First posted on Instagram
Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) delivered a blunt postmortem of the Republicans' losses in the November 3 midterm elections in a speech on the Senate floor on Tuesday, November 11, 2026, and used it to press Republican leaders to use the party's remaining weeks in control of the Senate to pass two measures before Democrats take power in January: a new budget reconciliation bill and Sen. Joni Ernst's anti-fraud package, the Protecting American Taxpayers Act.
"This was not a normal midterm election," Kennedy said, telling his colleagues it was time to "put down our juice boxes and listen." He said the only way Republicans can still pass legislation in the time they have left is through reconciliation, which needs only Republican votes, and he called on Senate Majority Leader John Thune to bring Ernst's bill to the floor.
The Protecting American Taxpayers Act, championed by Ernst, the chair of the Senate DOGE Caucus, bundles 17 anti-fraud bills that its sponsors say would save taxpayers $240 billion by targeting waste, fraud and abuse in federal spending. The package would recover stolen funds, stop fraudulent payments before they go out and hold fraudsters accountable. It was unveiled in April 2026, after the Minnesota fraud scandal, when Thune asked Ernst to build a package Republicans could bring to a vote.
Kennedy said the savings from the bill should be used to pay down the national debt. "Pass it and use the savings from abolishing or undermining that fraud to pay down our debt," he said on the Senate floor. Republicans still hold the Senate until January, and Kennedy said there was no excuse not to bring the bill to the floor.
Kennedy also used a blunt analogy to make the case for acting through reconciliation alone. "A wise man doesn't urinate on his hands. We need to stop urinating on our hands. The only way we can actually do that in the remaining time we have left is through reconciliation with just Republican votes," he said.
The scale of the fraud the bill targets is large. The Government Accountability Office has estimated that between $233 billion and $521 billion in federal money was lost to fraud between 2018 and 2022, and the bill's sponsors say about $1.4 billion is stolen from taxpayers every day.
The demand comes in the final weeks of the lame-duck session. Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate in the November 3 midterms and take over on January 3, 2027, leaving Republicans with about 20 scheduled legislative days in the House and 22 in the Senate. The House Freedom Caucus laid out its own lame-duck agenda on November 9, demanding at least $1 trillion in spending cuts before Democrats take power, and Senate Republicans reelected Thune as their leader on Tuesday.
Whether the bill reaches the floor is up to Senate leadership. The Protecting American Taxpayers Act has not been scheduled for a vote, and only the majority leader can bring a bill to the Senate floor. Kennedy has made the same plea before. In a January floor speech pressing the same case, he said: "Please, Senator Thune. Please let us do another reconciliation bill."