Cory Booker: “I appreciate the Democratic leader's question. I think that all 100 of us in this body are getting what I have gotten. I…”

“I appreciate the Democratic leader's question. I think that all 100 of us in this body are getting what I have gotten. I can't go to the grocery store. I can't walk my neighborhood. I just did a travel around the country to do what a lot of us elected officials do, and I got stopped in the airport by people who want to tell me stories about a parent with dementia or a disabled child or a child with a rare disease who has seizures. It is story after story after story. There are people who have been writing in to me, some of them on scraps of paper, just to try to tell us: Please--they are not saying don't do $880 billion in cuts; they say any diminution of resources. They live on such a precipice that any diminution of resources would drive their families into crisis and despair. Many of the professionals I am quoting are saying: We don't need to be cutting. We need to be finding ways to extend services to do more. How can we do more? I talked earlier about the fact--and you helped with this, Senator Schumer, when we were battling, many of us, and I know my friend Lisa Blunt Rochester was a leader in the House when we said: Why are so many women dying in childbirth in a postpartum period in America? It is shameful that we are the worst Nation of all the wealthy nations, and that is for us as a whole, but for Black women, it is almost four times as much. So what do we do here, Chuck? You remember this. Excuse me. Senator Schumer, what do we do here?”