Speaker Mike Johnson heard a plea from a military family to move legislation paying active-duty forces amid the government shutdown in a remarkable televised exchange Thursday.
Johnson was already under pressure from a growing number of fellow House Republicans to pass legislation to prevent a potential missed paycheck due Oct. 15. But on C-SPAN, he heard directly from “Samantha,” a caller who identified herself as a Republican military mom from Fort Belvoir in Virginia and urged him to call the House back and take action.
“I’m begging you to pass this legislation,” she said, her voice cracking. “My kids could die.”
Johnson so far has ruled out that possibility, arguing that it’s incumbent on Senate Democrats to pass the seven-week stopgap measure the House passed last month. The House has not returned since. The caller was not convinced by that argument.
“As a Republican, I’m very disappointed in my party, and I’m very disappointed in you, because you do have the power to call the House back,” she said, adding, “You could stop this and you could be the one that could say: ‘Military is getting paid.’… And I think it is awful and the audacity of someone who makes six figures a year to do this to military families is insane.”
The caller said she has “two medically fragile children,” a husband who has PTSD from two tours in Afghanistan and that her family lives paycheck to paycheck.
“Samantha, I’m so sorry to hear about your situation,” Johnson replied, saying he has been “so angry” this week because of situations like hers. He noted he has huge numbers of impacted military members in his own district.
But Johnson also claimed Senate Democrats led by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer would block such a standalone bill in the Senate, and he argued that Democrats are holding troop pay hostage as they continue to block the House-approved stopgap measure.
“Democrats are the ones preventing you from getting a check,” Johnson said, arguing it would be a “show vote” in the House. Schumer declined to address whether Democrats would back a standalone troop pay measure in comments to reporters Wednesday. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said he supported the move.
White House officials, meanwhile, are quietly preparing a slate of options to shift funds in order to pay troops if Congress doesn’t act in time. Trump will not let the military pay lapse, they’ve said.
In his C-SPAN appearance — the first live-caller appearance on the network for a House speaker in 24 years — Johnson was also peppered with a series of questions about the expiring Affordable Care Act insurance subsidies, GOP cuts to Medicaid and the fallout for rural hospitals as well as Trump’s threats to mass fire federal workers and deployment of military troops to American cities.
One GOP caller praised Johnson’s work as speaker. Another said Johnson’s characterization that people in cities where Trump has deployed the National Guard are happy with the results was “dystopian.”
Pressed by a caller from Texas what Republicans’ plan to fix the ACA was, Johnson replied, “Great question.”
“There’s a lot of improvement that’s needed. Obamacare did not do what was promised,” he continued. “We’ve got to fix that. Republicans are the party that have the ideas to do that.” He added the ACA is “very, very complicated“ and can’t be torn “out at the roots.”
Johnson said he spoke to Trump about the topic as recently as yesterday: “He wants to fix the health care system and we have a lot of ideas to do that,” he said.
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