10.22.25

Sen. Murray Joins Sen. Merkley During Landmark 20+ Hour Speech, Calls Out Trump’s Authoritarian Power Grab

  

***WATCH floor remarks HERE***

  

Washington, D.C. – Today, on the 22nd day of the Republican shutdown, U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), Vice Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, joined Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) on the Senate floor during his twenty hour-long and counting speech sounding the alarm on how President Trump is acting like a king, following an authoritarian playbook, and seeking to control more aspects of Americans’ lives.

  

The exchange between Senator Murray and Senator Merkley, as delivered on the floor today, is below:

  

“I see the Senator from Washington state is on the floor, and I would be very happy to yield to a question,” Senator Merkley said. 

  

[RINGING THE ALARM BELLS ON TRUMP’S ATTEMPTS TO CONTROL AMERICANS’ LIVES]

  

“I thank the Senator from Oregon. And first, let me just commend you for what you are doing here, throughout the night, throughout today, calling attention to a really critical issue in this country,” Senator Murray replied.

  

“So many people come up to me. And you know, because we go back and forth to the West Coast all the time, how many people walk up to us and say, ‘What can I do about this?’ And each one of us has to say, here’s what I can do.

  

“And I want to thank you for doing what you are doing today, because you’re going above and beyond to point out to people that, as your chart says, authoritarianism is here and it is here now, and we can ignore it or we can speak out. And you have spent all night long, all day, standing on your feet, and at, I’m sure, great personal sacrifice, to fight for everyone in this country and to sound the alarms you’ve been talking about. And so I just personally want to, want to thank you.

  

“And I want to reiterate something that you have said for all of these hours and actually many times to me over the past few months, the fact that Trump is using his place in government to control every aspect of our life. Whether it’s what our schools are teaching or not teaching, it’s whether or not he’s prosecuting his enemies, which he is doing, it’s cutting off projects and funding to punish the political opposition.

  

“And as you and I both know, we represent ‘blue states,’ but we have a lot of red counties and cities and neighborhoods, and even within all of our blue districts. And you can’t just randomly say ‘I’m hurting blue without hurting red,’ because these are all Americans. But he is using his power to do that.

  

“We are seeing him, as you know well, in your home state deploying troops to intimidate Democrats. And I listened to you late last night talk about what is happening in Portland. And the misuse of this kind of power should be frightening to every single American, and we need to stand up and we need to call it out, which is what you are doing today. And even dictating what late night TV hosts is doing is part of this whole picture that you’ve been describing.”

  

[TRUMP TRAMPLING ON CONGRESS’ POWER OF THE PURSE]

  

“But I came to the floor today as your partner on the Appropriations Committee,” Senator Murray continued. “We serve on that together, and we all know in this body how important that committee is, because we decide where the funding is going to go in the country. Now I’ve been out on this floor, I’ve been at home, I’ve been everywhere talking about the power of the purse, which sounds kind of like this quaint little phrase, but it is really important for anybody who has a family. You know that the person who writes the checks in the checkbook decides where the money is going to go? Well, that power of that checkbook, that power of the purse, it is, as it is called, lands in this side of the aisle, on this side of the White House and Congress, we have the power of the purse. Why is that? Because we represent our constituents from across the country. I from Washington State, you from Oregon, people from Illinois and Alabama and Florida all come here to be a voice for their constituents on where their taxpayers’ [dollars] are going to go. And within this country, the power of the purse means we have the ability to decide where the money is going to go, because we represent our constituents. That’s what they call on us to do, and I am seeing Trump doing an all-out assault on Congress’ power of the purse.”

  

“So, I wanted to come here today and ask you your thoughts on how this President is undermining the power of the purse, and how it plays into your ringing the bells about authoritarianism?” asked Senator Murray.

  

Senator Merkley responded, “Ringing the alarm bells for the authoritarian power of the purse is one of those fundamental ways that, in fact, the President is concentrating his power. The difference between a democracy—in a democracy the legislature says, ‘here are the programs, here’s how we want to run them, and here’s how we’re going to fund them.’ And it brings together the collective wisdom of a large group that comes from every portion of the nation, like we do here our 100 Senators from 50 states. And we not only bring our geographic differences, we bring our life differences and our life skills and all of that helps us form a pretty complex set of decisions about the programs that need more support because of the challenges we’re facing as a nation at that moment and those that can do with less support. And that’s our responsibility. But all those voices together are just so central to that.

