Title: Call Your Senator: Sen Gillibrand on Trump's Big Bill

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Coming up later in the eleven o'clock hour, it's 10:56 right now, we're going to do our Last membership drive 10 question quiz with membership drive prizes. Today's theme is going to be Name that Tune with music clips pulled from our 100 Years of the Billboard Music Charts. 100 Years of 100 Things segment that's coming up a little later in the hour. Get ready to play Name that Tune if you want.

First, as we've been reporting, the House of Representatives passed the president's massive tax cut, spending cut, and borrowing bill at around seven o'clock this morning after another all nighter. It also increases spending on some Republican priorities. It now goes to the Senate where it will likely get another real debate. We'll talk to Sen. Gillibrand in just a minute. To catch you up a little bit, since this is all so new, as the New York Times describes it, the legislation would slash taxes, steer more money to the military and border security, and pay for some of this with cuts to Medicaid, food assistance, education, and clean energy programs.

The Times says the bill adds significantly to federal deficits and to the ranks of the uninsured. The Times also notes some last minute changes and additions. We've been looking for those things snuck into the bill in the middle of the night since they were up all night several nights this week when you probably weren't paying attention. They include this culture war item, expanding the ban on the use of Medicaid funds for gender transition measures like puberty blockers, hormones, and surgical procedures. Here's the expansion.

The Times says it was expanded to include adults, not just children and teenagers. It's the children and teenagers who've been at the point of the spear of people opposing that kind of thing. Now they're saying, "No. Adults, you can't get the funding for it either." Also, a faster phase out of existing tax credits for low carbon electricity has been added to the bill, but the timeline is reportedly much more flexible for new nuclear plants.

There's an item in this bill that the president is calling what else, "Trump accounts" $1,000 for bonds for each newborn who is eligible during his term. It all now goes to the Senate. New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand does join us for her monthly appearance on the show. Senator, thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Sen. Gillibrand: Thanks, Brian. Appreciate you.

Brian Lehrer: First, your overall reaction to the bill is passed by the House. I gave some details there.

Sen. Gillibrand: Well, it's a horrible piece of legislation for New Yorkers. It is a giveaway to the wealthiest Americans and at the cost and at the harm of regular people. It's going to cut 40 million Americans off of healthcare. It's going to be about $1 trillion of healthcare cuts. That's going to be children, people with disabilities, seniors who can no longer get access to Medicaid. About 5 million people won't have the benefits that we had with the ACA, the Affordable Care Act tax credits. It's going to cut food assistance, something that I care deeply about.

I just spent time on Mother's Day volunteering for In God's Love We Deliver, which is one of the best food organizations to help vulnerable seniors who are homebound or people who are sick who are homebound, getting food, and we're going to cut about 11 million people off of the SNAP program and it's going to cut over $300 billion out of those budgets. That's just some of the top lines of the horrific things in this bill. It just harms the people who we have government and safety nets to protect because they will either go hungry or they will not be able to survive because they don't get access to healthcare.

Brian Lehrer: Do you think the effects on your constituents around New York would be any worse than for those in some other states? We know Trump has in the past tried to punish states that didn't vote for him.

Sen. Gillibrand: Well, I think it will have a significant impact on New York because we have a lot of Not for Profits that help these individuals, things like Meals on Wheels. We have organizations that are providing this care, but a lot of them are funded by federal money. Because we are a thoughtful, generous state and because we do a lot of outreach, I think these organizations that are doing the hard work are going to be defunded, and so they won't have the resources to do the help that they need. I think a lot of people will be harmed deeply in New York.

I don't know the relative impact on other states, but I just know all the organizations that have been doing this work will not be able to get the resources they would normally get from the federal government.

Brian Lehrer: Now this House-passed bill goes to the Senate. Are there some changes you think Senate Republicans are likely to make that you would like because they're not as hard line as House Republicans?

Sen. Gillibrand: I think that's generally true, Brian. I've already heard several of them just really oppose cutting Medicaid or making these broad-based cuts, but at the end of the day, the Republican Party is going to do what President Trump wants. That's been the most disappointing thing about even Senate Republicans, that they've really failed to stand up to Trump. They've not shown spines. They've not shown that they will take the heat of MAGA, of President Trump if it's harming their constituents. When they do stand up, it is so few and far between, but those are the only bright lights of resistance that I've seen. It's really shocking how much they will go along with.

