Speaker Mike Johnson revealed that House Republicans can be back in session in 48 hours if Democrats will stop playing games, pass the clean GOP House-passed short-term funding bill, and then work together on the larger bill before the year is over.
During an interview on Fox Business, Johnson spoke about Senate Democrats voting to block a Republican-sponsored stopgap funding package 13 times as the shutdown drags on.
“We are in the fourth week of this shutdown, and we’ve got unpaid federal workers and families that rely on food programs. “What do you say to those people, those Americans, who ask, ‘Why is the government still closed?” host Cheryl Casone asked.
“Yeah. Those categories that are listed by Leader Thune and yourself and so many others, real Americans are hurting and it is so frustrating to us, Cheryl, because the contrast so is clear. Remember, it was over a month ago that the House did our job, we passed a clean continuing resolution, totally nonpartisan, 24-page, very simple piece of legislation to just keep the lights on so the Congress could continue to do the work of appropriating the funds for the annual budget, and also for navigating all the rest of the issues we have on the table throughout the end of the year,” Johnson said.
“The Democrats voted it down, they’ve done it now almost a dozen times, as you said, because they’re playing partisan games. They filed a counterproposal. Let’s not let anybody forget what they filed as their counter-offer. Their CR is not a clean one, it’s a dirty one, because they want to spend a trillion and a half new dollars on all sorts of wasteful programs, including 200 billion dollars to fund healthcare benefits on the backs of American taxpayers for illegal aliens,” Johnson added.
“They want to give a half a billion dollars back to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to prop up leftist news organizations, and they want to spend billions of dollars overseas on all sorts of extraneous, crazy kinds of programs. They know we’re not going that,” he continued.
Johnson declared, “It is not a serious proposal. This is the first time in history that any party has chosen to shut the government down over a clean CR. They are playing a game, and it’s very simple — here’s the reason why. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the two leaders in both chambers for the Democratic side, are afraid of their far-left flank, they’re afraid they’re going to get a challenge in New York because Marxism is all the rage, and they’re going to lose their seats, so they’re putting up a fight. It makes no sens,e and real people are getting hurt.”
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However, Democrats may be on the verge of folding.
Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner said he’s “hopeful” the government shutdown will end this week.
Warner avoided questions on where Democrats might be prepared to give in during the month-long budget crisis on CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” but he did push for the president to come to the table to talk.
Asked at what point the “pain and pressure” from air traffic controllers and other government workers will finally “end the shutdown,” Warner said, “I hope it ends it this week.”
“We knew this wasn’t going to end unless Donald Trump was back in the country. He’s now back in the country. He’s got to go ahead and put America first and sit down with us, deal with the health care shortage,” Warner added.