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Speaker of the House Mike Johnson defended Republicans’ handling of the government shutdown and squarely blamed Democrats for what he described as a “terribly selfish decision” during an interview with “Special Report.”
“We were simply trying to buy time,” Johnson said. “Working through the process, we ran out of time. We need seven more weeks.”
Johnson claimed House Democrats blocked the GOP’s continuing resolution (CR) — a short-term funding measure meant to keep the government open — and instead pushed forward a “dirty CR” championed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
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“We put a clean CR on the table, assuming that everybody, all the Democrats, would do the right thing,” Johnson added. “They’ve rejected it. Now, three times, as of today, the Senate Democrats — 44 of them — have voted the clean CR down, and they proposed Chuck Schumer’s version, which is a dirty CR.”
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He went further, alleging that Democrats didn’t even read the bill they presented.
“They don’t understand what they filed,” Johnson insisted.
The Louisiana representative torched the Democrats’ proposal, saying it would “entirely” repeal health care reforms enacted by Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” and add trillions of dollars in spending for a seven-week stop-gap measure.
“They want to give health care to illegal aliens, claw back the funds that we put in for rural hospitals and all sorts of other mayhem,” Johnson said. “We can’t do that. We’re just not going to do it.”
One of the provisions Johnson emphasized was Medicaid reform, which he said the Trump administration strengthened by ensuring that only eligible recipients would get coverage.
Johnson said “2.3 million illegal recipients for Medicaid will be pushed off the rolls because of our reforms. And it’s going to save $185 billion of taxpayer funds,” he said. “They [Democrats] want to return all those ineligible people back to the rolls.”
Despite Democrats blocking the GOP funding bill three times, Johnson maintained the measure was largely nonpartisan.
“I could have loaded this up with all sorts of partisan provisions,” he said. “But we didn’t do that because we’re operating in good faith, and we want our partners on the other side of the aisle to go along with us so that the appropriators can go and debate all these issues. That’s how the system works, and they’re preventing it.”
Chris Towner, policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, described the Republican proposal as “just about as clean of a CR as you could get.”
The current government shutdown is the first since 2018, when the federal government closed for 35 days, the longest in U.S. history. When Johnson was asked how long he believed the closure would last this time around, he said he hopes for a quick resolution.
“I hope it’s a short one because real people are suffering because of this,” Johnson concluded.
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