Press Releases

WASHINGTON — On Day Two of the Democrat-led government shutdown, Speaker Johnson appeared on CBS’ CBS Mornings and Fox Business’ Kudlow to discuss Chuck Schumer’s refusal to reopen the government and criticized mainstream media outlets and Congressional Democrats for lying about their bid to restore healthcare funding to illegal aliens in exchange for keeping the government open.

Watch Speaker Johnson on CBS here, on Fox Business here.

On Democrats lying about providing funding for healthcare for illegal aliens:

We stood and did a House Republican Leadership press conference this morning in front of every media outlet in the United States, and I walked them through specifically title and verse and page number of the Senate Democrats own measure that they filed into the record, their counter proposal, continuing resolution that says all these things. Now, I'm going to tell all your listeners, you can pull this up and go through it yourself. Go to speaker.gov, go to the press release page. You'll see all this. You can access their own legislation, not Republican talking points.

I will direct everybody to page of 57 of that document that Chuck Schumer filed and go to Section 2141. It says it right there in the black letter. They want to repeal the important changes we've made to the law in the one big beautiful bill, the Working Families Tax Cut, Larry, that's where we cut out all the taxpayer funding to illegals and Chuck Schumer and the Democrats are staking this entire game on their demand for us to, to unwind that, reverse it and make sure that taxpayer funds go to aliens again. We're not doing it.

On the American people disapproving of the Democrat-led shutdown:

The polling reflects it. I mean, the New York Times, their own poll said 65% of Americans polls said, please, Democrats, don't shut the government down just because you don't get what you want. People understand that this is far simpler than what the Democrats are trying to obscure in their messaging. We did communicate this directly to Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries in the Oval Office with the President. The President and I and Leader John Thune in the Senate were all united, a hundred percent, zero daylight between us, and we said, gentlemen: keep the government open and then we'll have all these discussions and debates. That's our system, Larry. That's how it's supposed to work, but they’ve decided to shut it all down.

On Democrats digging in further amid the government shutdown:

There's no negotiation right now because the Democrats have dug in. You say I'm blaming the Democrats. I mean, these are objective facts. We passed in the House more than two weeks ago a clean continuing resolution. There are no partisan pills in this. There are no Republican priorities. It's just an extension of current funding, Tony, so that we can keep the government open until November 21 to allow the appropriators in both parties to continue their good work. They've been working very hard in a bipartisan fashion to move the 12 appropriations bills. We just ran out of time because at the end of the fiscal year, September 30, they all were asking. Wait a minute. This is a very important. All we're asking is that Senate Democrats do what they have always done in the past, every single time, and allow the additional clock. That's it.