WASHINGTON — On Day 22 of the Democrat Shutdown, Speaker Johnson held a press conference alongside House GOP Leadership, House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Bruce Westerman, and top appropriator for our national parks, Rep. Mike Simpson to further highlight the split screen between Republicans and Democrats.
“October 22 marks another landmark. This is now the second longest government shutdown of any kind ever in the history of our country. And it’s just shameful,” Speaker Johnson said. “Democrats keep making history, but they’re doing it for all the wrong reasons.”
Watch Speaker Johnson’s full remarks here.
On the glaring split screen between Republicans and Democrats:
But there’s also a figurative split screen. And I would just want to spend a moment this morning and talk with you about that. On one side, you have the Republican Party, the party that controls the White House, the Senate, and the House. We call that unified government. It’s the party that won the popular vote, then every single swing state, and made deep inroads with voters new to the Republican base. And we received that mandate gratefully, and we went immediately to work. Since the election in November, just in the last nine and a half months of this Congress, Republicans have delivered incredible results for the American people. And we could stand up here and spend an hour going through just the bullet points and highlights of all that, but we put a few on the handy chart over here. But just think of what’s been accomplished in the last nine and a half months. A couple of things listed here.
We passed the historic Working Families Tax Cut, one of the most landmark pieces of legislation ever passed by the U.S. Congress for the benefit of the American people. We slashed taxes for hardworking Americans, geared for the lower- and middle-class earners who needed that assistance. We cut hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud, waste, and abuse from government. We solved the border crisis. We are working now to solve the crime crisis in major cities around America. We strengthened Medicaid, we improved health care access, and we’ve lowered premiums with our legislation. We have restored peace through strength. Thanks be to God. We are ending wars around the globe, and we’ve restored common sense to a government that sorely needed it. That’s part of the mandate that was given to us by the American people in the fall. And most recently, we did our jobs, and we passed a clean, non-partisan CR to keep the government open for the people.
Now, look on the other side of that figurative split screen as demonstrated here. The lights were out. It’s all dark. Why? Because what the Democrats have accomplished in nine and a half months is a government shutdown. A couple other things sort of related to that. They have made a lot of TikTok videos. We give them credit for that. They’ve also assaulted law enforcement officers – one of them is on trial for that. They’ve openly embraced and rallied with communists and socialists, most recently across the country on Saturday. They voted to raise taxes on millions of hardworking Americans at the worst possible time. They have voted against reducing fraud, waste, and abuse in government, and they have now voted collectively, Democrats in Congress, have voted 12 times to keep the government closed down.
On Democrats abandoning common sense:
The Democrat shutdown is a glaring example of just how far the Democratic Party has strayed from common sense. Remember the simple truth here, it was over a month ago now that we passed, the Republicans passed, the clean short-term continuing resolution. It’s non-partisan. No gimmicks, no tricks, no riders, no partisan Republican policy priorities added to that. It’s 24 pages in length, as we’ve discussed so many times, and it is very simple. Why? Because it was a very simple, good faith effort on our part to preserve our ability to keep negotiating on the full year funding bills, and of course, the other big issues facing the American people. We wanted to keep the lights on, but what did the Democrats do? Instead of voting for it, as they have always done in the past, they broke from history, and they rejected that, and they offered a counterproposal.
Ours was a clean CR. We called theirs a dirty CR. And you all know why? Because they added one and a half trillion dollars in new spending. That would be a mandate, including hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars for health care for illegal aliens. Go to page 57, section 2141 of what they offered; they want to restore funding for left-wing pet projects in foreign countries. And I’ve given you a list of some of the crazy things that they would include in that. Half a billion dollars for liberal news outlets like NPR and PBS on the backs of taxpayers. And the removal, remember, they wanted to eliminate the $50 billion that Republicans got signed into law by President Trump on July 4 to prop up our rural hospitals.
On Democrats manufacturing a health care crisis to serve their political goals:
Now, they’re trying their very best to somehow blame Republicans for the forthcoming “health care crisis” that they themselves created. By way of just very quick review for the record, because they’re trying to obscure this as well. Let’s remember the true origins of the boondoggle that is American health care under Obamacare. Democrats wrote that bill, they passed it into law without a single Republican vote. During the COVID pandemic, Democrats created temporary Obamacare credits again, without a single Republican vote. Democrats then voted to extend those credits. They set the expiration date on it and then when they held the majority in the Senate, it was Democrats who chose not to extend those credits beyond this year. Now, as we approach their own self-imposed expiration date, they are breathlessly insisting to you and on all the interviews that somehow, it’s a Republican crisis.
Give me a break. The facts are the facts. We are up here sharing the simple facts and truth. As John Adams said, facts are stubborn things. Democrats are the ones who manufactured this entire situation without a single Republican vote. And now when the chickens are coming back home to roost, they’re trying to blame the other team. It is utter nonsense, and you should call them on it. That’s the job of the press and continue to do that every single time.
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