Source: United States House of Representatives – Representative Mike Johnson (LA-04)
WASHINGTON — Speaker Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune held a press conference this morning alongside House and Senate Leadership from the West Front of the U.S. Capitol to highlight the implications of the reckless Democrat-led government shutdown.
Watch Speaker Johnson’s full remarks here.
Below are Speaker Johnson’s remarks as delivered:
Today, America’s boys and girls will walk up to these doors, and they’ll see something different, a sign that says, “closed until further notice.” And that’s because, at midnight, the Democrats followed through on their threat to shut down the United States government.
As we speak here this morning, there are hundreds of thousands of federal workers who are getting their furlough notices. Nearly half of our civilian workforce is being sent home. These are hardworking Americans who work for our federal government. Our troops and our border patrol agents will have to go to work, but they’ll be working without pay.
Food assistance, veterans’ benefits, and vital support for women and children are all coming to a halt. Now, thankfully, President Trump is trying to mitigate the damage as much as possible. His administration is working to limit the harm to the American people.
But the longer this goes on, the more pain will be inflicted because it is inevitable when the government shuts down. The sad thing about it is that every single bit of this was entirely avoidable. Democrats could have worked with us in a bipartisan manner to avert this unnecessary and very harmful shutdown, but instead, they did something that is rather shocking to us.
They prioritized taxpayer funded benefits for illegal aliens over keeping the government open for American citizens. They themselves position that as a binary choice, and it’s patently absurd.
Listen to what the Democrats are demanding. They demanded in exchange for our simple, clean, 24-page bipartisan continued resolution, the same one that Chuck Schumer and the Democrats voted for just a few months back in March. In exchange for that, they rejected it, and they demanded something else. They wanted us to add over $1.5 trillion in new federal spending, paid for of course, by hardworking American taxpayers simply for funding the government at current Biden spending levels.
We are not going to do that. We can’t do that. We won’t do it. Almost two weeks ago, the House did our job. In the House, we passed a common sense, nonpartisan bill to keep the government open. Republicans did our job. We had one Democrat join us there. So, it was bipartisan, but every other Democrat in the House voted to shut the government down. And last night, 44 Democrats in the Senate did the same thing.
This is a clean resolution. It would simply buy Congress a few more weeks, seven weeks to finish the job. Why do we need that time? So that appropriators in both parties can finish their work. They’ve been restoring regular order. They’ve passed 12 separate bills out of committee in the House, and the Senate has done its work as well. Three bills of the 12 passed in each chamber.
They don’t line up exactly, so there’s a conference committee constituted for the first time in years that that’s happened. We just need more time because we ran out of clock, the end of the fiscal year, September 30.
This is very important to note. Democrats themselves have voted to pass a clean, bipartisan CR just like this 13 times in the last few years during the four years of the Biden administration. 13 times this happened, Republicans did the responsible thing, even when we were in the minority, to keep the government open. And today should be no different. There is nothing new in this legislation. There’s no poison pill. There are no partisan tricks. There are no gambits whatsoever. The only difference today is the man who is sitting in the Oval Office.
Rather than work with President Trump and Republicans to get this job done, as our party has done repeatedly in the same situation over the years, Democrats want to play political games with the lives and the livelihoods of Americans.
The simple truth is Democrats in Congress have dragged our country into another reckless shutdown to satisfy their far-left base. That is the truth. Whether or not the government remains open or reopens is entirely up to them.
There’s still time for Democrats to pass this clean, bipartisan bill that’s sitting before them. And we encourage our Democrat colleagues to do that. I certainly pray they’ll come to their senses soon and do the right and responsible thing.
The reason they will have one more opportunity today is because of the sound leadership that is being provided in the US Senate by our colleagues, who are standing here with us.
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