Speaking in a powerful press conference on October 27, the day before the government shutdown hit the four week mark, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) reminded watchers and listeners why the government is shut down, exposing the fact that Democrats are demanding hundreds of billions of dollars for illegal alien healthcare and vowing that Republicans would not aid and abet that.
As background, the matter of healthcare for illegal aliens has been a problem since the beginning, with President Donald Trump taking to Truth Social shortly before the shutdown began to expose how Democrats were demanding an immense amount of nonsense spending to keep the government open, and vowing that Republicans would refuse to pass that.
That has continued since the shutdown began, with a wide sweep of Republicans, including Speaker Johnson, continually reminding the public that the government is shut down because the Democrats want to use taxpayer dollars to pay for illegal alien healthcare. Further, the Trump White House released a fact sheet exposing exactly how it is happening.
Doing so, that fact sheet said, “FACT: Democrats’ proposal would result in nearly $200 billion spent on healthcare for illegal immigrants and other non-citizens over the next decade — enough to fund the entire Children’s Health Insurance Program.” It went on to add details like: “Democrats’ proposal would once again allow those improperly granted asylum and parole under Biden’s open borders scheme to receive Medicaid,” “Democrats’ proposal would require Medicaid to pay more for emergency care provided to illegal aliens than it does for American patients who are disabled, elderly, or children,” and “Democrats’ proposal would allow California to continue exploiting a loophole to fund Medicaid for illegal aliens.”
In any case, Speaker Johnson reminded the public of that fact during his Monday, October 27 press conference, bluntly saying, “This is what the Democrats in the Senate are demanding to reopen the government. They want to give $200 billion in health benefits to illegal aliens and non-citizens paid for by US taxpayers.”
Continuing, the Speaker explained that while the Republicans are doing their best to keep such funding excluded from anything that passes, as was much of the goal of the Big, Beautiful Bill, Democrats want to refund waste like spending on healthcare for non-Americans. He said, “That is in their proposal. They want billions in wasteful programs to be returned to foreign countries. See, we stop these things. They want to turn it all back on.”
Adding to that, the Speaker noted that while Republicans want to reopen the government so that important programs can once again be fully funded, Democrats are refusing to go along with that. He said, “They’re demanding that we do all that to get the government open for hard-working Americans.”
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Concluding by giving a few more examples of the sort of thing that Democrats are demanding and vowing that Republicans would not support those moves, he said, “Again, they want to give a half a billion to left-leaning news organizations and and they want to cut $50 billion from rural hospitals. We cannot. We will not do those things, and they know that very well.”
Watch him here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video