They say they're going to oppose it. They may fight about what parts they're going to approve, but mark my words, they will approve this in some version, and it will be devastating to families who don't have enough food to eat, to people who need healthcare and can't get access to it, for millions of Americans who will really lose the safety net that they have that keeps them alive.

Brian Lehrer: I see that you announced a bill to require insurance companies to at least cover all costs associated with childbirth. I see it's bipartisan with Senators Hyde-Smith and Hawley. Want to tell us about that, and if you see that in the context of these other safety net cuts that are coming down?

Sen. Gillibrand: That's something that I hope we can pass as a standalone bill. Because if President Trump continues to go on and on about wanting American women to have more children, well, then he has to make sure they actually survive childbirth and be able to afford the essentials of giving birth. I can't tell you how many things you have to buy when you have a baby. I don't know, Brian, if you have kids. When you have children, you have to buy the right car seat for the size of your child, and it's not the same car seat their whole life. You're going to buy several different car seats to meet their size. These are real expenses that families have to meet.

Diapers are extremely expensive. A pack of diapers is like $15. You can't not give your child a diaper. It is just very, very expensive. If you aren't able to nurse, the price of formula is over $5 a day. It's very expensive to feed a. It's hard. This bill would give a $3,000 tax credit to people to be able to afford their basic necessities for when they give birth.

Brian Lehrer: At least when they give birth. My kids are past that point now. We had car seats, but mostly we had subway friendly strollers. Along those lines, what do you think about the so called "Trump Accounts"? $1,000 bond for each new baby born in the US whose family is eligible. That's in this bill. Do you like that idea?

Sen. Gillibrand: Yes, I don't know the details of his idea, but it was something that I supported over the last several years. It was a bill originally written by Cory Booker. We call our bill "Baby Bonds" and it was for low-income, at risk, disadvantaged families to be able to put a certain amount of money in interest bearing account so that when they got to high school and was hopefully going to college, they would have the resources to pay for college. I don't know what Trump's version of this is. I don't know if it's just $1,000 tax credit or a giveaway. I don't know what form it takes.

Giving resources to families is very important and we shouldn't be paying for this massive tax giveaway to billionaires on the backs of working people. It's going to be a lot more harm than $1,000.

Brian Lehrer: We've covered this for years with your colleague Sen. Booker. Cory Booker's Baby Bonds. He ran in the Democratic primary for Senate against that in one of the recent cycles. They should be called "Booker Bonds," if anything. Of course the President has renamed them "Trump Accounts." I want to play a clip of one of the two Republicans in the House who voted against this bill and it was on the basis of the deficits that they would increase. This is Thomas Massie from Kentucky.

Thomas Massie: Under the taxing and spending levels in this bill, we're going to rack up, the authors say, $20 trillion of new debt over the next 10 years. I'm telling you it's closer to $30 trillion of new debt in the next 10 years. Mr. Speaker, we're not rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic tonight. We're putting coal in the boiler and setting a course for the iceberg. If something is beautiful, you don't do it after midnight. I oppose this bill.

Mr. Speaker: Your time has expired.

Brian Lehrer: Republican Thomas Massie of Kentucky. How concerned are you, Sen. Gillibrand, about the deficits in the bill, or how would you characterize them?

Sen. Gillibrand: I'm very concerned. This puts $3.8 trillion onto the federal debt. It's a huge problem and it is just literally creating costs. When you have a debt that's as high as it is today, you have a monthly cost of several billions of dollars that you owe to your debtors because you are holding so much debt. Those billions of dollars, whatever our monthly debt is right now, is money that you can't spend on healthcare or education or job creation.

Brian Lehrer: Are the deficits so big in the bill because the tax cuts are so much larger than the spending cuts?

Sen. Gillibrand: Correct. The tax cuts are so much larger than the spending cuts in this bill, which is why it's adding $3-point trillion to the debt.

Brian Lehrer: What would you do about taxes if you had more power?

