LIVE: Senate Democrats Speaking with the Press, 9.24.24

Our last gathering until after November the 5th and we've enjoyed having you attend all of these wonderful sessions. Okay, I want to thank Senator Murray, of course, our great leader on so many of these issues including women's rights. Now, as both parties work to avoid a shutdown, we encourage House Republican leadership to get this bill to the floor and pass it quickly. Time is of the essence. Once the House acts, the Senate will move quickly to get the CR done. I encourage my colleagues on both sides to prioritize speedy passage of the CR. If we work together, stay away from poison pills and partisanship, we can avoid a government shutdown. Now, as you all know, all of this, all of this was predictable and avoidable. The bipartisan CR we negotiated is, of course, what most people expected. A short-term CR, one that does not last six months, free of poison pills, and that honors the bipartisan funding levels we agreed to earlier this year. We're very proud of that. But again, House Republicans have had to learn the same elementary lesson over and over again. In a narrowly divided government, partisan bully tactics, appealing to the extremes, does not work. Didn't work this time. It would have been easier if they had learned the lesson of Speaker McCarthy. He tried and tried to appease the hard right with increasingly severe funding cuts and it ended up all being for naught anyway. Though this is the, though this is the first known case, oh no, got the wrong page. I got the wrong page. We ended up passing a bipartisan CR and radicals then turned on Speaker McCarthy anyway. This time around, it was Donald Trump telling the hard right to shut the government down if he didn't agree, if we didn't agree, to their poison pill provisions. Donald Trump told the hard right, shut the government down if Congress won't agree to his poison pill proposals. It's bewilderingly cynical to see him push for a shutdown knowing the pain it would cause the country. And of course, he should have learned his lesson when he embraced the shutdown publicly in front of Speaker Pelosi and I in the Oval Office, he ended up losing. But thankfully, we're on track to avoid all this mess. Once it's sent over, the Senate stands ready to get to work it to get this bill done quickly. On abortion, as we wait for the House to do their job, the Senate will address, will act today on life-saving legislation to provide basic and emergency care to women nationwide. Last week, we learned the heart-wrenching story of Amber Thurman of Georgia, who died because abortion bans in her state prevented her from getting the life-saving emergency care she so desperately needed. We know just how critical this is after we learned of the heart-wrenching story of Amber Thurman. She died because abortion bans in her state prevented her from getting this life-saving emergency care due to the disastrous repeal of Roe. Though this is the first known case of a woman dying because of a new abortion law, we know it's not the only death, nor the last. To be clear, according to doctors, this was a preventable death. A person's ability to receive life-saving care, including life-saving reproductive care, should never, never hinge on what state they live in. It should be a right. Amber's doctors didn't perform the medical procedures they knew she needed because of Georgia's law. They knew what she needed and how to help legally, but they couldn't perform that procedure, and they had to watch her go into severe septic shock and suffer for nearly 24 hours. Tragically, the intervention the restrictive Georgia law allowed was too late, and her heart stopped during surgery. The last words Amber said to her mother before going into surgery, promise me you'll take care of my son. My heart breaks for her and her family. In her country right now, doctors need to call lawyers to ask permission before they treat a patient. That is so wrong. That's dead wrong. So today, the Senate will act on legislation to help prevent tragedies like Amber Thurman's death from happening again. Today, Democrats, led by Senator Murray, will bring up a resolution that affirms the Senate's position that every person has the basic right to emergency care. It's a simple idea that emergency care should be a right for all. Who could possibly disagree with that? In addition, today, Senator Baldwin will attempt to create a grant program that will assist with travel-related expenses for those seeking an abortion, helping women overcome financial burdens if they need to travel out of their state for life-saving care. I thank Senators Murray and Baldwin for leading on these two important life-saving bills. My Senate colleagues say abortion should be left to the states. What do they have to say about states like Georgia, where abortion laws left to the states got someone killed? Today, Republicans can help us. They can show us they don't think those laws that allowed Amber to be killed are correct. I hope they'll join and vote with us. To say no would be cruel and heartless a message to send to the American people. Senator Murray. Well, thank you. Well, after some completely unnecessary drama from House Republicans, we do now have a bipartisan compromise to avoid a shutdown, and we are working to get it passed in a timely way. And I should mention the path forward, the way a bill can actually get passed, was exactly the way that Leader Schumer and I have been calling for. No poison pills, no bending backwards for the far right. A bipartisan compromise on a fairly straightforward CR, something all sides can agree on, so that we can avoid a government shutdown and negotiate a full-year funding bill in a bipartisan way in order to tackle the many urgent issues that are left undressed. We should all be very glad that we won't have a painful shutdown, but let's also remember the pattern we saw play out here yet again, so that perhaps we can fully avoid another pointless repeat. The simple trick here is just this. If you want to avoid a shutdown, don't focus on appeasing the people calling for a shutdown. It's really that easy. We have shown here in the Senate there's bipartisan interest in writing serious funding bills. Vice Chair Collins and I passed 11 bills out of our committee with overwhelming bipartisan support. Compromise takes time and it takes hard work, but I think it has been proven this Congress many times over that the path of bipartisanship is far easier and far in a way more productive than the dead-end mega-extremism House Republicans keep making their first priority. So I hope once we get this CR passed, we can all skip that drama now, get to the negotiating table, and cut to the chase to write serious, bipartisan, full-year funding bills that can get signed into law. On another important issue, last week I introduced a very simple resolution with Senate Democrats which reaffirms a very basic principle that when a woman needs emergency care, including abortion care, to save her life, no politician should stop her from getting that. But the reality is, in America, Donald Trump's abortion bans are killing women. The reality is that a majority of Senate Republicans actually signed onto a brief to the Supreme Court saying essentially no, we don't think doctors should be required to provide abortion care when a patient's life is at stake. 26 of them, to be exact. Their brief rejected the idea the basic medical reality of abortion as stabilizing care. You should ask every one of them what concrete policy changes in federal law they would support to save the life of a mother whose doctors can't treat her because of a Republican abortion bill. We should all refuse to accept a status quo in America where pregnant women are dying, not because doctors can't save them, but because doctors don't know if Republican politicians will let them. Later this afternoon on the Senate floor, I'll put forward a resolution on emergency care and we'll see if Senate Republicans will join Democrats in saying, yes, women have a right to get abortion care when their life is at stake. This should be the absolute bare minimum. But I want you to know, no matter what, Senate Democrats will hold Republicans accountable for the cruelty of these abortion bans and fight to fully restore the rights Donald Trump ripped away. Thank you. Questions? Yes, ma'am. They played very well. Come on, they won. Go Bills. Who likes the Bills? Raise your hands. Well, no one's getting called on. Look, the bottom line is, uh, Senator, um, soon to be Senator also Brooks is running a great race and she's gonna win. Plain and simple. Yes. Demanding Okay, on the first one, as I said before, and we'll say again, we need a bipartisan, bicameral bill with no poison pills. That's the way to get this done. Um, we've had a lot of Republicans hold up some of the people in a package and we hope we can get cooperation. We need to put these people in office. Yes, bang. It's something our caucus will discuss in the next session of Congress. Yes, yes. It's something our caucus will discuss. Yes. Yeah, we're making good progress on a I legislation in the Commerce Committee in the Armed Services Committee in the his GAC committee, and we expect we're gonna have a nice, robust a I package by the end of the year. We hope we get bipartisan support for that. Things are looking pretty good right now for just that. Yes. But they're kind of good for Texas and Florida. Where do you see the map? We're fighting in every state. We're fighting in every single state. The eight states or 809 states where there are contests right now where we have incumbents or a Democrat has vacated the seat and into other seats as well. Yes. Senate look, as I said, talking about the carve out in the filibuster, we're going to discuss that in our caucus in the next session of Congress. Thank you, everybody.