Cory Booker draws big crowd for town hall at Bergen Community College
Hailed by many as a returning hero, U.S. Sen. and Bergen County native Cory Booker held a town hall at Bergen Community College for over 1,000 people.
Sen. Cory Booker toured across North Jersey making multiple stops in different counties July 2 to speak out against President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” that passed the Senate a day earlier.
Booker started his voyage at 10 a.m. as he visited a mass transit infrastructure project. He then went to local businesses in Morris County before stopping at Valley Hospital in Paramus at 2 p.m.
“This is a sledgehammer to health care in America that will affect millions and millions of Americans,” Booker said while in Paramus. “And for what? giving bigger tax cuts to the wealthiest among us. That’s unjust.”
Booker toured the hospital July 2 while highlighting the facility was made possible through government funding that will be taken away with the new bill.
Among the cuts to health care will be Medicaid, where here in New Jersey, 1.8 million people rely on the government health program. The slashes to healthcare spending could result in 360,000 people to lose health insurance in New Jersey.
The New Jersey senator emerged as a prominent critic of Trump during his record-setting speech on the Senate floor in April that lasted over 25 hours.
What’s in the ‘big beautiful bill’?
The legislation narrowly passed in the Senate by a vote of 51-50 with Vice President JD Vance breaking the tie. All Senate Democrats, including Booker, three Republicans and two independents voted against the bill, but the bill still passed having a majority vote in the GOP-led Senate.
The mega-bill containing policies on taxes and government spending comes with controversy. While Republicans praise the bill’s continuation of extending the 2017 tax cuts from Trump’s first term in office, fulfilling Trump’s promise of no taxes on tips and overtime pay and increasing the child tax credit, many officials criticize the legislation because it would harm low-income individuals and families.
The “Big Beautiful Bill” makes major cuts to Medicaid, which could result in 7.6 million Americans losing health insurance over the next 10 years. The bill also will cut spending to the SNAP or food snaps program by about $267 billion, and also imposed work requirements to those at age 55 to 64.
College students could also be negatively impacted by the bill as significant caps are imposed on loans for undergraduate students and parents, and eliminated the lending program for graduate students.
Still with the cuts to government programs, the bill is expected to increase the country’s deficit to $3.7 trillion, due to increased spending elsewhere like border security and defense.
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