Bernie Sanders slams 8 Democrats for voting with GOP on continuing resolution
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Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., criticized eight Senate Democrats who joined Republicans in advancing a continuing resolution during a procedural vote in the U.S. Senate on Sunday.
Sanders described this move as a “very, very bad vote” in the video he shared on his X account.
“Tonight, 8 Democrats voted with Republicans to allow them to move forward on this ongoing resolution,” Sanders said. he said. “And to me that was a very, very bad vote.”
The continuing resolution was initially designed to temporarily fund the federal government and prevent a shutdown, but contained provisions or omissions that would increase health premiums, set the stage for Medicaid cuts and benefit high-income earners through tax changes, according to Sanders.
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Independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont during a press conference at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, November 5, 2025 in Washington, DC, USA. (Daniel Heuer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Sanders argued that the measure “increases health premiums for more than 20 million Americans by doubling, and in some cases, tripling or quadrupling.” He continued: “There’s no way people can afford this when we’re already paying the highest prices in the world for healthcare.”
“This leads to 15 million people being kicked off of Medicaid. Studies show that means nearly 50,000 Americans will die needlessly every year. And it’s all done to give a trillion dollars in tax cuts to the 1%,” the video continues.
“As everyone knows, there were elections all over this country on Tuesday,” Sanders said. “And the elections showed that the American people wanted us to stand against Trumpism, his war on the working class, his authoritarianism. That’s what the American people wanted. But that’s not what happened tonight.”
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In Sanders’ video, he frames the procedural vote as not just about keeping the government open, but as representing a broader policy direction that, in his view, undermines health protections and working-class interests.
“So we have to move forward, we have to do the best we can to secure and protect working-class people, to make sure that the United States not only doesn’t deprive people of health care, but also stops this nonsense of being the only major country in the world that doesn’t guarantee health care to all people in the world,” Sanders said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do, but tonight wasn’t a good night to be honest.”
Millions of Americans could face higher market premiums if Advanced Affordable Care Act subsidies enacted under the American Rescue Plan are allowed to expire, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). CBO’s 2023 analysis of health insurance provisions showed that ending expanded subsidies would significantly increase out-of-pocket expenses for people enrolled in ACA marketplaces.
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Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R.S.D. and Senate Republicans are open to negotiating an extension of expiring Obamacare tax credits, but only after the government reopens. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Research cited by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP), which Sanders chairs, also estimates that large-scale cuts to Medicaid could lead to tens of thousands of preventable deaths each year.
In the 2023 HELP Committee report available on Sanders’ website, the committee cited peer-reviewed studies published in the journals Health Affairs and The Lancet Public Health, finding that loss of Medicaid coverage is associated with higher death rates due to reduced access to preventive and emergency care.
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The report is also supported by other documents on the site, including findings from a June 2025 letter from researchers at the Yale School of Public Health and the University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics that warned that proposed federal health care cuts “could lead to more than 51,000 preventable deaths per year.”
Sanders’ comments were published on his official website in multiple press releases dating back to March of this year and reflect his long-standing opposition to Republican budget proposals that he says favor the “1%” at the expense of working Americans.
