Commenting yet again on how ridiculous he sees the Schumer Shutdown as being in what could be deeper cracks in the Democratic Party coalition behind the shutdown, United States Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) skewered his party for not being able to get its act together and put together a reasonable proposal that would end the shutdown before tens of millions of Americans go hungry.
As background, the shutdown has now been ongoing for more than a month, as it began on October 1 after the Senate failed to strike a deal on a Continuing Resolution on September 30. Since then, Republicans have continually shown that no deal the Democrats want is possible, as the left is demanding hundreds of billions of dollars for illegal alien healthcare, which is obviously unacceptable.
With Republicans refusing to contemplate that insane spending, the very sort of thing that Trump was elected to try and stop, and most Democrats refusing to back down on the illegal alien healthcare matter, the government has remained shut down. As a result, SNAP ran out of funding on November 1, meaning that the 42 million Americans who rely on the program could start going hungry.
Speaking about the matter during an interview with CNN’s Manu Raju, Sen. Fetterman apologized to the nation for the disastrous news that SNAP could go unfunded thanks to Democratic obstinacy, saying, “And like I said, to all of the viewers, I’m apologizing that we can’t even get our sh*t together and just open up our government.”
He further said, during the interview, that he knows how hard this is hitting people, as his wife works at a food bank and has already seen the lines get longer and longer. He said, “I’m saying that I’ll witness it firsthand. My wife, Giselle, she develops the Free Store in our community. It distributes food three times a week and her lines have already got longer.”
Continuing, he noted that with things getting even worse thanks to SNAP running out of funding as a result of the shutdown, people are in an even worse place, and it’s quite scary. He said, “And now, I will encounter people that have no SNAP benefits starting on Saturday, and I don’t have an explanation for them.”
He then apologized for what has gone on, saying that Congress has been a complete and total failure as regards the budget and getting something passed, saying, “All I could say is I’m sorry. It’s an absolute failure — what occurred here for the last month — and now things are really going to land.”
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Commenting on how scary this must be for parents, he then said, “And imagine being a parent with a couple kids and how you’re going to fill the refrigerator and pack their lunches and get on with their lives when the things that they’ve depended on now is gone because we can’t even agree to just open things up.”
And, nuking his party for its obstinacy and putting Americans at risk, he said, “If a Democrat — you know, we’re not allowed to just open this up, I mean, then our party has bigger problems than I thought we might have already. It’s like, that’s not controversial. Pay everybody. And you have our workers here borrowed over a third of a billion dollars to pay their own bills.” He added, “Like, it’s a failure.”
Watch him here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video