  

“In an authoritarian nation, all of that responsibility—design the program, fund the program, choose whether the program will happen—it’s all transferred to the executive. So, we’re thinking authoritarians over here, power of the purse with the executive, democracy over here, power of the purse of the legislature. So, Russell Vought, the current head of OMB, he’s a well-trained, clever man, and he’s saying, ‘Well, let’s see how we can actually take the power of the purse. You passed a bill for fiscal year [20]25 and now we’re in. Now we’re not now, we’re no longer in fiscal year [20]25, but let’s say we were, ‘Hmm, well, maybe I can just slow off the funds for the programs I don’t want to fund. That way, the decision is transferred to the executive. Maybe I can freeze them, maybe I can impound them, basically permanently take them off the table, see if I can get away with that. Maybe I can send over a request to have Congress formally undo the programs that they have funded,’ and they did send one of those over, and it was voted and needed a majority vote in both chambers. But the problem with that is, you have a bipartisan vision to serve the entire depth—this job to me is representing the geography of the United States, to serve the entire breadth and depth of our nation with all of our differences, and then on a partisan basis, meaning half the room, they decide what programs to cut. And that means a deal was done in the beginning between Democrats and Republicans, and then it was undone, and the programs that were cut were the programs by and large the Democrats had advocated for. How do you do the next deal in that situation? And then we have Mr. Vought saying, ‘Hmm, what I’ll do is pretend I’m going to spend it, but then in the last 45 days, I’ll send a notification that I’d like Congress to undo it, but there is a waiting period, so therefore I know what I have done is set it up so that before those 45 days are out, the end of the fiscal year comes, and that bucket that goes to that program goes poof into thin air.’ And that’s the fancy term he’s used for the pocket rescission. And so here, we are saying to our Republican colleagues: if you’re negotiating in good faith to serve the interests and concerns that all 100 senators bring here, that a bill forged in that bipartisan manner can only be undone in a bipartisan manner. And we do rescissions in a bipartisan manner. We do undo funding. We take one year two, year three, year funding that turned out not to be needed or better spent elsewhere, and we pull it back and we put it into a different program, but we do that readjustment in the same bipartisan way we did the initial program,” Senator Merkley continued.

  

“So, we’re saying to our colleagues across the aisle, if the power of the purse means something, and it does—the difference between an authoritarian government and a democracy, then work with us to defend our Constitution. Defend that what we have done together cannot be undone by the executive. And so far, we have not received a ‘Yes, we will defend the Constitution.’ And what I hear is mainly, ‘Yeah, President Trump would never go for that.’ When you hear that, you know you’re trapped in an authoritarian because the vision of our nation is that we the Congress will forge these programs and decide how to fund them, how much and when it’s like, ‘Can’t do that, because Trump would be upset,’ well, that just confirms we are in authoritarianism now, and it’s not just the power of the purse, of course, it’s an attack on due process. It’s an attack on free press. It’s an attack on the freedom of speech. It is the weaponization of the Department of Justice. It is the ignoring the laws that apply to the executive completely, like firing all the IGs, getting rid of all the referees. In the book that I really spent the night trying to use as a framework in order to say, ‘Hey, experts who have studied how democracies die—they don’t die with people with guns anymore. They die when people get elected, and then they follow the authoritarian playbook on how to basically undo the checks and balances and amplify the power.’”

  

[NATIONAL GUARD DEPLOYMENTS IN OREGON]

  

“And another piece of that that we should be very concerned about in the Northwest right now, more in Portland, but who knows what happens in Seattle, is trying to carve a path in which Trump has court decisions that say he can put troops into the street whenever he wants, and that is a massively dangerous amplification of authoritarian power. And that’s why what we do this year makes such a such a difference that we have to protest and say, ‘This is not normal.’ We have to ring the alarm bells. We have to praise the 7 million people who got out there and said, ‘No Kings’ in the United States. And that’s such a beautiful, short way of saying, ‘No authoritarianism. We want our republic back, and we’re willing to fight to make that happen,’” Senator Merkley said.

  

“That’s what you’re doing. And I thank the Senator from Oregon, for all he’s been doing for so long—for so many years, but especially for the last 20 plus hours that you’ve been on the floor, many, too many hours on the floor—reminding us all of why this is so critical,” concluded Senator Murray.

  

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