WASHINGTON — On Day Five of the Democrat government shutdown, Speaker Johnson joined Meet the Press on NBC and Face the Nation on CBS to further debunk Democrat lies about their own counterproposal and remind liberal media hosts that it is Senate Democrats who bear responsibility for keeping the government closed.
“The reason the government has closed is because Chuck Schumer and 43 of his Democrat colleagues in the Senate have decided now to vote multiple times to keep the government closed,” Speaker Johnson said. “We need them to turn the lights back on so that everyone can do their work. The House did our work.”
On Chuck Schumer’s refusal to reopen the government:
Well, the only person who can answer that question is your next guest, and that’s Chuck Schumer, because the House did its job. The reason that House Republicans are home working in their districts, and I suspect House Democrats should be as well, is because we did that. We passed a bipartisan, very clean, continuing resolution a couple of weeks back now and sent it to the Senate. It’s very important to note what was in that. It was only 24 pages in length, Margaret; it was a good faith effort to keep the government open for seven more weeks so that Republicans and Democrats in a bipartisan fashion could work together to fund the government with the appropriations process.
Chuck Schumer always voted for those in the past. In fact, he did it 13 times during the four years of the Biden Administration, but now suddenly he’s commanding his Democrats in the Senate not to do it, and there’s one simple reason why. They need political cover from the far-left corner of the base. He’s afraid, Chuck Schumer individually, ask him about it. He’s afraid he’s going to get a challenge from the Marxist left in his party, because that’s the new wave in New York. That’s what this is about. Chuck Schumer is trying to show a fight against the President and Republicans, and real Americans are being harmed in the process of this political game.
On Democrats conflating the September government funding deadline with an unrelated December policy issue:
Let me just start by saying, I listened to my friend Hakeem there, and when we used to do debate competitions in high school, they taught us to watch out for the red herring. The red herring is a distraction. Literally everything my friend just said there was unnecessary because what he’s trying to talk about is a December funding issue, the health care provision, some of these Obamacare subsidies that expire December 31. He is looking over entirely the fact that we have to keep the government open in order to have those bipartisan debates and discussions that he just referenced. The simple CR that we passed in the House more than two weeks ago does exactly that. It is a clean CR. It’s only 24 pages in length. It’s the simplest thing that’s ever been done in. It’s exactly what Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and all the rest of them said must be done. You saw the tape. We could roll that tape for hours of all of them saying this passionately as recently as earlier this year, that we had to keep the government open in order to do our jobs.
On Republican efforts to drive down costs and improve health care quality:
I commit to what Republicans have always done and what we’ve already proven this year in the Working Families Tax Cuts, Republicans are the ones in Congress working to improve health care access, quality, and make it cheaper. We want to bring the cost down of healthcare. Premiums are too high, but it’s not because Republican policies, it’s because Obamacare is not working. We are trying to fix it. We’ve just shown in the One Big, Beautiful Bill, the Working Families Tax Cut, those reforms we made to Medicaid are not cuts to Medicaid. Medicaid will continue to grow. It’s just growing at a slower pace. Why? Because we got illegal aliens and able-bodied young men without dependents off of Medicaid. They were never planned to be there in the first place. And what the Democrats are demanding right now to keep the government open is we put them all back on there. We’re not doing that.
What the Democrats are demanding is that illegal aliens, that care for them in an emergency room, should be reimbursed at a higher rate…to the hospitals, than for American citizens, young pregnant women. They want to pay more for illegal aliens than for U.S. citizens. And we are against that. The reason it’s illegal right now for illegal aliens to receive taxpayer funded benefits is because Republicans wrote it into the law on July 4. Don’t take my word for it. Look at page 57, Section 2141 of Chuck Schumer’s counterproposal. It’s on my website at Speaker.gov. Everybody go look, don’t take my word for it. Read that section. They want to reverse those changes.
