Canning Leadership Award from Northwestern Memorial today. Throughout my time in the Senate, making sure families have affordable health insurance and high quality care has remained on my heart and mind, as has ensuring federal funding for the medical research that makes new cures and treatments possible,

HHS Secretary Kennedy struggled to defend his budget request last week. Why would he want to fund 4,600 fewer research grants? That is 4,600 [potential] cures. Those cuts would extinguish hope for patients, and devastate America’s standing as the world’s leader in medical research.

In the words of the late John Lewis, the right to vote is ‘the most powerful nonviolent tool or instrument we have in a democratic society.’ When Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and then reauthorized the bill in 2006, an overwhelming bipartisan majority supported the measure,

As our servicemembers hang up their uniform, they deserve comprehensive support in helping them transition back into civilian life,

When we invest in education, we help provide students with the tools they need to succeed both in and outside of the classroom,

Families and businesses in rural Illinois deserve to have reliable, affordable energy, and electric co-ops are critical to this goal,

I have no doubt that competent planners in the Pentagon raised their concerns about a quagmire in the Strait to leadership—the question is why their leadership did not pay attention to this sound advice,

There are very real ways that a crisis in any one of dozens of flashpoints in the Pacific could be devastating for our servicemembers, Americans in the region and our economy—and yet, this Administration keeps diminishing DoD’s abilities to prepare for them,

No one in America should experience what my constituent Michael Case endured when he was shot and critically injured simply for performing his job as an Amtrak conductor,

Our ports play a critical role in maintaining Illinois’s status as a major commerce hub,

The need for expansion of clean energy production is critical to help with affordability, generating jobs and protecting our environment as well as secure Illinois’s leadership in the energy sector for years to come,

There is something deeply wrong when Black children in Chicago are far more likely to die from asthma and families in ‘Cancer Alley’ are still living and dying next to toxic pollution—but if these issues aren’t impacting his billionaire buddies, Donald Trump doesn’t seem to care,

It looks like insiders have been making out like bandits by using secret information about the war,

Donald Trump has turned the antitrust review process into a cesspool of corruption and American families are paying the price with higher costs and fewer choices,

I want to be clear: It’s common sense that we can of course protect the president without shoveling millions into Trump’s ballroom in the middle of an affordability crisis,

Your responses to questions about the Administration’s deals with pharmaceutical manufacturers raise troubling questions about President Trump’s failure to reduce drug prices for Americans,

This answer revealed exactly my concern – that TrumpRx is acting as a conduit for Big Pharma to steer consumers to expensive brand name drugs when cheaper generics are available,

You and I discussed the extent to which President Trump has been swindled by Big Pharma, giving them handouts worth billions of dollars in exchange for what appears to be no meaningful concessions for consumers,