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COMMENTARY REP. JASMINE CROCKETT Rep. Jasmine Crockett: The GOP’s Big ‘Beautiful’ Bill? Just a Bad Built Blueprint for Billionaires PLAY YOUTUBE VIDEO Original article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njC-7XvS_lQ
Rep. Jasmine Crockett: The GOP’s Big ‘Beautiful’ Bill? Just a Bad Built Blueprint for Billionaires Rep. Jasmine Crockett 346K subscribers ... 461,862 views ... 12K likes Jun 3, 2025 Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett joins Eye on Politics to rip apart the Republicans’ so-called “big, beautiful” bill, exposing it as nothing but a billionaire tax giveaway at the expense of working families. She breaks down the gutting of Medicaid and SNAP, sets the record straight on who’s really paying the price, and calls out Trump’s childish attacks. Jasmine also shares why she’s gunning for the Oversight Committee’s top spot—to keep the GOP’s lies in check and put people over politics Peter Burgess COMMENTARY Peter Burgess \ Transcript 0:00 Democratic Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett of Dallas. Thank you so much and welcome back to Eye on Politics. Absolutely. So, since we last spoke, uh, the House Republicans passed what President Trump calls his quote big beautiful bill, tax cuts, spending cuts. Your reaction? Um, it's a disaster for the American people. And when I say American people, while you just introduced me as a Democratic representative, at the end of the day, when you look at my title, it's just US representative. And this is a disaster for anyone who is not from the top 1%. Um they decided that they would throw a few crumbs in there to make people believe that they were doing something great for them as it relates to the tax side of this reconciliation bill. The kind of idea of no tax on tips and things like that. Um it's more so a game. Um the reality is that we are looking at approximately 14 million people that may lose their healthcare. And last time I checked, most people that are struggling with health care, whether they have it or don't, those bills are usually a little bit bigger 1:05 than the average tax bill. That is for sure. Um, or those people that are relying on things such as SNAP benefits, the amount of people that are going to go hungry. Unfortunately, we have an hunger issue in this country in the first place. And SNAP is literally short for supplemental nutrition nutrition assistance program, right? it is supplemental and the way that the federal government sees that is that $6 a day is enough to supplement you per person and we know in reality that it's not. So the idea that you would go through and you would like gut critical things, things that literally people rely on to live also that say maybe somebody can go and buy yet another jet or another yacht. It just doesn't seem right because it isn't right. This is literally a reverse Robin Hood of literally ste stealing from those that need resources the most and giving it to those that are rich. So, I've heard Republicans say that all the Democrats 2:07 who voted against this voted to raise everybody's taxes. What do you say to that? I I say it's a lie and it's a game. Here's the deal. you had every Democrat lock step recognizing that this was going to inflict harm. Um, and so they voted against it and we know that this was just about taking care of the billionaires. It's a billionaire tax scam. Um, but you also had Republicans that didn't vote for it in the House. You had two Republicans that decided to vote with the Democrats and then you had another Republican that in my opinion most likely they got to and said just don't tank the bill, right? And so that Republican voted present. So you still had three Republicans that didn't vote for the bill. Now mind you, they have a threeperson majority and unfortunately we've lost three colleagues. So that's six people, right, that literally they 3:04 got freebies on. Not to mention, you had two people that missed the vote on the Republican side completely. Now, they're claiming they were asleep or whatever. And yes, we were doing this during the wee hours of the night. And I say that that tells the entire story. In fact, that frames the story. The fact that if it was this big beautiful thing, you would want everybody to see it. You would want to celebrate it. You would want to have it plastered everywhere. And listen, if there's one thing that these people know, they know media. This is why, in fact, that's the only thing they know. This is why this cabinet is full of media personalities instead of people that are actually qualified to do their jobs. But they decided they didn't want to do it in the daylight because they didn't want the American people to see it. And there would be no reason for Trump to have to call them in to the White House to try to twist their arms if it was just so great. So yes, they may have their talking points together, but as we are on recess this week, both 4:00 the House and the Senate, and people are starting to dig through all the things that are in there and seeing some of the fine print, some of the things that they absolutely threw in there. Um, one of the things that hasn't been talked about is the fact that there is there are monies that were put into this bill. So that on average for every ICE officer, there is a bonus of $42,000. So at the same time that you want to potentially give each ICE officer a $42,000 bonus on top of their salary, you have people saying, you know what, I can't afford