Video: Sen. Mark Warner Says the More the “big ugly bill gets exposed, the uglier it becomes”; “if interest rates go up simply 1% more…this $2.4 trillion deficit more than triples”

See below for video and a few highlights from Sen. Mark Warner’s weekly press availability (bolding added by me for emphasis of key points).

• “What’s dominating the news now is that this big ugly bill that passed the House by one vote is now in front of the the Senate, and as we’ve seen the more this bill gets exposed, the uglier it becomes. I guess I was not totally surprised even yesterday when the long bromance  between the world’s richest man and the president looks like it’s finally coming to breakup time, when even Elon Musk went online to attack this bill. Let me tell you some of the reasons why I think this bill needs to not see the light of day and everything I’m going to do to make sure it does not pass. The area that’s probably received the most attention is the health care cuts…There’s been estimates of about 13 million Americans will lose their health insurance from Medicaid; that translates into about a minimum of 250,000 Virginians will see their health insurance just disappear virtually overnight. We’re talking about taking away health care from kids…dramatic cutbacks on Medicaid services for our moms and dads and grandparents who are in nursing homes…a lot of rural hospitals either have to shut down or stop providing services, particularly OB/GYN and and delivery services for babies in wide swaths of of the state…What’s not been focused on as much is that this awful bill as well takes away a lot of the premium support for those small businesses or individuals who go into what’s called the insurance marketplace and buy their insurance directly that way…the more information that gets out about this bill, the more cruel it becomes. And the evidence is overwhelming…we’re doing all these cuts or at least the president has proposed all these cuts to maintain his tax cuts from 2017 and frankly give even more tax cuts to the richest Americans…I don’t think that’s fair, I don’t think that’s right…And again, let’s be clear that’s being rushed through with absolutely no input from the Democrats because it is being done on a totally partisan basis and they want to rush it through before July 4th. I can’t think of uh anything that would be more unAmerican and unpatriotic…Tim Kane and I are working together hand and glove and again, just trying to educate people about how draconian and dramatic this bill’s effect could be on on people all across the Commonwealth…”
• “They put out this absurd list last week that was full of mistakes that, for example, I know there is no Martinsville County in Virginia, there is a small town in southwest Virginia called Duffield, it is not a city; there was community after community that was somehow viewed as a sanctuary community and I know police departments and sheriff departments across Virginia were flipping out because they have worked…in legal ways…with ICE…and to somehow get put on this list and this list is so sloppily put together, I don’t know if it was generated by a bad AI tool or somebody that couldn’t even spell. But as in so many times with this administration, the casual sloppiness, suddenly the list disappears over the weekend when there were so many mistakes made again…I think as we see more and more information come out from an administration that says they’re going to be efficient, this DOGE effort that Musk led, I think at the end of the day will end up costing taxpayers money rather than saving any taxpayer dollars, it’s just been so sloppily put forward.”
• “You have an administration that is now being the opposite of transparent in the intelligence domain…we’ve seen people put forward by the director of national intelligence who claimed she was going to be transparent…her chief of staff has literally been caught trying to cook the books in terms of intelligence conclusions about some of these Venezuelan gangs, literally to the point where the intelligence professional that made this independent assessment got fired because he wouldn’t cook the books. That’s not transparency, that’s undermining the integrity of the independence of the intelligence community.”
• “Or more recently…we’ve seen that some of the independent economic indicators –  one of the things that American governments have always been good at and that authoritarian governments are awful on is we publish real numbers about the state of the economy that the markets rely upon, that the world can count on – we’ve seen evidence recently that Department of Agriculture numbers are being manipulated  because they’re going to predict a recession, and suddenly you’re seeing the politicization as well of economic data. I can assure you one of the signs that is evidence of a move away from democracy is when, whether it’s intelligence is politically manipulated or when actual economic data is manipulated, those are signs of democracies in decline. And unfortunately, because there’s such fear of offending  the president, I believe this is starting to take place at at a scale that’s actually increasing. And I’m going to do everything I can, particularly from the intelligence standpoint, to document this, to point this out and hold individuals who are manipulating our intelligence, hold them accountable.”
