Senator Jeanne Shaheen Discusses Trump’s Disastrous Shutdown

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Speaker 10 MAGA Mike Johnson made a stunning admission during the morning press conference where he was asked, so why don't you just bring the Republican members back to the House?

Speaker 10 Just why don't you support funding and paying essential workers? Like, why don't we start there, Mike Johnson? Because the Senate seems willing to do that.

Speaker 10 Why don't you do that? Why do you keep telling the House members that they need to be on vacations and not show up and not speak to Democrats, yet alone negotiate with Democrats?

Speaker 10 Like, isn't schoolhouse rocks?

Speaker 10 Isn't like fifth-grade government like the parties are supposed to talk to each other? Why are you telling your members don't talk to Democrats? That's kind of odd, Megan. Mike, don't you think?

Speaker 10 Here's what he says here. Play this clip.

Speaker 13 Chad.

Speaker 13 If it's so important to take the aircraft,

Speaker 13 you said you want to see what happens in the Senate. Why wouldn't you connect right now and say, we're going to have the House back in session and we're going to vote?

Speaker 13 Because you know as well as I do, sometimes when one body moves something, it gives emphasis to the other body.

Speaker 5 Well, no, I don't know that. We just demonstrated it's not true, Chad.
We passed the CR to get everybody paid.

Speaker 5 If I brought everybody back right now and we voted on a measure to do this, to pay essential workers, it would be spiked in the Senate.

Speaker 5 They're going to show you this afternoon that they would spike that bill.

Speaker 5 So it would be a waste of our time and it would take the pressure off Chuck Schumer to get his job done and open the government again. That's what's so infuriating to us.
Yes, sir.

Speaker 10 Ms. Magamike says, you don't want to see mad Magamike.
He wants to be the happy warriors, what he's been repeating over and over and over again.

Speaker 10 Well, then he threatens people who are going to football games. I think that's their approach.

Speaker 10 I guess first it was blame immigrants, then transgender people in Peru, and then go back to immigrants, and now

Speaker 10 say Democrats are destroying football. Here, play this clip.

Speaker 5 We are rounding into a holiday season, as we all know, and we're in the middle of the height of the football season. This is peak travel time for the U.S.

Speaker 5 Hundreds of thousands of Americans are going to travel to football games this weekend, for example.

Speaker 5 And if the current trajectory continues, many Americans could miss watching their favorite teams and reconnecting with friends and family.

Speaker 5 So football fans, hey, if you're stuck in the airport this weekend while your favorite team is about to kick off, you can blame the Democrats for that. All right.

Speaker 10 I mean, who's writing these scripts for him? I mean, this would be like on Saturday Night Live and maybe mildly funny if they weren't ripping away the health care of 20 million people.

Speaker 10 Hey, football fans, blame the Democrats. Who writes these things?

Speaker 10 And then they claim that they're the party of health care as they're ripping away health care from 20 million Americans and everybody knows it.

Speaker 10 Just extend the affordable care act subsidies and protect Medicaid. But he goes,

Speaker 10 we've shown that we're here to do it. Remember that budget bill? We saved it.
We did it. We gave you health.
No one believes this here. Play this clip.

Speaker 5 When the government dumps more money on a bad system, it makes it worse. And that is the reality.
We have to make everybody face that. And then we got to build the consensus around the solutions.

Speaker 5 We have lots of ideas. The Republican Party is the party ready to fix that.
And and we're demonstrating that every day.

Speaker 5 We brought down costs in Medicaid and we strengthened the program in the Big Beautiful bill because we got ineligible enrollees off the program and

Speaker 5 we brought down the cost. It's going to save, the CBO says, the measures that we did in that bill on Medicaid, for example, are going to save $185 billion.
So they're good ideas, Joe.

Speaker 5 We just need time to work through the consensus to do it. But we've got to get the lights back on here again.
We got to open the government so that all of that can happen.

Speaker 10 Just open it. Trust us.
We're going to do it this time, even though we're the party that rips away your health care. The RAG Republicans, what are they talking about?

Speaker 10 Let's bring in Senator Gene Sheen, New Hampshire. Senator Sheen, great to see you on the Midas Touch Network.

Speaker 10 You see Mike Johnson every morning. It's like blaming someone new for the fact that Republicans are ripping away people's health care.

Speaker 10 What's your perspective on the Senate side when you see what he's doing, telling his members, don't even show up to work and don't even talk to the other side?

Speaker 14 Well, Well, I just want to correct what he said about the

Speaker 14 reconciliation bill, the big beautiful betrayal, as I call it, that was passed last summer. The reason it saves $185 billion in Medicaid is because it kicks people off of Medicaid.

