Speaking on the floor of the Senate about the present government shutdown in a gut-bustingly hilarious speech, United States Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), widely regarded as America’s funniest senator because of his clever and on-point jabs and jibes, did a perfect job exposing what is going on and how absolutely unreasonable demands from the left are responsible for this one.
Beginning, the senator noted that this shutdown is absolutely ridiculous, as the apparent policy disagreement behind this one makes no sense. “Now we’ve had a few shutdowns before, and every shutdown is different, but most shutdowns are. They are a combination of both policy and politics in varying degrees. This shutdown in terms of policy, makes absolutely no sense, none,” he began.
Continuing, he noted that, in the past, funding the current budget to keep the government open has been the agreed upon stopgap solution, and both parties went along with it for the good of the nation. Not so much now, with the Democrats refusing to go along with it. He began, “But this time, the Democrats have said, ‘no, no, no, no, no, we want more.’ And you may be thinking, ‘Okay, that’s reasonable. What do you want?’ Well, it’s not reasonable.”
Building on that, and explaining why their demands are utterly unreasonable, Sen. Kennedy continued with his entertaining speech, saying, “In effect, what the Democrats are saying to us is that ‘We’re going to close government unless you Republicans agree to make it bigger. We don’t want the status quo. We want you to commit to spending $1.5 trillion more than you’re spending now. And we, the Democrats are saying, are going to tell you how to spend it first.'”
He further added, explaining that what the Democrats agree Republicans demand to is allowing outright fraud, “They want us to repeal all of the Medicaid reforms that we did in the reconciliation bill. Some call it the One Big Beautiful Bill. The One Big Beautiful Bill would not reduce Medicaid. In fact, it would go up about 2% every year as a result of our bill, but it would say to people who are on Medicaid who aren’t eligible for Medicaid, that you’re not going to get Medicaid anymore. Dual eligibles, people who sign up in Louisiana and Mississippi. That’s fraud.”
Explaining further how the Democrats are demanding that Republicans accept outright fraud, explaining, “Under our bill, they would be thrown off the Democrats want to put back on under our changes in the one big, beautiful bill that the Democrats want us to reverse, you would have to satisfy certain income levels to be on Medicaid. The law says if you make too much money, you can’t get Medicaid, because Medicaid is for the poor. In my state, we have found people through audits making $120,000 a year on Medicaid. So our bill, which the Democrats want us to repeal after just passing it, would say to those people that ‘if you don’t meet the income limits, if you don’t meet the income limits, you can’t get Medicaid.’ So that’s that’s the first demand of the Democrats. Take out all the reforms that we made to Medicaid in the reconciliation bill and throw them out the window.”
Getting to one of his jokes, the senator noted that to pile up all of Schumer’s demands on top of each other would be to pile a towering stack of paper up to the ceiling, saying, “You need an Excel spreadsheet to be able to follow their demands, their demands to keep government open, you stack them here. You could stand on them and paint the ceiling. And that’s not much of an exaggeration.”
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Later, Sen. Kennedy cracked yet more jokes when explained that the “loon,” far-left wing of the Democratic Party is in charge, saying, “There is a wing of the Democratic Party. I call it the socialist wing. Some less charitable people call it the loon wing of the Democratic Party, and they are in charge right now.”
Watch him here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video