Representative Adam Smith

Well, the budget fight, the shutdown fight has huge stakes.

And it's really easy to sort of think of it in two buckets.

One is the broader budget, the budget that

that Trump and his Republican friends in Congress have put in place over the course of the last nine months, which, as Hakeem Jeffries says all the time, has been the most devastating budget to health care in our lifetime.

The cuts to Medicaid, the cuts to the Affordable Care Act.

You want to broaden health care, the cuts to food assistance, which obviously impact the health of people across the country.

This budget reflects a set of priorities that doesn't include health.

It is going to put millions of more people off of health insurance.

They won't have insurance and it'll drive up the cost for everybody else.

So and in place of that, they've done massive tax cuts primarily for the wealthy.

They've done a massive increase in the budget for ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, massive increase in the defense budget.

all at the expense of health care for the American people.

So you've got the budget.

And then the second piece of this, which I won't go too far into because it's not directly related to health care, is just the authoritarian way that Donald Trump has run the government.

He has not spent the money as Congress has told him to spend it in a variety of different areas.

And in some places, this has hurt health.

The cuts that he has made to the CDC and the NIH are

The cuts that he has made to scientific research across the country, all unilaterally.

And to my mind, illegally.

The Constitution states clearly Congress has the power to appropriate money.