Sen. Gillibrand: I think for New Yorkers, I support middle class tax cuts. I think it's really important that people who work hard every day have more of their own money in their pocket. I don't support tax cuts and tax giveaways for the largest wage earners. Because if you're earning tens of millions of dollars, billions of dollars, you don't need tax cuts. You have more money than you will ever need in your lifetime. Society expects that we all care about one another and we make sure we have the infrastructure we need for society and commerce and the economy to work, and that's what taxes pays for. I would not support tax cuts for people earning more than $1 million.

Brian Lehrer: I want to ask you about a couple of things that might be in this bill that are not exactly budget items. A listener is asking about one that I haven't seen. Maybe you could tell me if this is actually in the bill. A listener writes, "This bill stops funding for federal judges to enforce contempt charges," and asks, "Is that as bad as it sounds?" Are you familiar with that? Is that a real thing?

Sen. Gillibrand: I haven't seen the bill yet, so I don't know if that's in there. I will look and find it and let you know, but that would be very outrageous. It'd be just more of the cynical type of cuts they've been making for the last several months. We know when they cut all NIH grants, when they cut all research for cancer, and all these other important investments that we make as a society, it just harms people. Cutting early childhood education and cutting access to summer and meals at school. These are just the simple things that they literally keep defunding. Cutting the access for the personnel at the VA or the Social Security Administration. This is more of the same.

I will look at the bill today and try to see if that is in there. Again, that would just be another example of a very cynical political type of cut that's very unharmful.

Brian Lehrer: What are you focusing on right now mostly, if there are some things with respect to democracy itself? I see the Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem, testified that habeas corpus is about the president's rights, not the rights of the accused, as everybody ever has understood habeas corpus. We still have the academic freedom issues they're pressing against many universities and other things. We've talked so much on this show, and you and I have talked in previous months this year about democracy being at stake. What are you focusing on in that lane?

Sen. Gillibrand: I do think our democracy is very much at stake. President Trump has created a constitutional crisis because he does not want to enforce court orders. This is going to come to a head. The Supreme Court told him, particularly in these immigration cases, that, "You may not disappear people, you may not deport them without any access to the courts or any access to defend themselves." Right now, these issues are coming through the court system. We have been winning almost all of our court cases when it comes to constitutional rights. Unfortunately, President Trump continues to skirt the law and pretend he didn't hear the order, or didn't turn the plane around, or didn't do the things he was supposed to do.

At some point in the very near future, the Supreme Court's going to have to decide if they're going to enforce their rulings and whether they hire the US Marshals to go do it or they tell Trump he has to pay fines, I don't know. This is something that I'm watching very closely. The other thing that I'm very concerned about is that he continues to subvert the balance of power in the Constitution by taking away Congress's role. Every time he cuts NIH funding, or stops funding programs that we care about, like Head Start or Meals on Wheels, that have already gone through the appropriations process and is something that the bipartisan Senate and House have approved, he's violating the balance of powers within the Constitution.

Our attorney general, other attorneys general across the country have been filing suits. We filed over 100 lawsuits, and unfortunately, or fortunately, we've won about 25 of them and we've only lost a handful. We are just going to keep pushing these cases. He can't ignore the Constitution and the rule of law, which he just continually wants to do. There's a myriad examples of how he's doing that, like small ball things, like we created a cyber academy, and we have kids who are going through this school and are supposed to be hired by the DOD as civilians and cyber careers while the hiring freeze at the DOD is making it impossible for these kids to get their first job and they're just waiting.

Again, they're very small, but it's everywhere in every part of government, and you just keep getting presented with president undermining Congress's role and the work that we've been doing to help our citizens, and he keeps subverting it. It's very challenging because every day is something new, another program or safety net being decimated. You remember we talked about the fact that he told people at Social Security they weren't able to answer the phones, so no phone service. Well, if you can't have your Social Security check and you can't find it, how do you-- You can't go to a Social Security office necessarily, especially when he's closing them. All of these issues are part of this constitutional crisis he's put us in and undermining our fundamental rights in this democracy to be represented, to be heard, and to have the power of the purse be in Congress and not in his hands.

Brian Lehrer: Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, we appreciate that you come on once a month to answer my questions and those of listeners, thank you for today.

Sen. Gillibrand: Thanks, Brian. Appreciate you.

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