WASHINGTON — On Day 13 of the Democrat Government Shutdown, Speaker Johnson held a press conference in the Rayburn Room of the U.S. Capitol to urge reasonable Senate Democrats to make the responsible, commonsense decision and vote to reopen the government. Speaker Johnson also highlighted the ongoing hypocrisy of Congressional Democrats who have voted to prevent government shutdowns their entire careers.
“Ending this shutdown is not a one-party exercise. Republicans do have control of Congress, but it still takes 60 votes to pass a funding bill in the Senate. All of this is the way the founders intended the process to work,” Speaker Johnson said. “Any Democrats who suggest otherwise are willfully misleading the American people.”
Watch Speaker Johnson’s full remarks here.
On reasonable Senate Democrats voting to reopen the government:
Ending this shutdown is not a one-party exercise. Republicans do have control of Congress, but it still takes 60 votes to pass a funding bill in the Senate. All of this is the way the founders intended the process to work. Any Democrats who suggest otherwise are willfully misleading the American people. Chuck Schumer gave a speech on the Senate floor, I think it was on Friday. He looked right into the cameras and said, “Republicans are in control, and this is all on them.” He knows full well that it takes 60 votes, and we only have 53 Republicans in the Senate.
There’s already a bipartisan majority in the Senate that supports our clean CR. There are three, two Democrats and one independent who caucuses with Democrats, three Democrats total who’ve gone along with Republicans and using common sense to keep the government open. We need five Senate Democrats now to break ranks and do the right thing. The only ransom here is the $1.5 trillion that Chuck Schumer is demanding from the American people.
On the hypocrisy of Congressional Democrats:
The Democrats are perfectly happy to do all this damage while they play political stunts. We can hardly believe that they’re willing to go along on the gambit and the false narrative that they’ve created. And as you all know here in Congress, Republicans have voted over and over to reopen the government and end all this pain. We passed a clean, nonpartisan CR that would pay the troops and the TSA agents and Border Patrol and the rest of our federal workforce. We did our job. We had that vote over three weeks ago now, and the bill is still sitting in the Senate where Democrats have now voted seven times to keep the government closed. I brought our handy chart again today because they were out breathlessly over the weekend on media outlets, Democrats in Congress including Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, claiming facts that are simply untrue.
They claim that this didn’t happen, but this is exactly what the vote tally is. And on September 19th, the House passed the clean resolution that got everyone paid and kept the services flowing, and they voted against it. Every Democrat but one in the House voted not to pay the troops, not to pay TSA, border patrol, air traffic controllers and all the rest. The Senate Democrats then voted that down. And you see now, eight times total in Congress, Republicans have voted to keep the government open, and Democrats have voted to close it. Period, end of sentence. And why did they do this? Because they want to spend $1.5 trillion in new taxpayer funded spending as a ransom for ending the shutdown. Not our talking points, this is in the record. They filed it. No matter how they twist it, this is a clean, nonpartisan CR.
It does not include new spending. It does not include partisan strings attached at all. This is something, as we have pointed out over and over, that Democrats have supported repeatedly. In fact, 13 different times during the Biden Administration. Even the liberal New York Times admits the obvious truth. Here you have leaders on the Democrat side like Jeh Johnson, who spoke out this week and said, “end it, end it, open the government and then have these negotiations.” We were always planning to do that, to negotiate on the other issues. Again, we have to be very clear, the shutdown did not have to happen, but every American needs to understand why it did.
On Democrats clamoring to “negotiate”:
You’ve all heard our Democrat colleagues demand that Republicans come to the table to negotiate. But as I’ve said time and time again, I don’t have anything to negotiate with. We don’t have any partisan policy riders that I can remove from the funding bill because Republicans didn’t include any. It is a truly clean, nonpartisan, short-term CR. They don’t really want a negotiation. It’s just a talking point. They’re not interested in negotiating. Again, look at their counter proposal.
$1.5 trillion in new spending, $200 billion to use hard earned taxpayer dollars to fund healthcare and other benefits for illegal aliens and non-citizens. And they want to give a half a billion dollars to liberal news outlets, to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting while cutting $50 billion from rural hospitals. These are not serious measures. They’re not serious counterproposals, and they know that. The Senate Democrats know they cannot tell voters that they’re willing to hold hostage funding for the nutrition of women, infants, and children in exchange for restoring health care to illegal aliens. So, they want to do this behind closed doors. And you’ve heard Chuck Schumer say, breathlessly, I just want the four leaders to get in a back room and make a deal. We’re not doing that. We’re not doing that anymore. We’re getting back to regular order. And it’s infuriating that that’s what he continues to demand.
Before Democrats recklessly shut down the government, Republicans and Democrats were engaged in responsible, open, bipartisan negotiations on the appropriations process. Republicans are eager to return to the actual negotiating table to finish out full year appropriations and do work on all the other matters before us. But we won’t negotiate in smoke-filled back rooms, and we won’t negotiate as hostages.
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