Speaker 14 We are going to have tens of thousands of people in my state of New Hampshire who are going to get kicked off of Medicaid as soon as those provisions go into effect.

Speaker 14 And that's going to have a huge impact on on the entire health care system. Not to mention right now what this fight is about.

Speaker 14 And I've said from the very beginning that we ought to be able to keep government open and ensure that we can provide, make sure that people can afford access to their health insurance.

Speaker 14 That's the position I think we ought to take. And

Speaker 14 we can do both.

Speaker 14 The fight is about ensuring that we are not going to see 20 million Americans who are going to have their health insurance premiums become unaffordable and kick 4 million people off of their health insurance because of those rising costs.

Speaker 14 And you know, they keep claiming that

Speaker 14 we knew about this and why did we let this happen? Well, we tried to extend the

Speaker 14 end date for those tax credits four times this year, and the Republicans refused to let us do that. So

Speaker 14 this has been coming.

Speaker 14 Our Republican colleagues know it's been coming, and they refuse to acknowledge that it's going to have a huge impact on people's ability to afford health insurance, and that's going to have implications for the entire health care system.

Speaker 10 You know, at least on the Senate side, the Republicans are showing up. I mean, like to work.
Like, I know, I guess we'll start with, let's start with the floor.

Speaker 10 You know, that on the Senate side, there's work being done. There are committees that are meeting.
On the House side, in the past 90 days, they've showed up.

Speaker 10 I don't know what it was, like 11 or 12 times if that.

Speaker 10 All summer, they said they weren't showing up because once people started talking about the Epstein files, they're like, all right, we're leaving, go home.

Speaker 10 And now, like, to me, I just remember growing up in government class with schoolhouse rocks and fifth grade. Parties got to talk to each other.
Our system relies on conversations.

Speaker 10 So it's just strange to see Mike Johnson Johnson every morning do that press conference and then tell his members, you know what, don't even talk to the other side. Like their ideas don't matter.

Speaker 10 Don't speak. And that to me is like, what do you mean, don't? What are we? Like, like, that's not what our country is about.

Speaker 14 Well, Speaker Johnson seems to be more concerned about his own future than he is about solving problems that. this country faces.

Speaker 14 And the fact is we are in this situation because people have refused to talk to each other.

Speaker 14 The reason there was no government shutdown during the four years of the Biden administration is because we understood that this is not just about who's in the majority and who's in the minority, certainly not in the United States Senate.

Speaker 14 It's about ensuring that we address the minority concerns as part of what we do.

Speaker 14 And they knew they needed 60 votes coming out of the Senate, and they have been unwilling to sit down and talk to us, to negotiate. You know, I was governor of New Hampshire for three terms.

Speaker 14 And when we had serious issues, I I went and met with the Speaker of the House. I had a Republican legislature.
I met with the Senate President.

Speaker 14 And we talked about how we could work together to solve the issues that were facing the state of New Hampshire. And that's what we need to do now.

Speaker 14 We need to see President Trump, who's only met once with the leadership of Congress before the shutdown began. And now

Speaker 14 he's off again to

Speaker 14 Asia for a week. Last weekend, he could have been here meeting meeting with the leadership of Congress helping to solve this issue.

Speaker 14 And he was down in Mar-a-Lago playing golf, doing whatever he does in Mar-a-Lago.

Speaker 14 So he has not shown any kind of leadership, and there has been no willingness on the part of the leadership and Congress to sit down to meet to solve this.

Speaker 14 That's, as you pointed out, that's what this government is founded on. It's founded on compromise, on people working together.

Speaker 14 And the idea that you shouldn't talk to members of the other party and solve problems is totally antithetical to what this government is about.

Speaker 10 And then while there's this shutdown, he's literally demolishing the East Wing, just like putting a bulldozer.

Speaker 10 There's no more East Wing of the White House now. I never thought that I would say that.
$40 billion bailout to Argentina now says we're going to bring in Argentinian beef.

Speaker 10 And our cattle ranchers here are

Speaker 10 absolutely livid. He's focusing on his own private Qatari jets that he's bringing in

Speaker 10 and a settlement with himself, with the Justice Department. Apparently, he has pain and suffering from the 2020 election and the investigation.

Speaker 10 So he believes that the DOJ should be settling with him for $230 million.

Speaker 10 It's also what he's doing and messaging, which to me just is telling the American people, like, I really don't care about you. Like, I'm, this is my, the White House, this is my vanity project.

