WASHINGTON — This morning on Day 12 of the Democrat government shutdown, Speaker Johnson joined Shannon Bream on Fox News Sunday to discuss how Republicans have voted repeatedly to reopen the government and pay U.S. troops, air traffic controllers, and TSA agents. Speaker Johnson reminded the American people that it is Democrats — and Democrats alone — who hold the keys to reopening the government.
“It requires 60 votes in the Senate to get this through. We only have 53 Republicans,” Speaker Johnson said. “We’ve got to have a handful of Democrats in the Senate who apply commonsense and agree to reopen the government so that we can continue all these discussions.”
Watch Speaker Johnson’s full interview here.
On Democrat attempts to distract the American people from the fact they shut down the government:
The Republicans have already said we were going to have thoughtful conversations, deliberation, and debate about the COVID-era Obamacare subsidies, but they don’t expire until December 31. They’re trying to pretend like that’s a September issue. It never was. The President himself offered to Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries in the Oval Office, when I and Leader Thune were sitting next to him, that thoughtful debate, which is for tomorrow, as soon as we get the government open so that everybody can come in and do that, there’s hundreds of ideas on how to do it. It was not appropriate or possible for that to be resolved in a continuing resolution.
And again, what they’re saying right now, the reason they’re talking about health care is because they’re trying to create a distraction. We have voted eight times to pay the troops, pay TSA agents, border patrol agents, everybody serving in the federal government and to make sure these services are provided for veterans and the elderly, the disabled who need them so much. Eight times now, Democrats in Congress have voted to close the government. We’re on Day 12. It’s a real pain for real people, and they seem not to care.
On Democrats voting eight times to keep the government closed and not pay U.S. troops:
The House has already voted to pay the troops on September 19. We have a chart that we used at our press conference showing every time the Republicans have voted to pay the troops and the Democrats every time voted no. We did it in the House on September 19, over three weeks ago, sent it to the Senate. And now seven different times the Democrats in the Senate, all but three, have voted not to pay the troops. So, the ball is in the Senate’s court; the House has done its job.
On Republicans as the party to improve our health care system and drive down costs:
The rural hospitals that are in trouble right now are not because of Republican policies. This is the legacy of what has happened under Obamacare. And you just heard the leader of the Democrats in the House acknowledge that Obamacare is unaffordable. When they passed it into law in 2010, they promised us it was going to make health care more affordable. They put it in the name of the law. It did exactly the opposite. Premiums have risen exponentially since 2010, and they’re not affordable. It was never designed to be affordable.
Republicans are the party that are fixing health care. We just demonstrated that in the One Big Beautiful Bill, the Working Families Tax Cut. We put in reforms to Medicaid, as I mentioned, that cut out fraud, waste, and abuse that got ineligible recipients off of the program. And it’s brought down the cost and made the resources spread more broadly to the people who actually need it — U.S. citizens, who are the disabled, the elderly, and young pregnant women, those kinds of folks. Folks who are the people who are intended for that program to help. We are shoring up the program. We’re fixing health care. Obamacare is what broke it.
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