Sen. Chuck Schumer's push for a full reading of the "big beautiful bill" before a Senate vote was "all about Trump derangement syndrome," former Sen. Rick Santorum said on Newsmax Sunday.
"This is not unusual for the Democrats to do these types of delaying tactics," the Pennsylvania Republican commented in an interview on Newsmax's "Sunday Report." "It's a hissy fit. They're not going to change the outcome. They're just simply trying to delay. And the reason they're trying to delay is so they don't meet President Trump's deadline."
The delay, he added, was "all about creating the image that they're doing everything they can to slow this down and to fight Donald Trump," Santorum said. "And it will do nothing other than to make people stick around on a Sunday and make folks in the Senate work by reading this bill."
Meanwhile, several of the sticking points in the legislation center around Medicaid, but Santorum insisted that the cuts that the bill calls for are necessary to keep the program alive for people who need it.
"We have to start from the premise that the Medicaid program has expanded dramatically over the past dozen years or so, and even more increases, steeper increases in Medicaid under Joe Biden," said Santorum. "They basically blew the doors out during COVID and enrolled just millions and millions of people who, frankly, should never have been enrolled in this program, shouldn't have been eligible for the program."
This doesn't only include immigrants living illegally in the United States, but people who did not meet the qualifications for the healthcare program or were able-bodied and could work, not those who were "living in dad's basement and got signed up to Medicaid," he added.
Medicaid was intended as a targeted program to help those who were really in need, but Democrats have expanded it past its initial borders, said Santorum.
Further, Medicaid is a shared program between federal and state governments, but Obamacare "opened it up" and then later, Biden and Democrats expanded it more, the former senator said.
Now, the federal government "picks up 90% of the cost," he added. "Most of the money that's being spent on Medicaid is being spent not on poor people, not on the disabled, not on the people who really need it, but it's being spent on people who, frankly, are able-bodied and simply aren't working. And this is what the Republicans are trying to get at."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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