•  “…think about this, if you’re a sports team, if you’re losing, what does a loser do? You blame the referee. The CBO is the referee.  I can remember at times and both parties have have been guilty of this; the Democrats sometimes contested some of the CBO estimates. But the notion that this is adding 2.4 four trillion to the long-term debt of our country, I think is actually on the low side, because there are two other factors that just need to be to bear in mind. The whole basic operating premise – and I don’t want to nerd out entirely here…They are changing the entire underlying working assumption and this is going to nerd out too much under current policy baseline acting like these Trump tax cuts, which are another $4 trillion, that they don’t have to pay for any of those. Now again, end of the day, the amount of the debt is going to go up much more than the $2.4 trillion, just because of this accounting trick that they’re trying to use…Another thing that that I think is valid to point out and this is more understandable, we’ve had relatively low interest rates on from a historic basis for a long time. But if interest rates go up simply 1% more than what is baked into this formula, this $2.4 trillion deficit more than triples; that’s how sensitive because we built up so much accumulated debt, now about $37 trillion, it doesn’t take a mathematician to realize if you if average interest on that is four or 5% and instead it goes to six or 7%, with the power of compounding that means the debt is exponentially higher….And when we see the kind of erratic…tariff policy that the president has, that leads to market uncertainty, market uncertainty leads to higher interest rates. So if interest rates simply again go up 1% more, you’re going to see this debt number dramatically increase.”
• “America has been the envy of the world because of our investment in research, investment in science, and it feels like we’ve got a fullout assault on science coming from the Trump administration…for example when it denies the effects of sea level rise…Specifically when we’re talking about this many folks laid off at NASA Langley that has been our premier aerospace research facility in the country, what does that do? It means one that future scientist is probably not going to go want to go work at NASA because there’s not going to be this any kind of job security... I can assure you many of those future scientists can make a lot more money working at a tech company, but they come and work for NASA because of the mission. Well, if that mission is being undermined, that’s going to hurt…Hampton Roads’ ability to be a research community.”
• “I had a national security individual send me photos that came from Google Earth of a lot of our airfields around the country on military bases, and you see our bombers and fighters literally lined up in rows that look very similar to what the Russian airports have. Now I’m not saying we’ve got to put everything in a hanger or rethink how we deploy this aircraft, but I do think we have to realize that what Ukraine is doing is redefining modern warfare; it is showing that who has the most tanks and trucks and planes alone may not be the most successful. What Ukraine was able to do here is really brilliant, and we’re still getting intelligence on this. The fact that they have built these extraordinarily cheap drones, they were able to basically get them into Russia, you know park them by these these Russian air bases and one of them was out in Siberia, literally I think 3,800 miles away from Ukraine’s border, and then in a coordinated effort launch all these drones from these trucks and other vehicles or cabins…and then in many cases have the trucks explode after the fact so the Russians couldn’t get ahold of how this took place, I think this means we need a rethink in America. I mean, the fact that the Ukrainians are creating drones at the cost of a couple hundred dollars, I mean there were basically 2 million drones last year and they’re going to be up to four million drone production themselves, it shows how resourceful they are, it shows that they can still punch above their weight in terms of holding Russia at bay. And I think it again demands that we and our European allies ought to continue to assist Ukraine’s efforts to push back Putin’s brutal aggression…because if we don’t, if we turn a blind eye and Putin is successful…he won’t settle for Ukraine; the next place he will look will be the Baltic states or Poland and they are members of NATO. And do we really want American soldiers…engaged in conflict in Europe? If you allow a bully like Putin to be successful, I’m so fearful that American and NATO troops will be in harm’s way. We need to draw the line…Unfortunately we are still buying way too much old-fashioned hardware and we are still buying even in the drone area, drones that cost $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 when the Ukrainians are out there producing drones that have this dramatic effect at a cost of a couple hundred dollars a piece. We’ve got a lot to learn from what the Ukrainians are doing. But it also reinforces what the vast majority of us in the Senate want to do, we’ve got over 80 sponsors on an increased sanctions bill against Russia and that would really take on those nations who are helping prop up the Russian economy by buying Russian oil. The fact that over 80 senators say ‘let’s stand up for Ukraine’, I really think the majority leader needs to bring that bill to the floor, it is clearly the will of the majority of the Senate to stand with Ukraine and it’s pretty disgraceful that we’ve not had a chance to vote on it yet.”
• “The acting head of FEMA ought to be fired immediately, because as been reported, he didn’t even know that there was a hurricane season in America…He then tried to say it was a joke; well in my mind, it’s a remarkable demonstration of ignorance and if you don’t understand there’s a hurricane season in America how should that person be in charge of emergency relief… So reform yes, but elimination of FEMA and pushing it back all on the states, that sounds good until it’s your community that’s hit. And candidly it would be just one more example of the whole notion…that we are Americans first and we help out our neighbors in California when they have the fire or we help our neighbors in Florida when they have a hurricane and they help us in Southwest Virginia when a hurricane Helene comes around. To kind of put this back on the states’ backs individually, all you’re doing is passing the buck. And frankly for states like ours that can get hit both by hurricanes…as well as the increasing number of storms that come up for example into like southwest Virginia, we would bear a disproportionate burden, it wouldn’t be fair, it wouldn’t be right.”