groceries even with SNAP. Now, we're just going to go ahead and take away SNAP benefits to the tune of $330 billion. What's going to happen to those farmers in rural America, the ones that were trying to plant and plan for people to go out and buy this food? The money doesn't just somehow magically appear because you removed it out of the ecosystem. I want to ask you about the 5:01 Medicaid cuts. Uh because I've asked the Republican members of Congress a lot about this and what they tell me is the growth of the program was just getting out of control. And they say that they wanted to rein it in because people should work. Able-bodied people should be working and they're just getting the benefits. and they want to focus more on pregnant women, lowincome, and disabled. So, what do you say to that? I say that they are really good at spinning it. Um, I'm going to diverge for just a second. All right. The last time we talked, you asked me about Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security. You asked me about SNAP. You asked me about these things. Absolutely. And you told me that they said that the Democrats were not telling the truth. Well, here we are. And at least the House version of the bill has these cuts and now they're having to talk about it. So I say just go and look at their record for telling the truth or 6:04 not. They lied before they're lying now. Okay. It's not true. It is not true. What it is is they have decided that they need to somehow figure out how they are going to um bring in some of the spending. And I say it that way. And the reason that I hesitate is because of this. You dealt with three main committees in this bill. Let me just break it down that way. There's a lot of other comm we all went through our markups, but there's three main committees. You dealt with ways and means that deals with all the taxation, which also is our income. That's where we get our money from, right? So, your income tax rate is determined that way. That's how we know how much money we're going to have coming in. Okay. Then they dealt with the agriculture committee, which is where the SNAP benefits ended up being depleted. And then they dealt with um energy and commerce, which is where they dealt with the Medicaid. And 7:00 they kept saying they lied. They lied. And it was like, 'No, in the House resolution budget or the House budget resolution that was passed when y'all were saying it, like there the only place you could get the cuts is if you went to Medicaid.' They lied and said they're not going to Medicaid. they went to Medicaid, right? And the thing is they are trying to use that to justify the tax cuts that they have built in for the ultra wealthy. But here's the problem, Jack. They still got to raise the debt ceiling because it's not a onetoone. So just imagine that you make $100,000 a year, right? And you're saying, you know what, I'm going to reduce my income. I don't want to make $100,000 anymore. Let's drop this down to $50,000 a year. But my bills, right, my bills were set out and they actually probably were still going over that $100,000 a year, right? But now it's like, well, I got to cut it down so it's not so bad. So they decide, you know what? We're going to go ahead and cut down some of our bills, which is what 8:04 they did. And one of our largest bills is Medicaid. That is absolutely true. So they decided, let us just go ahead and take an axe to Medicaid. Okay, so they did that. But here's the problem. They still have bills that are over the 50,000. So they just didn't want to make it seem like it was that bad. So really true fiscal um conservative Republicans are like, I can't vote for this because you still want to raise the debt seal in$5 trillion. So here's the deal. You ended up cutting everybody off their healthcare. You're cutting people off of access to food. And at the end of the day, you still don't have anything to show for it because you still are like, 'Wait a minute, let's raise the debt ceiling.' So why is it that we're inflicting all this harm? If heck, if we're going to raise the debt ceiling anyway, go ahead and let people have healthcare. But they don't want to do that. And so if they really wanted to be 9:00 serious about this, we would be having conversations about defense and defense spending. And we would talk about the fact that they are now trying to raise the spending in defense to $1 trillion. Every single budget we are constantly pushing up the numbers for defense. But you know who can't pass a clean audit? Defense. They have failed the last seven audits that they've had. Now you tell me if I keep failing audits and I go to the bank and say I need more and more and more. Do you think they're gonna give it to me? They're not. But that's exactly what they're doing and you can go and find more and more of the big dollar items, right? Like right now they've decided to go after something. They went after the penny candy, right? $6 per person for SNAP benefits instead of going after that fancy dress that you would go get from Neiman Marcus. That is what they have decided. So they're like, 'Well, let's get all the pennies together and let's cut a whole bunch of people.' When you could just say, 'You know what? You don't get this fancy dress over here.' That's what they 10:03 should do and that's what defense is. I was just going to ask you, but this is the first time defense spending is actually gone up. It's been cut under the Biden administration. Um, it went up for sure. One of the things that we dealt with