Speaker 10 Go screw yourself. That's how, I think that's how I see it.
Is that how the people of New Hampshire are seeing it now?

Speaker 14 Well, I think the people of New Hampshire want to see us get this done.

Speaker 15 They,

Speaker 14 they share, generally share my view that we ought to be able to keep the government open and address the costs that people are facing because of the rising costs of health care.

Speaker 14 We need to take action on that. That's what, as I said, that's what this fight is about because those tax credits that millions of Americans rely on are going to expire at the end of December.

Speaker 14 But more importantly, November 1st is when the marketplace for the Affordable Care Act opens up.

Speaker 14 And so people are now getting their bills because insurance companies have had to set rates based on the assumption that we are not going to extend those tax credits.

Speaker 14 And so what we're seeing with people across the country is those bills

Speaker 14 doubling for people. And the people who are getting hit the hardest are older Americans, people who live in rural areas, small business owners.

Speaker 14 About half of the people who are affected are either small business owners or their employees. So, this is going to have a huge impact, not just on those

Speaker 14 people who benefit from those premium tax credits, but on the entire care system, because the expectation is that people who are healthier and younger will drop out because they're not going to be able to afford their health insurance.

Speaker 14 They're going to roll the dice. When they get sick, they're going to go to emergency rooms and that's going to drive up costs for everyone.

Speaker 14 We're going to have a risk pool for health insurance that's going to be older and sicker, and that's going to drive up costs.

Speaker 14 So just because you don't benefit from those premium tax credits doesn't mean you're not going to be affected by what goes on here. And

Speaker 14 we can do this. This is not that challenging.

Speaker 14 If we sit down and talk to each other, we can come up with a compromise that can address some of the concerns we've heard from our Republican colleagues and still extend those tax credits for people who need them.

Speaker 14 And what's ironic about this, Ben, is that 57%

Speaker 14 of people who

Speaker 14 identify as MAGA Republicans who benefit from those tax credits. And 76%

Speaker 14 of people who are premium tax credit receivers are in states that Donald Trump won in the election. So it's in everybody's interest to try and solve this problem.

Speaker 14 I don't understand why our colleagues have been so reluctant to address what they know is a looming problem.

Speaker 10 And something that's also, as we pivot to foreign relations, you sit on the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations that

Speaker 10 I just feel that in a few years from now, people are going to look back on, to me, what's happening in the Caribbean and now in the Pacific with the United States military.

Speaker 10 without providing any transparency. I mean, shooting at these fishing boats

Speaker 10 and then providing protectual justifications for it that don't really just kind of logically make sense based on knowing the types of drugs that are in the area, the size of the boat, where the boat's located, the amount of times it would need to refuel, where it looks like.

Speaker 10 I mean, just looking at it logically, look, we should have the most serious interdiction policies when it comes to drug boats and drug running.

Speaker 10 I just think back, this is how I talked about it on the show, to Abu Ghraib when we talked about what, you know, how horrible it was to waterboard and to torture individuals who were believed to be like al-Qaeda terrorists and to be, you know, and now it's not waterboarding.

Speaker 10 The federal government is killing people without any process, just killing and just saying, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. And I'm thinking to myself, what's going on here?

Speaker 10 And what's the perspective now going on on the Foreign Relations Committee?

Speaker 14 I think there's real concern on both sides of the aisle about what we're seeing in the Caribbean and now in the Pacific because of the strike off of Colombia.

Speaker 14 You know, in New Hampshire, we've been very hard hit by the opioid epidemic. We've had one of the highest overdose death rates in the country.
It's finally gotten better in the last couple of years.

Speaker 14 But I appreciate the fight against the drug cartels.

Speaker 14 It's something that we need to engage in, but we need to do it in a way that is going to be effective and that's going to not risk escalation that puts at risk American lives and men and women in the military.

Speaker 14 I was down in South America with a bipartisan delegation almost three years ago now and one of the things we did was to meet with the Coast Guard in Colombia and see how they were cooperating with the United States to address drug running in the country.

Speaker 14 We went out and we saw efforts to close up the cocaine labs that are in the country. And

Speaker 14 that's an effective way to go after

Speaker 14 the drugs that we all want to eradicate. Nobody is interested in seeing drugs get into the United States.
We need to stop that.

Speaker 14 But we need to do it in a way that doesn't put at risk Americans and that cooperates with those countries who are working to try and address it within their own country.

Speaker 10 Senator Shaheen, I appreciate your time. We've got to talk more.
I want to talk more about what's going on in the Foreign Relations Committee, but we'll get you back on soon.

Speaker 14 Great. Nice to be with you.
Thanks.

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