Well, for a Republican perspective on all of this, I spoke earlier with Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin before the latest announcement of a deal.

Senator Ron Johnson, welcome back to the News Hour. Thanks for having me on.

President Trump sounded positive today about the possibility of avoiding a government shutdown saying that he's engaged in talks with Democrats. You were among the Republicans who joined with Democrats in voting to block the funding legislation from advancing.

Why?

Well, I'm just basically a thoroughly discussed with the process.

I've been here 15 years.

We should have passed in that time frame 180 appropriation bills on time before the start of the fiscal year in which they were funding.

We've passed six.

That's a 96.7% failure rate.

To address that, I proposed, and we voted on the Eliminate Shutdown Act.

We get rid of this dysfunction for all time.

Pretty simple bill, just a rolling

14-88 automatic appropriations till the appropriators can come to agreement to pass appropriation

bills. Short of that, the shutdown fairness act. Let's at least pay these people. We're going to do it

after the fact. Let's pay them on time. Neither bill has been passed yet. Throw on top of that,

this package, in order to get it passed,

includes $14.3 billion for the earmarks.

I'm part of the Republican Senate Conference.

We have a resolution against earmarks.

We're in charge.

We've got the chairmanship of the committee,

and we're going to allow $14.3 billion of earmarks

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