Hakeem Jeffries has publicly challenged the Republican Speaker, Mike Johnson, for a live debate on the ongoing shutdown situation. Guess who’s going to hide behind the white wall again?
The “great” United States of America has just slipped into its first full week of government shutdown after it failed to get Democratic support in the Senate on a “clean” stopgap spending bill crafted entirely by Trump’s party, ignoring the Democrats’ demand for an extension of tax credits for the Affordable Care Act’s health care marketplace. On Friday, House Speaker Mike Johnson declared this week a district work week, meaning the House will not return for votes.
While Republicans have cast blame for the shutdown on Democrats’ health care demands, Democrats insist Republicans need to negotiate. Amidst this, the Democratic House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, has written a letter to the Republican leader, Johnson, asking for a TV debate. “I write to challenge you to a debate on the floor of the House of Representatives any day of this week in primetime, broadcast live to the American people,” he wrote.
Jeffries reasoned that a debate on the floor would provide the Americans a much-deserved transparency on the situation, given the urgency of the matter and “the Republican refusal to negotiate a bipartisan agreement.” However, the responses from the Republicans have been humiliating and unprofessional, with Trump posting cartoons of Jeffries in a Mexican sombrero, accusing Democrats of wanting to give health care benefits to undocumented immigrants.
However, the Democrats are only leveraging that need to push for changes on spending caps, Medicaid, and ACA subsidies, all of which apply to legal residents, not undocumented immigrants. Johnson, too, accused Jeffries of playing politics. “I’m not going to let Hakeem try to pretend for these theatrics. I mean, this is a Chuck Schumer decision, the ball is in the Senate’s court now,” he said. Defending the Republicans, he continued,
“Look, my friend, Hakeem had his shot. We debated all this on the House floor, as you know, before he passed our bill, he spoke for seven or eight minutes, he had all of his colleagues lined up. They gave it their best shot, and they argued and they stomped their feet and screamed at us and all that. And still, we passed the bill in bipartisan fashion and sent it over to the Senate.” (via Independent)
While Johnson claimed in a press conference that the priority is to reopen the government, his mocking of Jeffries and refusal to appear in a live debate testify that the Republicans have no means to defend their stand. But too bad, Johnson, the Americans already know it.
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