President Donald Trump called on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and his Democrat colleagues on day 36 of the shutdown to “stop playing games with people’s lives” and reopen the federal government.
Trump’s call for Democrats to support the House-passed clean Continuing Resolution–with zero strings attached–came during his remarks at the American Business Forum in Miami.
“It’s time for Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrat Congress to stop playing games with the people’s lives and to pass a clean funding bill that they’ve done 30 times before, and to reopen government immediately. Just reopen it,” he said.
The CR would continue to fund the government at the 2024 levels approved by then-President Joe Biden and strongly supported by Democrats at the time. Yet Congressional Democrats have opposed the bill 14 times as a means of trying to create leverage to restore taxpayer-funded healthcare benefits to illegal aliens and noncitizens and to renew Obamacare subsidies that expire at year’s end.
Trump said moments earlier that Democrats are holding Americans “hostage” with the shutdown, which is affecting more and more corners of American life as it persists.
“They’re demanding free health care for illegal aliens that just came into our country from prisons and from mental institutions and drug dealers and drug addicts, and they want to give them $1.5 trillion in giveaways that would turbocharge rapid inflation again,” he said.
“Meanwhile, the radical left Democrats are causing millions of Americans who depend on food stamps to go without benefits. They’re forcing federal workers to go without paychecks, and they’re stranding thousands of travelers at the airports,” the president added.
Last month, Schumer declared to PunchBowl News, “Every day gets better for us” during the shutdown, and House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-MA)–the number two ranking House Democrat–told Fox News that while families are suffering during the shutdown, “It is one of the few leverage times we have.”
