Speaking in a press conference given as the government enters a shut down period created by the Senate’s inability to strike a spending deal, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) brought the receipts to expose how Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and others in his party are foisting this chaos on the American people over their desire to use taxpayer dollars to fund, amongst other things, government healthcare for illegal aliens.
As background, that has been a matter of contention since the shut down fight started to loom, with President Trump taking to Truth Social to expose what the Democrats want and why much of the over $1 trillion in spending that they are demanding is utterly unacceptable and won’t be engaged with by the Republicans.
Amongst those budgetary items that drew the most concern from across the political spectrum was his allegation, one that was soon repeated by Vice President JD Vance and the Administration itself, amongst other Republican leaders, that amongst the spending the Democrats want is hundreds of billions of dollars to pay for healthcare for non-citizens, including illegal aliens. Democrats quickly, though unconvincingly, insisted that Trump’s allegation was false.
Speaker Johnson then stepped in to show that it was indeed a real problem, as it is what the Democrats are pushing for. Beginning, he noted that Americans are being harmed by their crazy intransigence, saying, “Real pain is being inflicted upon the American people because 44 Democrats in the Senate have voted for the third time to reject the completely non-partisan, completely clean, very simple, 24-page continuing resolution that we passed in the House here two weeks ago now.”
Continuing, Speaker Johnson alleged that Democrats aren’t going along with it because Schumer is trying to prevent AOC from outflanking him to the left, saying, “Why did Chuck Schumer change his tune? Everybody knows that now he’s trying to avoid a challenge from his left flank in his next Senate reelection campaign, and he wants to avoid the scrutiny that he received for doing the right thing back in March, because the far left and the base really went crazy on poor Chuck Schumer, and so he changed his tune, and now they’re trying to pretend it’s about something completely different.”
Getting to the bit about healthcare for illegal aliens, the Speaker of the House introduced it by contrasting that spending with how Democrats are treating illegal aliens, saying, “They have made a decision that they would rather give taxpayer-funded benefits to illegal aliens than to keep the doors open for the American people.”
Adding to that later on, Speaker Johnson brought the receipts to reveal what the Democrats are up to and note that the illegal alien healthcare matter is real. He began, “There’s been a lot of talk about, they say that we’re making this up, this illegal aliens receiving taxpayer benefits. It’s a talking point, they said.”
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He continued, “I want to remind you of a couple of key facts everybody can remember, I think back to 2020 in the presidential debate for all the candidates on the Democrat side. You might remember, famously, they were asked the question, ‘Raise your hand,’ they said on the stage, ‘if you believe that illegal aliens should receive health care paid for by American taxpayers.’ Every single one of them raised their hand to great applause in the audience from the Democrats who were there, those hands included Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Now, what did they do? Did they follow through on that promise? Yeah, they absolutely did. Joe Biden used executive orders, and he expanded benefits, health care to illegal aliens in his four-year term.”
Adding to that, Speaker Johnson noted, “That was an outrageous violation of the existing federal law and of the principles of good stewardship. Those resources are not meant for people who break the law and come into our country. Those resources are not meant for people who break the law and come into our country. They’re meant for US citizens. And so they watered down these health programs. It was terribly dangerous then.”
He then went on to explain that the GOP had ended all of that insanity as part of the Trump-trumpeted “One Big, Beautiful Bill,” slashing the health subsidies for illegal aliens. He further added, “A big chunk of that bill was the health provisions. Now, why are we saying that they want to return and restore taxpayer-funded benefits to illegal aliens? Because that’s exactly what they did when they rejected the clean CR that we sent over.”
And, somewhat later on, he commented further on the matter of healthcare for illegal aliens, explaining, “They want to remove the rural hospital fund that Republicans fought so hard to put into the one big, beautiful bill we set $50 billion aside to take care of rural hospitals. Why would Chuck Schumer want to get rid of that? I don’t know. A lot of those rural hospitals are in red states. You have to decide for yourself what the motivations are here. But they say they prefer health care. Why would they want to do that? The other thing that they put in there is very important, and on page 57 in Section 2141, [this is] not a Republican talking point, read from the Democrats document themselves. They said that they want to repeal the health provisions of the One Big, Beautiful Bill. Why is that so important? Because [those health provisions] eliminated all of the taxpayer funded benefits going to illegals.”
Then, explaining how going along with the Democrat plan would turn out, he noted that it would lead to hundreds of billions in funding for healthcare for non-citizens, saying, “The Democrats counter proposal, CR, the dirty CR, we call it, as opposed to the clean CR, would result in nearly $200 billion being spent on illegal aliens and other noncitizens.”
Watch him further explain the matter here: