An intelligent, balanced and reasoned discussion – by Senator Slotkin of Michigan touching on:
1) the looming government shutdown,
2) the hurt our farmers are facing,
3) a national security issue and
4) what freedom of speech really means in our country.

8 minute video:
https://youtu.be/sOSoEbK-ZoQ?si=Iq8xap8BrrArZFXL

Excerpts:
“Looming Shutdown?
As some of you may have heard, on September 30th, the government, the federal government runs out of money. So there is about a two-week period that we have to figure out what kind of compromise we want to get to in order to keep the government open for a few more months or many months.

No one wants a shutdown. But we got to get in a room and negotiate.

I you want to be seriously considering my vote, we got to have a conversation about healthcare. Every single Michigander is at risk of losing their health care or having the price of their insurance, including their private employer provided insurance go up.
So, if we’re going to have a conversation, let’s have it.

Our farmers – and tariffs:
I want to talk about a really important issue related to our farmers and the real struggle that our farmers are going through right now to keep their farms alive. People who are in active farming are worried about inflation, the price of inputs, regulation, all of these things that were already making farming difficult.

Then you have the tariffs. The tariff story that’s going on right now is kind of a sequel to the tariff story that went on in the first Trump administration. Trump put on tariffs back in his first term and in retaliation, a bunch of these countries cut off American agricultural products from their markets. Most important was China. China said to us, “Nope. um we’re mad at you because you put tariffs on our goods and so we’re going to retaliate by cutting off American soybeans from their markets. China said, “We’ll just find other markets.” They went to places like Brazil and no longer bought our soybeans.

So, as you can imagine, the soybean farmers, which are very important farmers across Michigan and across the country, um got into some real trouble. So, what did Trump do in response to um our soybean farmers being in such trouble? He just started writing checks. He created a program, $28 billion worth of a program to write subsidy checks to our farmers.

Now, our farmers don’t like receiving those checks. They want to work. They want their markets open. I have farmers say to me, “We want trade, not aid.” Wwhat we are seeing now in this Trump administration is exactly what we saw before, where there’s retaliation against our farmers because of these sloppy tariffs that the president has put on all kinds of countries in all kinds of ways.

And they’re attacking our farmers in retaliation. And our farmers are already coming to us and saying, “If we don’t have some relief soon, we’re going to again need those subsidy checks. We’re going to need someone to write us cash.” That means the Trump administration is going to go come back and have to find a ton of money, billions and billions of dollars to pay the farmers because of their tariff plan. So middle class Americans are having to pay those tariffs and our farmers are going to have to be the recipient of subsidy checks in order to keep their farms alive.

National security:
The president in August hosted Vladimir Putin in Alaska. He rolled out the red carpet and afterwards we saw the following things happen. Vladimir Putin launched the largest single raid on the capital city of Ukraine, Kiev. He went and hung out with the president of China, Xi Jinping, and attended a big military parade to show their relationship in front of the world. And then in the last couple of weeks, they’ve sent Russian drones over the border of Poland, a NATO ally, and then Romania, a NATO ally, just to test the defenses and see what the United States and what NATO would do in response. All of those things have happened in month and a half since the president welcomed Vladimir Putin.

This is a real thumb in the eye of the president. This is Vladimir Putin saying, “I know I just sat with you in your own country, but now I’m going to do whatever I want.” The president has some options in order to respond to this and to not let Putin walk all over us. There is a bipartisan sanctions bill that would add sanctions on to Vladimir Putin and the Russian government to send a signal that the president and the United States is not going to take Vladimir Putin just doing whatever he wants. Now, why is this important back home in Michigan or in the Midwest? It’s important because the other folks around the world, the other countries, both our friends and our adversaries, watch how we react to someone like Vladimir Putin, and they take notes. They say to themselves, “Huh, I guess the United States is willing to roll out the red carpet and then just be walked over by Vladimir Putin.”

It’s extremely important that we have a clear and consistent policy against someone like Vladimir Putin and urge President Trump to see the global ramifications if he continues to let Putin do whatever he wants.

On democracy:
It’s been a tough few weeks on the issue of freedom of speech. There’s been a lot of debate about which side of the aisle is allowed to say what and then what are the consequences for speech that people don’t think is appropriate or don’t like. And I think it’s important to review: the United States of America has freedom of speech written into our Constitution. We invented the concept that a citizen was free to speak their mind even when people disagree and there wouldn’t be retribution. That was a radical idea when the United States invented it.

But the thing about freedom of speech is that you can’t just take the position that you only like free speech when it’s your side or when someone agrees with you. If you want to be a real American patriot, you have to defend other people’s right to freedom of speech.

We saw problems with this this week. The president has his leader of the FCC, a man named Brendan Carr, who by the way wrote Project 2025. He put real pressure on one of the TV networks to fire yet another late night host that makes jokes about President Trump.

The reason why this is so worrisome is because if we become a country where whoever your whoever’s in power, whichever parties in power can just say, “We don’t like the talk that’s coming out of that person. We don’t like the conversation that’s coming out of that leader or that TV host.” We effectively eat away at one of our country’s most valued assets, which is that freedom of speech.

I’d ask everybody watching to just be honest about it, that we need to be okay with freedom of speech, whether we agree with it or not.”