This is the first time in history a party has shut down the government over a clean continuing resolution (CR), Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said during a press conference on Friday, laying out what the Democrat shutdown is doing to real Americans, all while Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) tries to appeal to the Marxists within his party’s base.
“This is the first time in history, the first time in the history of the United States Congress that a party has shut down the government over a clean CR we did. We frankly didn’t expect this. We sent over a no-frills, 24-page document to keep the lights on, keep Congress working, keep the paychecks flowing, and they stopped it because they’re afraid of the far left,” Johnson said during the press conference, explaining that Schumer “is trying to bow to the Marxist wing of his party.”
Johnson then walked through some of the “devastating” impacts on the American people of the Democrat shutdown.
“You’ll note a theme here. A lot of these are blue states, where their Senate Democrats are over here keeping the government closed. In California, home of the nation’s largest civilian workforce, more than a quarter of a million federal workers are now working without pay. Both the Democrat senators, Padilla and Schiff, have now voted seven times to block those paychecks,” Johnson began.
“In Virginia, there are 189,000 federal employees, nearly 5 percent of the state’s workforce, that are waiting on their next full paycheck, and both of their senators, Warner and Kane, refused to pass a clean, bipartisan CR that Democrats supported 13 times under Joe Biden in the previous four years,” Johnson said before moving to Maryland, which he described as a “hub of trade and commerce.”
“You have 150,000 federal workers there. Both of their senators, Alsobrooks and Van Hollen, have voted seven times to keep the government closed,” he said.
“In Georgia, home to our nation’s busiest airport, with close to 110,000 federal workers, including thousands of TSA agents and air traffic controllers now being forced to work without pay. You guessed it, Senators Ossoff and Warnock voted to block those paychecks too,” he said, then highlighting Arizona, where “58,000 workers serve the federal government, including many Border Patrol agents who are working hard to keep us safe.
“That hasn’t stopped Arizona senators Kelly and Gallego from blocking funding seven times for the paychecks for their own constituents. In fact, they have so much idle time, they’re having publicity stunts, opposing publicity stunts, outside my office in New York,” he said, before highlighting what is going on in Schumer’s New York:
Let’s talk about New York, because this is interesting. It’s, it’s the home to both of the Democrat leaders, both in the Senate and the House. 115,000 federal workers are waiting on Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer and Kristen Gillibrand to come to their senses and end this shutdown, Chuck Schumer said himself, with every day of the shutdown [it] gets better for us. What does that look like? We’re talking about 2 million civilian workers, 1.3 million active duty service members, everybody being hurt because of it.
“This is beyond the pale what Chuck Schumer is doing right now. It’s sickening. It’s sickening to hear him say it’s better for him and his party when it’s so terrible for real Americans. Millions of people are experiencing real pain because of these political games,” Johnson said, concluding that Schumer has been in Washington, DC, far too long to truly understand the “real pain of real people.”
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