In an entertaining press conference given on October 14, the fourteenth day of the Schumer Shutdown, Speaker of the House Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) sounded off on the sort of spending that Democrats are demanding to end the shutdown, noting that what they are demanding is obscene and unacceptable to Republicans.
Speaker Johnson’s commentary on the matter, which was delivered in the Rayburn Room of the U.S. Capitol alongside House GOP Leadership and Rules Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx, was meant to explain why no deal to end the shutdown has been struck, noting that the spending bill the Democrats want is full of nonsense.
Particularly, he noted, as his office described it, “the unserious, partisan demands included in the Democrats’ $1.5 trillion counterproposal to reopen the government, included $200 billion in health benefits for illegal aliens and tens of millions of dollars for ‘climate resilience in Honduras’ and ‘LGBTQI+ democracy grants in the Western Balkans.'”
Speaking on the matter, Speaker Johnson explained that he finds the sort of foreign aid nonsense that the Democrats want to be utterly ridiculous, saying, “They want to spend $2.9 million of your dollars for desert locust risk reduction in the Horn of Africa. $2 million for organizing for feminist democratic principles in Africa. We are not doing that.”
Continuing, he noted that the sort of proposals they are making as baseline demands for a spending deal are “unserious” and presented by “unserious people,” saying, “These are unserious proposals from unserious people. They are playing games while real Americans are being harmed adversely by the shutdown.”
Commenting elsewhere in the speechh on what they want, the Speaker of the House said, “They’re demanding $1.5 trillion in new spending paid for by American taxpayers. And I want us to be specific. I want you to know what that counterproposal includes because we’ve not yet gone into all the details of it because it’s large and very absurd.”
Adding to that by focusing on the sort of nonsense they’re demanding as regards illegal alien healthcare, he said, “But here’s some of the highlights of this. It would reverse commonsense reforms that Republicans made in the Working Families Tax Cut that keep illegal aliens off taxpayer-funded healthcare. This is a fact. Page 57, section 2141 of their counterproposal as we’ve been posting everywhere. And they would add the illegal aliens, non-citizens back to taxpayer funded benefits. It would cost taxpayers nearly $200 billion.”
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And, noting that they would even get rid of a simple work requirement for the able-bodied to access welfare services, he said, “They would also remove a very reasonable and modest work requirement that we put on able-bodied young men with no dependents. As we’ve said, they should not be riding the wagon and taking Medicaid that is intended for vulnerable populations – the elderly, disabled, and young pregnant women, for example, and not young able-bodied men without dependents who are playing video games. We put that into the law because it’s common sense. Their counterproposal would reverse that. So, taxpayers would be funding them.”
Later in the speech, Speaker Johnson noted that “What Chuck Schumer means when he says that he wants us to negotiate, what he is demanding, and he said it publicly, I can’t believe he says the quiet parts out loud sometimes, but he wants a backroom deal. He wants a backroom deal that the American people will never see.”
Continuing, the speaker highlighted the sort of ideas Schumer is pushing, saying, “He literally has said, we need the top four leaders to go into a room and work this out. Why does Chuck Schumer say that? Because that’s how he’s operated for decades. He’s been in Congress since 1980. I was nine years old in the third grade when Chuck Schumer got here. He is the broken status quo.”
He further added, on that same point, “We are trying to break the status quo so government works better for the people. And Chuck Schumer is resistant to that because he can’t even imagine the way the founders intended for this to work. He doesn’t want this open to everybody involved, all Members and a bottom-up process. He wants four people to go in a backroom and just make this deal and foist it down upon everybody else. I’m not participating in that. Chuck Schumer doesn’t like that. He doesn’t like that we’re trying to get Washington to work again, because he doesn’t know how to operate in that kind of system. And we’re certainly not going to allow the American people to be taken hostage for his political gain,”
Watch him here: