Johnson pushes back on Jeffries: ‘There is nothing partisan about this continuing resolution’
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) insisted on Sunday that there is “nothing partisan” about the Republican bill to keep the government funded ahead of the shutdown deadline this Wednesday.
In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” the GOP leader pushed back on House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s (D-N.Y.) suggestion this past week that the Republican proposal is a “reckless partisan bill that continues to gut the health care of the American people” and that “their bill is dead on arrival.”
“Look, that statement by my friend Hakeem is absolutely absurd,” Johnson told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “There is nothing partisan about this continuing resolution, nothing. We didn’t add a single partisan priority or policy rider at all. We’re operating completely in good faith to get more time.”
“The only thing that would gut health care, using his own phraseology there, is if we took Hakeem Jeffries’s and [Senate Minority Leader] Chuck Schumer’s demand here, because they want to cut $50 billion from rural hospitals — That’s the new fund that we added in the big, beautiful bill, the working families tax cuts that we passed just a couple months ago — They want to gut that. They also want to hold up all this funding that I listed,” Johnson continued.
Democrats have rejected the suggestion that the GOP continuing resolution is “clean” and nonpartisan, arguing that it perpetuates spending and policies that House Democrats nearly unanimously voted against earlier this year, when Republicans passed their budget bill.
“If they’re continuing a policy related to legislation that they passed in the House on a partisan basis, how is that clean?” Jeffries said this week. “It’s not clean, it’s dirty. It’s not bipartisan, it’s partisan.”
The Democratic leaders have also been adamant that Republicans won’t get their party’s support without action on Affordable Care Act subsidies that are set to expire at year’s end — a demand Republicans have maintained is a non-starter.
“The Obamacare subsidies is a policy debate that has to be determined by the end of the year… not right now, while we’re simply trying to keep the government open so we can have all these debates,” Johnson said in the Sunday interview.