Sheldon Whitehouse: “let me thank our Democratic leader for that very kind intro. I will confess that I come to the Senate floor today with a…”

“let me thank our Democratic leader for that very kind intro. I will confess that I come to the Senate floor today with a pretty heavy heart. The effort that we are engaged in right now is going to be extremely damaging to our country. We are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid that are part of the plan here. And we are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid that are coming on top of this tariff madness emanating from the White House that was already estimated to cost families north of $3,000 a year in added costs for the same stuff--average $3,000 per year, per family. And that was before the retaliatory tariffs came back, so that is kind of the baseline. Trump campaigned on lowering costs and the first thing he has done is to raise costs by thousands and thousands of dollars for American families. On top of that, their pensions and 401(k)s got slaughtered. I think it is about $3 trillion in value was lost because of this maniacal tariff effort that gives nobody any confidence about which way we are going to go. Set aside how bad the tariffs are--like the lesson the last time we tried this back in the Depression era--isn't it obvious enough that tariffs harm the economy unless they are precise and intelligent and purposeful and focused, which these are, by definition, not. But just the uncertainty, just the fact that every day it is a different tariff, it is another number.…”