when we were trying to get the uh debt ceiling raised before under Biden, but Republicans controlled the House is in that negotiation when we were dealing with the debt ceiling, they decided to deal with the budget itself in that moment, which was really conflating the two issues because they were separate. And one of the agreements was we will raise the debt ceiling so long as you raise defense spend which his budget proposal actually raised it as well not as aggressively for sure and there was a provision if we didn't get if we didn't meet certain timelines that there would be these little cuts and we did miss some of those deadlines. So, I don't know what the net result 11:01 ultimately ended up being, but there was an agreement that actually gave them more and uh gave non-defense less. How concerned are you that uh President Trump has or the White House has said recision cuts are coming? In other words, taking spending that Congress already approved previously in previous terms uh i.e. the uh green energy inflation reduction act uh monies. They're going to resend those. They want to take that money back to help pay for uh presumably uh the tax cuts. Your thoughts on that? I'm obviously against it. Um you know, here's the deal. I have been talking to my cities and my counties for some time actually before he swore in and I knew that this was a possibility because they had been trying to do it. I remember when we were sitting in agriculture and we were trying to get through the farm bill. The farm bill is still uh is behind. We are on year three of being behind right now 12:03 on the farm bill. Um I remember sitting in agriculture and they wanted to claw back a lot of the inflation reduction act dollars that came within our purview then and they were like oh well if we claw this back then we can do this over here. And I was like, 'No, it's been passed into law and these programs are working and so we need to go ahead and do that.' So I knew that if they got even one more lever that that would be a goal. So for me, I'm like telling cities, telling counties, pull down on your dollars. if you had an award of some sort, if you think you wanted to apply for it, pull down on it ASAP and spend that money because, you know, frankly, I don't think that there is very much respect for the Congress as a whole, nor our work. Um because we've seen things as us having fights about empoundment, which is basically this idea that we have already come up with budgets and we have already said that these dollars go to this place or that place and then they just decided nope, 13:02 we're not going to do it unilaterally. Um and really stepping on our territory, right? because we live in a government or allegedly live in a government where we have three co-equal branches of government and we have different responsibilities within those various branches. And so the idea that the executive branch has decided forget what Congress has done. We're going to do whatever we want to. And then when the judiciary steps in and says no, you can't do that. They then say well forget you judiciary. We're still going to do whatever we want to do. People should be concerned regardless of your political affiliation that we have an executive and an executive branch that has decided that somehow it reigns supreme to the other two branches of government. Whether we're talking about spending or whether we're talking about court orders, it is a problem. And this isn't about whether or not you agree. This is about whether or not you agree that we 14:00 live in a democracy where we have three co-equal branches of government. And therefore, even when I disagree with the president, I have to respect the actions that he is allowed to take via the Constitution. And unfortunately, we're not getting that same respect in the other branches of government. But if Congress comes back and decides, if Republicans decide as a block, yeah, we're going to resend that. We're going to take that away. That would be that's still legit. Well, I mean, if they decide that they are going to do it and they go through the proper channels, then yeah, it would be legit. I mean, because that's like any other law, right? You can at any point in time overturn any law that you want to if you go through the process. The biggest issue that we've had thus far with this administration is that they don't like processes and they don't want to go through processes and I don't believe that he necessarily have the votes to overturn some of this legislation. You recently criticized uh the long wait times at the Dallas VA. Yeah. Uh and then the VA secretary, Doug Collins, 15:05 replied to you on X and said what you said wasn't true. So talk to us about this. Yeah. Well, he can just go ahead and give me the receipts if that's the case. All I can do is make sure that I am a voice for the people of my district and if I'm getting phone calls, then I'm going to investigate because that's my job. And as the VA secretary, then his job is to reply to the fact that I actually sent formal um investigatory requests and he needs to answer. I will tell you that if we just decide that we are going to evaluate based on what's saw on social media, I can tell you that I never anticipated that the um shade room would pick up on on this, but they did. And there were stories not only from my district because there were people that were saying, 'Thank you to my congresswoman because this has been an issue for me and my loved one at the Dallas VA, but there were people from