Speaking during his daily Capitol press briefing about the ongoing government shutdown, which has now raged for more than a month, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson delivered a stern warning to the Democrats, noting that the pressure on them will now be growing all the more intense as Americans go hungry thanks to their intransigence.
As background, Speaker Johnson’s warnings, delivered on Thursday, October 30, came just days before SNAP ran out of funding, a problem caused by the shutdown on Saturday, November 1. Many on the Republican side of politics have pointed out that the shutdown, coming as it has thanks to Democrats demanding ridiculous spending like $200 billion for non-citizen healthcare, has shown that Democrats are putting Americans last and illegal aliens first, and will, as such, face an increased amount of pressure.
Commenting on the matter, Speaker Johnson began his takedown by noting that, despite all the problems it has caused, Democrats still don’t seem willing to blink and end the illegal alien healthcare-caused shutdown. He said, “The Democrats, incredibly, are showing no signs at all that they want to end their shutdown.”
Noting that the Democrats were being given yet another opportunity to just pass a continuing resolution devoid of partisan spending and end the shutdown, he said, “Now, they’ll have another opportunity today. The Democrats in the Senate will have their 15th opportunity to do the right thing.”
He then added that it didn’t look like they would, and thus that the critical November 1 deadline for SNAP would be hit, a situation that has come to pass. He said, “We’re concerned that they won’t, and if they reject this for the 15th time, they will be ensuring that this shutdown continues past the Nov. 1 deadline.”
Building on that, the Speaker warned that the then-looming Saturday deadline would be “fateful … for a number of reasons” going on to point out the huge real-world impacts on the American public if Democrats keep stonewalling and refuse to just reopen the government with a clean CR of the sort Republicans have proposed countless times.
Explaining the various programs that impoverished Americans rely on, he then said, “Starting on Saturday, let me give you a list of things that this means for the American people: it means that tens of millions of American families will struggle to keep food on the table, because the SNAP program benefits will run dry. It means that WIC assistance — that’s Women, Infants and Children, nutrition programs — will be at risk of running dry. It means that Head Start centers, which serve 60,000 children nationwide, will be at risk of closure.”
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Then, giving yet another example of how their refusal to stop playing politics and just pass the spending package is putting Americans in a bad position, the Speaker further added that the federal employees who are reliant on paychecks are going unpaid as long as the shutdown drags on, saying, “Millions of federal workers … will miss their paychecks.”
Watch him here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video