Loading summary
Transcript4 lines
- [00:02]
Unknown Speaker 1
Rural communities are being squeezed from every side, from rising health care costs to crumbling hospitals, from attacks on public schools to the fight for paid family and medical leave. Farmers and small businesses are reeling from the trade war. And now Project 2025 is back with a plan to finish what Elon Musk started. Trump and the Republicans won rural votes, then turned their backs on us. Join the One Country Project for the rural progress summit, July 8th through the 10th. This free virtual event brings together leaders like Senator Heidi Heikamp, Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Governor Andy Beshear, and others for real talk and real solutions. Together, we'll tackle the most urgent issues facing rural America. Register today or learn more@ruralprogress.com.
- [01:01]
Sam Stein
Hey, guys, it's me, Sam Stein, the managing editor at the Bulwark. It is Sunday evening. It's like 9. 00pm I have no life. And so I'm doing this video for you guys. But I'm doing it because a pretty remarkable moment just happened on the Senate floor, relative, I guess, to what we usually get on the Senate floor. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who today, hours ago revealed that he would not be seeking reelection this term, gave a fairly impassioned speech ripping apart his own party's bill, the reconciliation bill, over what he essentially deemed a lie that Republicans have told either to themselves or to voters about what the bill would do with respect to Medicaid cuts. I want you to just take a listen to what Tillis said on the floor and, and then I'm going to offer some thoughts about that on the.
- [01:55]
Thom Tillis
Other side, that between the state directed payments and the cuts scheduled in this bill, there's a reduction of state directed payments and then there's the reduction of the provider tax. They can't find a hole in my estimate. So what they told me is that, yeah, it's rough, but North Carolina's used the system. They're going to have to make it work. All right, so what do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding's not there anymore, when the White House advising the president are not telling him that the effect of this bill is to break a promise? And you know, the last time I saw a promise broken around healthcare with respect to my friends on the other side of the aisle is when somebody said, if you like your health care, you can keep it. If you like your doctor, you can keep it. We found out that wasn't true. That made me the second Republican speaker of the House since the Civil War, ladies and gentlemen, because we betrayed the promise to the American people. Two years later, three years later, it actually made me a US senator because in 2010 it had just been proposed and just anticipation of what was going to happen was enough to have a sea change election that swept Republicans into the majority for the second time in 100 years. Now Republicans are about to make a mistake on health care and betraying a promise. It is inescapable that this bill in its current form will betray the very promise that Donald J. Trump made in the Oval Office or in the Cabinet Room when I was there with finance, where he said we can go after waste, fraud and abuse on any programs put aside.
- [04:07]
Sam Stein
Whatever you think about his bolo tie, it is again Sunday night and, you know, no one's holding these people out as, you know, fashion icons anyway. But the substance of the speech, there he is a Senator being like, the president is misrepresenting what this bill does or he will be betraying the people who he promised he wouldn't cut their Medicaid. And he spoke specifically about the impact that the bill would have on his home state of North Carolina. I think he said something like 630 plus thousand people would lose their coverage under this bill. It's an extraordinary thing to see. Thom Tillis is not a flamethrower. He's, I guess, considered more moderate because the party has moved so far in one direction. But when he came to office, he was a conservative. And here he is on the floor of the Senate just saying that the main policy priority that his party is pushing is built on harming hundreds of thousands of people, that the cuts that they are putting on Medicaid would be in the tens of billions. That people who are voting for this bill, and we expect that they're going to vote on this tomorrow in the Senate, will be dooming their own constituents to a life with, you know, less healthcare options, maybe no healthcare options at all. And that they're doing this after they had promised these very same boaters that they wouldn't do it, that they were not going to cut their Medicaid. Now, like I said earlier, Thom Tillis is not running for reelection. He was endangered because both he was from a relatively swingy state. North Carolina has gone Republican mostly, but it's certainly a top Democratic target. But the real danger was that he would be primaried in the Republican primary because Donald Trump and others have just had it out for him, primarily for things like this. Taylor's over the past couple days has just been enduring a whole slew of angry tirades from Trump on Truth Social. And after his retirement was announced, Trump went on True Social again. And he bleeded. Great news, exclamation point, Senator, in quotation marks. Thom Tillis will not be seeking reelection. The day before, Trump had already said he was going to try to find someone to primary the guy. So the writing was sort of on the wall. So I guess the question is, what do we make of Tillis doing this? Obviously, I mean, there's obviously a lot of freedom that he must feel knowing that he doesn't have to posture for a primary because he doesn't have to run in a primary. And in fact, old colleague of mine, Andrew Desidero, who's over at Punch Bowl News, he caught up with Tills after the fact. And Tills told him he had informed both Trump and Senate Majority Leader John Thune that he wasn't running free reelection last night. And the quote that Tillis gave Andrew was, quote, I slept like a baby last night. So that gets you a sense of the freedom that he feels to now do these things. And he's going to use his time to, I guess, speak some truths. And when he's saying in the well of the Senate, you have been misinformed. You supporting the Senate bill will hurt people who are eligible and qualified for Medicaid. That's him speaking truths. Right. And so, I mean, I guess I applaud that. And yet, I don't know, something about it feels a little off. Tillis made a lot of moves to ingratiate himself to MAGA prior to this. He famously supported Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and kind of threw him a life raft when it looked pretty bleak for the guy. And you just think that, you know, also maybe the play here was to stick it around and see if you could challenge Trump while doing this stuff. Now, I know probably ended poorly. You might have lost in the primary, and maybe this is just the way it should be. But I'm thinking about Thom Tillis right now. I'm thinking about another retirement that was announced this weekend. Don Bacon, a moderate Republican from Nebraska, he said he's not going to seek reelection as well. He's from Omaha. It's the swingy district in Nebraska, Another great opportunity for Democrats to gain office. But here you have two sort of moderate minded people in the Republican Party who basically are just calling quits. And it's hard to not look at that and say, you know, we're in a bad place where people like that feel like they cannot stick around in Washington, D.C. and fight the fight. And certainly they both concluded that they were screwed, more or less. Otherwise they probably would have run. Okay? So that being said, I still apply till us for making the speech he did tonight. It's easy to contrast what he's doing with what a lot of other Republicans are doing. They know fully well the damage that this bill is going to inflict on their constituents, and they know it's going to hurt really bad and they're voting for it anyway. And some of them are just putting their heads in the sand and say, well, these are, you know, the states can handle it. These, these people aren't actually going to get hurt. If they are getting hurt, they're probably, you shouldn't be on the program. Or maybe they're undocumented immigrants. Right? But then you have people like Josh Holly who spent months being like, we can't cut Medicaid, we can't cut Medicaid. And then this bill comes around and he's like, it does cut Medicaid, and I hate it. And I'm going to fight like hell to make sure it doesn't happen in the future, but I'm going to vote for it anyway. And you look at that and you look at Tillis and you just gotta kind of tip your hat, I guess, in the end to Tillis for seeing the writing on the wall, for seeing how bad this bill is, and for deciding that he's just gonna go for it and do what he can with the very little remaining time that he has before this bill passes and the remaining time he has in office and just tell it like it is. And so for that, I suppose I tip my hat for Tillis. And it was something to behold watching him give that speech. Okay, I've talked enough. Hopefully you enjoyed this. Hopefully it was worth the Sunday night video.