all over the country that talked about surgeries that have been cancelled and they have been cancelled because they said that they did not have adequate 16:06 personnel. So my deal is if that's the truth, then prove me wrong. I am here for it. But I will tell you that as a trained litigator, I usually don't ask questions that I don't already have the answer to. So if he's got receipts, I'd love to see him. President Trump himself on another network criticized you and called you a low IQ individual. What was your reaction to that? And what do you say to that? He's such a loser. Um, you know, and I say that and I'm laughing, but I really do believe that he's a loser. Um, because I truly number one can't imagine being the president of the United States, which arguably historically has been the most powerful country in the world. And I'm worried about uh a rising sophomore or a sophomore in Congress. Like, I can't really see me taking up that much air time or space on that person. And 17:04 listen, whenever people start to attack you based on things that are not of substance, that's when you know that you're really getting under their skin and that there is nothing to attack. Because if he really had something of substance to say, then he would say, you know what, this congresswoman has filed for this bill or done this or done that. And so she has no idea what she's doing. He can't say that. anytime that he decides that he wants to lodge an attack against me, it's something like low IQ or or and actually he has a really hard time. Um, now he just says my name. They've got this crocket. This Crockett is what he says, you know, and it's like I for some reason frustrate him and most likely it's because I refuse to back down, you know. I am going to call him out at every chance that I get for anything that he is doing that is not only harming my constituents but harming a lot of the constituents of the Republicans that are going along with this agenda. And I think that it is incumbent upon me to make sure that I 18:05 can educate people and make sure that they understand that the pain that you are feeling, the pain that's being inflicted is being inflicted by him and his administration and that is the reason you're feeling it. I don't want anybody to get confused and believe that Joe Biden has anything to do with the pain that they are feeling. Whether it means that they won't have healthcare, that ain't got nothing to do with Joe Biden. Whether it means that you are struggling to find a job because literally I think just recently a report came out saying that for the first time in maybe three years that um we actually shrunk. I think our economy is actually starting to shrink um instead of growing. If people are complaining because we are entering as some would argue that we are in a recession already, I need them to understand that it's due to his incompetence and when he wants to take a IQ test and challenge me, I am down. Let me ask you, um, Congressman 19:04 Connelly, who was the, uh, ranking member on House Oversight, a committee on which you sit on, uh, as you know, obviously he he recently passed away. And a lot of people are wondering if you are going to run for ranking member or do you have your sight set on higher office here in Texas? I am running for a ranker. Um for sure. I am I am running. Uh we are working on pulling it all together, but um most likely either next week or before my colleagues get back, they will have um what we call a dear colleague, which is a letter um that they will all receive laying out why it is that I believe I am the best candidate for this moment, for this particular position. Um I had an opportunity and I still currently serve as the vice ranker on this committee. um being able to serve under Connelly as 20:02 well as Jamie Rascin and I still have an opportunity to serve under Jamie on judiciary now. But I will tell you that as I was thinking through this as you know, Representative Connley had announced that he was going to step back um I thought about the fact that Elijah Cummings, who used to head the oversight committee prior to me joining Congress, recruited Jamie Rascin for oversight. And Jamie Rascin was a fearless leader last cycle for sure um on oversight and now he's on judiciary. But it was Jamie Rascin that recruited me to come to oversight and I think that there is something special um that you know some of these rankers have seen in people that they literally have recruited. Ultimately, uh, Jerry Connelly was the one that asked me to run to be the vice ranker of the oversight committee, and I was unanimously elected by my colleagues on oversight to serve in that role. But when we think about where we are in this 21:04 country, when we think about the level of lawlessness, um, corruption, um, unethical behavior that is taking place, I don't know that I can say that I believe that we would ever get to the point that we could actually impeach and convict him so that he's out of office because clearly he's been through two impeachments and he should have been convicted and he didn't and in fact he ended up being reelected. I don't know that that's necessarily the way that we need to go, but I do believe that we should educate the American people about the violations that are taking place as it relates to monuments cause um as part of the constitution and the other constitutional violations that he's engaging in. As well as I think that we need to do the investigations and discover what is going on. What was this crypto