Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) held a press conference on day six of the Democrat government shutdown and made clear that Democrats are being incredibly misleading in their messaging and that it is Republicans who are actually trying to solve the healthcare crisis.
“I want you to look at the real facts,” Johnson began, explaining that Republicans decided to come up with an extremely simple
stop gap measure to “keep the lights on and keep the government open so that appropriators can finish this very healthy process for the people they represent,” maintaining that this was a clean continuing resolution.
“Why do we say it’s clean? Because there’s nothing to it. It’s 24 pages. It’s the bare minimum. It just says, keep the status quo,” he said, reminding Democrats that the status quo is very much the Biden-era policies and spending they have not been able to fix yet.
“We’re in the process of getting appropriations done to prepare all that, but we needed more time to do it. So in a bipartisan fashion, Democrats and Republicans got together and said, you know what? Fine. Let’s extend this until November 21. The Democrats in the House agreed to that. That was the date we put that on the floor. We passed it out of the House in bipartisan fashion, and we sent it over to the Senate,” Johnson explained, noting that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) changed his tune and is now trying to save face among fellow Democrats — namely, the radical left wing of his party.
“They created a red herring. A red herring is a distraction. They decided that they would pick a fight on healthcare. Let me look right under the camera and tell you very clearly, Republicans are the ones concerned about healthcare,” Johnson clarified.
“Republicans are the party working around the clock every day to fix healthcare. It’s not talking points for us. We’ve done it. A big part of the one big, beautiful bill, the working families tax cut, was to fix healthcare. Health care is broken in America. It’s too expensive. The quality of care needs to rise. We need more access for more people, and we have lots of ideas to do that,” he said, explaining that the debate for that issue is in the next few months and “always was.”
“We have members working on that. The tax credit, the subsidy you’ve heard about, that expires December 31. There’s a lot of thoughtful debate and discussion that has already been going on about that, and will go on about it, but that’s a December 31 issue. So Chuck Schumer is scrambling. He has to have an issue,” the Speaker continued, noting that none of the Democrat policies are very popular right now, so they decided to take on healthcare and tie it to government funding, despite the fact that they are two separate issues.
“They’re two totally separate things. The clean continuing resolution would simply keep the lights on so that the members in the House and Senate can have those debates on healthcare. We were always planning it. We have lots of ideas on the table on how to fix it, but we don’t yet have consensus on it because it’s very complicated,” he said. “We have time to do it.”
“In his [Schumer’s] desperation, they decided to create the red herring. They decided to claim that this is all about health care, which the September funding issue never was. That’s a December policy issue. He tried to create it as a September funding issue… In his desperation, they hastily filed an outrageous counter proposal. It is a wild wish list of big government liberal nonsense that we can’t do,” he added.
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