During an "Ask Me Anything" event on Wednesday, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) took questions from voters.
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00:00Well, it's great to be with everybody. Thanks for joining us. And it's good to see my friend
00:05Ron Wyden. But why don't we just jump right in. So Jen from Facebook asks,
00:14will these budget cuts affect me even though I live in a blue state? Well, the answer is yes,
00:22absolutely. This is national legislation that will impact everybody in the United States and
00:28will harm everybody in the United States. And the whole idea here is to provide very big tax cuts
00:35to billionaires and very wealthy people at the expense of everybody else, regardless of what
00:41state you live in, red state, blue state, purple state. It will hit everybody because the reality
00:50is that when you cut, for example, Medicaid or food and nutrition programs, that impacts people,
00:56harms people in every state. So this is a very bad news bill. And again, on top of the cuts that will
01:06be made, it's also going to dramatically increase our national deficits and debt. The Congressional
01:12Budget Office, which is a nonpartisan entity, they're kind of like the umpire in the baseball
01:17game. They call balls and strikes. They said that this would increase our debt and deficit by $2.4
01:24trillion just over the next 10 years. And in the process, they indicated that about 11 million
01:32Americans will lose access to affordable health care. So you can see the choices that Republicans
01:39are making. It's part of this reconciliation bill. So we have another question from Cyan Bloom's
01:48audience question. The current funding bill impacts IDEA funds originally meant to support children
01:56with disabilities. What are you doing to protect children with disabilities? How are you organizing
02:01with your fellow congressional colleagues to flip votes against this bill in the Senate? There's
02:08absolutely no doubt that the Republican bill will do dramatic harm to individuals with disabilities.
02:17The primary way it will impact them is through the Medicaid cuts, because Medicaid is a program
02:25that definitely benefits individuals with disabilities. Their main, three main categories of people who,
02:32who are, who Medicaid is important to, are number one, seniors in nursing homes, number two,
02:39individuals with disabilities, and number three, you know, lower income families who can't afford
02:46health insurance. And so when you go after those programs, you are, according to the Congressional
02:54Budget Office, hitting about 11 million Americans who are going to lose access to that care. With respect to
03:01IDEA funds, this is a program that has fought for my entire time in public service. In fact,
03:09IDEA is already underfunded. What do I mean by that? I mean that current law that was put in place a long
03:17time ago promised that the federal government would pick up 40% of the costs of IDEA. As we speak here,
03:25the federal government's only picking up about 15, 16% of those costs. So I've introduced legislation
03:31that would mandate full federal funding of IDEA. That's really what we need to do, as opposed to
03:40this legislation, which together with the Republican budget, will do great harm to IDEA, including the
03:48budget. Next question, Jeremy from Instagram, what's going to happen to EBT, electronic benefit transfers?
03:57So what they do is they do go after food and nutrition programs. They cut those very dramatically,
04:06about $200 billion, $300 billion in cuts. What that means is that families who obviously need access to
04:17the programs just to put food on the table, these are people who are living paycheck to paycheck,
04:21will be hit. And I should say that a lot of people are going to be hit multiple times by these cuts,
04:31right? So for example, if you're somebody who's had their healthcare taken away, you're also going to
04:38have less support from the SNAP program, the food and nutrition programs, and you're also going to be
04:46hit by their efforts to take away, for example, the LIHEAP program, which is a program designed to help
04:52people with their energy bills. So this is going to hurt people across the board. In terms of the
04:59electronic benefit transfer, I don't know if this has any specific impact on that mechanism. But what I do
05:08know is that it will do you a lot less good to have EBT if you no longer have funding for the SNAP program
05:17to begin with. So we have a question from Sawyer Hackett's audience. What part of the bill is no
05:28one talking about, but people should know? That's a good question because there are so many bad things
05:35in this bill. I do want to mention one provision that's gotten a little bit of attention,
05:41but not enough, which is they snuck into this bill a provision that essentially would prohibit
05:48judges and courts from enforcing decisions in the event that the Trump administration doesn't comply
05:58with a court order. So for example, if you defy a court order, judges should be able to sanction
06:07the Trump administration lawyers, but they've essentially taken away funding that would allow
06:14you to do that. Now, we strongly believe that that violates the rules in the Senate regarding the
06:20reconciliation procedure. We strongly believe we will be able to take that out, but it is important
06:27to realize the lengths to which they will go to try to prevent courts from holding the Trump
06:35administration accountable. Another provision like that would actually put a 10-year moratorium on any
06:42state regulation of AI. Again, this would be, in my view, a big mistake. We need to establish some
06:52rules of the road at the national level on AI, and if you prevent states from doing it, you take off
06:58the pressure of doing this at the federal level. So those are a couple of provisions that haven't
07:05gotten a lot of attention, but we hope to be able to get rejected out of the bill through the process in
07:11the Senate. We're going to the next one. So Rachel Bender's audience, will it affect education or school
07:23budgets? So this particular bill, the reconciliation bill, will not directly impact school budgets,
07:35but, and I want to hasten to add, there's a parallel process going on, which is the whole budget
07:45submission from the Trump administration. And if you look at that, yes, you're going to see
07:51significant cuts, unfortunately, to important education programs. And of course, as part of their
07:58plan, they want to literally eliminate the entire federal department of education. So if you look at
08:05these things together, it will dramatically undermine our ability to provide federal support for our
08:12kids' education. And we need to stop both the efforts, their efforts on the budget and also on
08:19the reconciliation bill. Now I'm very pleased to see that my friend is in the room, Senator Schatz from
08:31Hawaii, who's a really essential part of our Democratic caucus, a great leader. And he's going to take over
08:39to answer some questions now. But thank again, all of you for joining us. And thank you for being in this
08:45fight, because we have to remember that back in 2017, when there was an effort to destroy the Affordable
08:54Care Act. It was because people who are tuning in right now rallied. We were able ultimately to defeat
09:00their effort to destroy the Affordable Care Act, but by only one vote in the United States Senate. So
09:06we're going to need to work together to defeat this bill now. And with that, I'm going to turn it over
09:13to my friend, Senator Brian Schatz. All right. Hey, everybody. I just wanted to thank you for
09:24tuning in. And I want to reiterate what Chris just said. Look, I think we can kill this bill.