dinner about where people are wearing masks and don't even want to be seen going in there? What's going on with the various pardons that are being given out after certain donors drop a 22:00 lot of money into his pocket? What's going on with the fact that I think they said 40% of his wealth right now has actually um accumulated since he's been in office? I mean, I'm not allowed to make any money um at all. I mean a book deal is quite complicated for me as a low member of435 of one of 435 in the house yet he is accumulating wealth and his family members and he's putting them on trips and they're going out beforehand and the next thing you know like there's all kinds of stuff going on with the Saudi government there's all kinds of stuff that's going on with the um cutaries like what is happening at a very minimum we should we should be shining a ite on what is taking place and let the American people for themselves see and that is what the oversight committee can do. Now, we are obviously in the minority at this moment, but it doesn't stop me from being able to do field hearings um in the form of like shadow field hearings where we're going across the country and we're letting people's 23:03 neighbors be the ones to testify about their experiences. Whether they are former employees for the federal government, whether they are someone who is supposed to be receiving government aid of some sort, we need to make sure that people understand what's happening. And I think that there is no one better who can not only do the work, do the investigations, but can also make sure that the word gets out and is communicated. Because regardless of how people may feel, I will always say that Joe Biden was one of the best presidents that we've ever had. But ultimately, it didn't matter if people didn't know what all he was doing. And so, I don't want us to get caught in that same way. and it's why I'm throwing my name into the hat to run to be the ranker. Speaking of pre former President Biden, um House Republicans on the oversight committee now want to investigate the use of the auto pen 24:01 during his term. uh based on the the book that came out original sin which Republicans say this backs up what we were saying for years before that of his cognitive decline. Yeah. So what do you make of their desire to investigate this the use of the auto pen? It's it's just more distractions to be perfectly honest. We know that Joe Biden is not currently in office. We know that chances are Joe Biden is not going to reenter office. And so why are we spending our time on this? Why is it that you said that we needed Doge and yet you've not had Elon Musk come before us to lay out exactly where it is that he felt like we should be making cuts. In fact, y'all just did whatever random cuts y'all wanted to do. We didn't get a Doge report. Doge didn't come in and say, 'Oh, you should do this or that.' And so what I think the American people want is a government that is focused on their current issues. And I can tell you that I've never talked to any constituent that was 25:05 worried about the autopin. I'm going tell you that the average constituent don't even know that the auto pin exists. Don't even know anything about it. Right? Like I can tell you that they are saying we don't know if we're going to have jobs or we just lost our jobs or we don't know if we're going to have benefits or we don't know if we're going to be able to afford Christmas or we don't know if we're going to be able to afford a roof over our head. There's a lot of things that we can dig into such as maybe we should call in um the secretary of VA so that he can talk to us about how these firings have impacted the services that they've delivered or not. Right? like there are real issues that people really want to talk about and this isn't one. And if they want to talk about medical issues, we also could have a conversation about Trump because I don't I don't know what's going on. Um now I I know that he's not necessarily the creme de la creme in general. Um because we know that potentially part of his issues as it relates to Harvard is that well he got rejected. So we know that he's not ever been known as kind of like the scholarly guy. We know that he 26:05 will never be known as this amazing orator as some of our former presidents were. Barack Obama, another one of his favorites, right? We know that that's not his wheelhouse. But we also know that like he is like next level unhinged and he's been unhinged since the campaign. like the fact that people ignore the fact that he was constantly talking about um he was talking about the whales or the sharks and he was talking about I mean the windmills I I don't know I mean just all over the place and recently at West Point decided to talk about trophy wives and decided to talk about his investigations and then right after the crypto event he couldn't read the words on the teleprompter like he he did not know the words he couldn't read I don't know what's going on but like if we want to talk about something, we need to talk about whether or not he really has the cognitive ability because he is the current sitting president and whether or not the 25th amendment should apply is 27:04 something that maybe we should be digging into. I got a lot of things we could do on oversight and this just isn't one. Well, the Republicans on oversight have said they thought that Democrats lied and the White House lied to the American people about the former President Biden's, you know, cognitive decline