Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) said Friday government shutdownThe longest in modern American history, will be surpassed by Thanksgiving.
“I think this will continue after Thanksgiving,” Burchett. told Anchor Black Berman “Pahari on NewsNation.” “Yeah, I think the pain will continue until TSA – [if] You have three or four Democrats who are adamant and capitulating on this thing, and it will come back and say, ‘Hey, you know this is our health care issue. Let’s come to the table. Let’s stop suffering. “Let’s come to the table on this health care issue.”
“And until that happens, I don’t see it happening,” Burchett said.
Burchett said Republicans “have staked their ground” by passing a clean continuation resolution, but he added that if Democrats want to negotiate an extension of health care subsidies set to expire at the end of the year, “what’s wrong with President Trump’s idea of opening the government?”
He accused Democrats of profiting from health insurance companies and said the party was being “funded by people who got fat from Obama Care.”
“These are not doctors. These are not patients. It’s certainly not patients who were lied to from the beginning,” Burchett said. “It’s like they’ve got a $5 bill and they’ve thrown it on a fishing line and run it down the hall to the Senate chambers, and all those Democrats are chasing it, and that’s exactly what it’s about.
“This is not about taking care of people. This is about power. This is about control. This is ego. This is Washington, D.C. and that needs to change.”
Earlier in the day, Senate Democrats … Offered Republicans wanted a short-term funding stopgap with an attached three-bill “minibus” and an extension of the tax credit for one year. Republicans rejected this proposalnonstarter” And, as Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) put it, “terrible.”
Graham added, “The stock prices of the five largest health care companies in America have increased 1,000 percent since 2010. We are flooding these people with money which is causing inflation.” “The program is broken, and I will not continue to pay hundreds of billions of dollars to insurance companies.”
While Democrats have made expanding Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies their central focus amid funding talks, Republicans have consistently said they will negotiate only after the government reopens.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R.S.D.) also had the same opinion.
“A one-year extension in line with what they’re suggesting … it still doesn’t come close,” Thune said, adding that the Democratic proposal also does not include protections for the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of federal funds to pay for abortions.
