Fox News Podcasts Presents the Brett Bear Podcasts with Fox News Chief Political Anchor, Brett Bear.

If anyone wanted evidence as to who wanted this shutdown, just look at the fact that Johnson

does not even have the House

in session.

As long as we have a Speaker of the House who is not willing to come back in with his

members, then it's going to be hard to get this resolved.

All along, Republicans wanted to shut the government down. Let's welcome in Mike Johnson, Louisiana. Good to see you, sir. Thank you for taking the time. I know that you have been very busy. Busy day. Those clips are hilarious to me. The House did its job. The House Republicans did our job. It's been over two weeks. We passed that continued resolution. It's clean. It's simple, it's 24 pages in length. We were simply

trying to buy time. And this is really important for everybody to remember, John. The reason

we're doing this is that the appropriators are trying to rebuild the muscle memory, to do appropriations

to spend taxpayer dollars responsibly. And that takes 12 separate approach bills. We were doing

that, working through the process. We ran out of time. We need seven more weeks. So we put a clean CR on the table, assuming that everybody, all the Democrats, would do the right thing. They've rejected it. Now, three times, as of today, the Senate Democrats, 44 of them, have voted that CR, the clean CR down. And they proposed Chuck Schumer's version, which is a dirty

CR. Why do we say that? Because he wants to add $1.5 trillion in new spending to a seven-week stop-get measure, and they want to give health care to illegal aliens, claw back the funds that we put in for rural hospitals and all sorts of other mayhem. We can't do that. We're just not going to do it. So this is the real point of contention here. I mean, obviously they want to restore some of the cuts that were enacted in the Big Beautiful bill when it comes to Medicaid funding, et cetera. But Democrats insist our bill does not provide federal dollars for health care for illegal immigrants. And you say what? I say they obviously have not read their bill. This counter proposal that he filed,

everybody can Google it, go pull it up, it's on the Senate's website and in the legislative

text, go to page 57 of Chuck Schumer's bill and look at section 2141. It says right there

in plain language they want to repeal the health provisions of the one big beautiful bill.

I do part ways with you here on this idea of plain language. I read that whole section. It

might as well be written in Mandarin. And that's probably why the Democrats don't understand what

they filed. But if you interpret that and you get through all the subsections, what you realize

is they're trying to take out in its entirety

the reforms that we put into the big beautiful bill pertaining to health.

And why is that so important?

Because what we did was we strengthened the Medicaid program by making sure that ineligible recipients are not on the rolls.

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