when people saw it for themselves on the screen, whatever. And so, what do you say to those who say the Democrats hurt themselves in that whole deal? I think we did hurt ourselves. I don't think it's for the reasons that you're laying out, but I do think we hurt ourselves because what Democrats tend to do is the Republicans know how to create a an ecosystem of commentary whether it's true or not, right? Because how long have we been talking about the whole Medicaid thing? Like they will continue to readjust their message, but they are going to have a message and they are going to create an ecosystem of lies, right? And so there were Democrats 28:04 that fell for it and we became divided and that is how it led to this kind of unprecedented moment of Joe Biden stepping down and Kla Harris running. And so I think that people should have just stuck to their guns about what it is that they knew. Now obviously it's not like I've known Joe Biden my whole life because I haven't. But I can tell you that I literally have had conversations with him, not once, not twice, um probably not even three times, multiple times. And I never ever ever felt like I saw anything that was decline. Now, would I be honest if I said that we don't all decline at some point? Like there has to be a point just because we're aging that there is like um a level of kind of fall off that we all have. I I think that that's the natural part of aging. It's the same thing that happens with our bodies, right? Like this is a whole body thing like you probably not running 10 miles anymore like you used to, right? So 29:04 there is a natural but does that mean that you're not qualified or does it mean that it is so detrimental that it's causing harm? Absolutely not. because I can remember vividly, you know, when all these stories started to kind of start up and there was this interview um and actually it wasn't an interview, it was a press conference. It was a press conference and it had to deal with foreign affairs and you know Joe Biden, anybody know anything about him, they know foreign affairs is like his wheelhouse and he was so on point like he understood like on a whole other level and frankly the rest of the world actually respected him and it's not like you know who the world is pissed off at? It wasn't Joe Biden, it's Donald Trump. When you have literally King Charles that's going off in Canada about Trump. When you have Canada, one of our close allies that's going off about Trump. When you have Mexico, one of our 30:05 close allies that's going off about Trump. These are people that had an opportunity to interact with both. And let me tell you, no one claimed that he was unintelligent or that there was some level of decline to where he was unable to comprehend or unable to perform. That did not exist. And so the fact that we buy into these false narratives, the fact that we're even having this conversation when literally Joe Biden is not the president and right now whatever harms that are going to be suffered by the American people have nothing to do with Joe Biden because we didn't have to worry about the stock market crashing every other day when Joe Biden was in office. We didn't have to worry about whether or not people were going to have their Medicaid when Joe Biden was in office. We didn't have debates about whether or not people would have social security when Joe Biden was in office. So, let me tell you, if Joe Biden was like mentally um deficient in some way 31:01 and he was still able to keep this sucker on the tracks, then give me a mentally deficient Joe Biden any given day over Donald Trump. Last question. You're still facing a censure vote in the House, unless that's gone away. I just wanted to ask you, what do you make of that? This was obviously for comments that you made about Governor Abbott. Um, so talk to me a little bit about how your level of concern if at all. I don't have any concern. Um, you know, I forgot all about that. I I will tell you that you were able to first of all, let me back up for everybody that's watching. Um, censure used to be a really big deal because there was some level of decorum in the house. Now that we have a bunch of the raggedy people in the house that we have, it's really nothing more than a badge of honor, unfortunately. And so we have seen that when they really plan to go through with a censure, when they really do have the votes for a censure, it comes up 32:01 immediately. Um, and and they are trying to, again, I told you these people understand news, right? They are trying to keep up with the news cycle, right? So the thing is, why would you go and try to censor me? I don't even know how many months later over something that happened a long time ago. If it was that big of a deal, it would have been done at that moment. And it's like what we saw with um Congressman Al Green. Congressman Al Green um after the State of the Union, they decided they were going to file a censure. They did it immediately. They took him to the floor and they censured him. Same thing that we saw with Rashida Talib. um when they decided that they were going to go forward on a censor um against her for some comments that they felt like were problematic, they immediately went forward with the censure. Um and so I I don't anticipate that anything's going to happen. I think it's forgotten. Yeah. Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, always nice to see you. Thank you so much for your time. Good to see you.

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