Providing for Consideration of H.R. National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024
Floor Speech
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Mr. BOWMAN. Mr. Speaker, if we defeat the previous question, we can bring up H. Res. 178, an important piece of legislation affirming the House's commitment to protecting Social Security and Medicare.
Protecting Social Security and Medicare must be a front and center priority of this Congress. We should be doing everything we can and using all of our power to work in a bipartisan way to make sure we protect Social Security and Medicare, as opposed to moving forward aggressively to raise military spending once again where we already spend more on our military and on our military industrial complex than the next 10 countries combined.
The American people need to know the Republican Party is attempting to invest more in war than it is in protecting our seniors.
Some of our seniors--55 million Americans--have been paying into Social Security and Medicare for 50 years, and by 2035, 75 million Americans will call themselves seniors.
We must protect our seniors. They have paid into our system. We must ensure that they have access to healthcare, to housing, to money in their pockets, and to food on the table. We often, particularly my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, seem to continue to marginalize and neglect the most vulnerable people in our society--our seniors included, our children included, and those who live in poverty included.
I represent New York's 16th Congressional District. It is one of the most diverse districts in the country. We have urban, suburban, and rural areas. I am constantly in the community talking to my neighbors. Never do I hear that we should invest more in the military industrial complex than we do in protecting Medicare and Social Security. I never hear those words.
I also want to identify our veterans as another vulnerable group that Republicans continue to leave behind, as not one Republican in the House voted in support of the PACT Act.
I thank the chairman for yielding me this time, and once again, let us do everything in our power to preserve and protect Medicare and Social Security. Let's not let the Republican Party cut it.
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