Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
speaker
863 appearances
57 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 24 Nov
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Oct 2025 with 3.
Appearances
Somebody has to stand up and yell, the emperor has no clothes, and everybody's falling in lockstep on this. Pass the big, beautiful bill. Don't question anything. Well, conservatives do need to stand up and have their voice heard. This is a problem we've been facing for decades now. And if we don't stand up on it, I really fear the direction the country is going.
When March, every Republican, virtually every Republican other than me, voted to continue the Biden spending levels, which are going to give us a $2.2 trillion deficit. Now, if you increase the debt ceiling $4 to $5 trillion, that means they're planning on $2 trillion this year and more than $2 trillion next year. That's just not conservative.
So I've told them if they strip out the debt ceiling, I'll consider, even with the imperfections, voting for the rest of the bill. But I can't vote to raise the debt ceiling $5 trillion. There's got to be someone left in Washington who thinks debt is wrong and deficits are wrong and wants to go in the other direction.
The idea that we're going to explode deficits and the projections are now looking at over $3 trillion in deficits over the next 10 years, I think is just not a serious proposal.
The MeidasTouch Podcast · Senator Tammy Baldwin on Trump Cabinet Disaster Hearings · 25 May 2025
podcast
We've got administrators. We're cutting waste. We're cutting duplicative programs.
We're spending less on administration of those programs.
Many of the grants were terminated because they were grants that were not advanced.
We spend 70% of the world's biomedical research out of NIH. 70%. And we're the sickest country in the world.
And we are the sickest country in the world. So that money has not been well spent. We've had a 38% increase. and our agency, growth in our agency over the past four years.
Well, Ben, let me let me start off by saying I have zero sympathy. Zero. I mean, Mike Johnson, a speaker of the House, he can work to raise the salary of members of Congress. These things are totally unconnected. When you're in this job, you get enormous access to information. I sit on the Armed Services and the Intelligence Committee.
There are people on the Ag Committee that know what's going on with crops and cattle and could use that information to trade futures. I do believe there is somebody that sits on the Senate Ag Committee. I'm not going to name names here, but does actually trade future contracts. for agricultural products. So with this access to information,
I imagine there is a temptation by members of Congress to use this information to gain, to just build their wealth. And that is not right. That's not information that the general public has. I get the issue that Mike Johnson has with the salaries of members of Congress. He is the speaker of the fricking House of Representatives. And he could do something about that.
And I think there should be something done. Folks that have been here for a long time because of inflation, you know, their buying power has been reduced. I'm sympathetic to that argument. So Ossoff and I, Senator Ossoff and I reintroduced our legislation to basically compel the rest of Congress to do what the two of us do.
And that's putting your assets into a blind trust where you don't have the ability to use any of the information you have to make money because of your job. We're supposed to be public servants here. And Senator Ossoff and I take this very seriously. You can also diversify. And, you know, so there's another option there, too.
But we want this to be the rule for all 535 members of Congress in the Senate. As far as I know, it's just the two of us. that have taken these steps in the House. I'm not sure how many people. But this needs to happen. And there is bipartisan support for this.
And I think the second part is really the point, I think. It's the enriching the billionaires. It's making sure that they don't have to pay more taxes if we got if if Donald Trump's 2017 tax cuts went away. And these are the guys that are supposed to be, you know, the fiscal conservatives.
They're going to add trillions of dollars of debt, you know, to the well, to the deficit and to the ultimately to the national debt in order to give money. put more money in the pockets of rich people. The cruelty part comes in where they're trying to make it not look so bad. Instead of adding six trillion, it'll be only four trillion. So they can feel a little bit better about it.
But to do that, they're going to kick people off their health care. and kids aren't going to get meals. I mean, that's the cruel part, is hungry kids are going to continue to go hungry so rich people can pay less in taxes. And I'll say this, Ben, you know, I had some teachers in here today with some kids from schools in Arizona. And
These teachers pay a higher percentage of their income in federal taxes than many, many billionaires and millionaires. I mean, Warren Buffett is a guy who pointed this out all the time. The secretary paid a higher percentage of taxes than he did. And I think that is that that's true. And it's a problem. And we got to fix it. They're doing the opposite thing here.
They're making this situation worse.
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