Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said Monday that Democrats bear the blame for the pain of a government shutdown, as President Donald Trump and his budget chief moved forward with identifying federal programs to cut.
“Day 27 means it’s almost been a full month since the Democrats shut down the government. And as we near the end of this month, the pain being felt by so many hard-working people around this country is very real and it gets worse with each passing day. Here’s some of the stats. Last week, 1.4 million federal workers missed a full paycheck. Now, you know, many of them are furloughed and many more are deemed essential workers,” Johnson said.
“Those who are essential, for example, to keep the country safe — TSA agents we’ve discussed and air traffic controllers and Border Patrol and of course our troops. But so many of them now are going without pay. The families of military service members and air traffic controllers and so many of these others are now at very real risk of missing the paycheck at the end of this month,” Johnson added.
“The Trump Administration has done everything possible to bend over backwards to try to find sources of funding within the federal government to be able to cover the bases, but it is getting more and more challenging with each day,” Johnson argued.
The Speaker added, “Now, every Republican in Congress wants to stop this Madness desperately. And we have voted many times, over a dozen times, collectively 13 times to reopen the government, to keep it open and reopen it once the Democrats closed it. But here’s the very simple and important fact that no one should forget. We have no ability. Republicans do not have the ability to do this on our own. It’s a simple math problem. We need Democrats to help. You need 60 votes in the Senate. We only have 53 Republicans.”
“The Democrats are the ones voting repeatedly to shut down the government. But they’re not they’re not opening it back up,” Johnson declared.
“They spent most of their time trying to distract the American people from the very simple truth. So I brought you a little visual aid here to just remind everybody what the simple facts are. Four simple facts here. The Democrats are required to open the government. They keep saying Republicans are in charge of government,” Johnson argued.
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“We aren’t, not in the Senate. Sixty votes control the Senate, not a bare majority. And so point number one, Democrat votes are required to open the government. Point number two, they refuse to do it. They have now voted 12 times to keep the government closed, and they’ll have another chance today or tomorrow, maybe multiple times this week, and we’ll see what they do. Now, the third point is very important because they’ve been trying to confuse the American people,” the Speaker continued.
“They’ve tried to say this is a fight about health care or this or that or any other thing. And it’s — it’s very simple. They put this on paper. They made this their demand in writing in the record of the Senate. And it has not changed,” he said.
“These are just four sub points there under — under a fact number three. But there’s many more. But among the things they’re demanding — this is what the Democrats in the Senate are demanding to reopen the government. They want to give $200 billion in health benefits to illegal aliens and noncitizens paid for by U.S. taxpayers. That is in their proposal. They want billions in wasteful programs to be returned to foreign countries. So we stop these things,” he added.
The Speaker concluded, “They want to turn it all back on. They’re demanding that we do all that to get the government open for hardworking Americans again. They want to give a half a billion to left leaning news news organizations and — and they want to cut $50 billion from rural hospitals. We cannot, we will not do those things. And they know that very well.”
