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Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) on Friday said the government shutdown, the longest in modern U.S. history, will stretch past Thanksgiving.
“I think it’s going to go on after Thanksgiving,” Burchett told anchor Black Burman on “The Hill on NewsNation.” “Yeah, I think the pain is going to continue until the TSA — [if] you have three or four Democrats peel off and capitulate on this thing, and it’s going to come back and say, ‘Hey, you know this is our health care issue. Let’s come to the table. Let’s quit suffering. Let’s get to the table on this, on this health care issue.’”
“And until that happens, I don’t see it happening,” Burchett added.
Burchett said that Republicans have “staked their ground” with passing a clean continuing resolution, but added if Democrats want to negotiate over expanding health care subsidies set to expire at the end of the year, “What’s wrong with President Trump’s idea of opening the government?”
He accused Democrats of profiting off of health insurance companies, and that the party “is being funded by who’s getting fat off ObamaCare.”
“It’s not the doctors. It’s not the patients. It sure as heck isn’t the patients that were lied to from the start,” Burchett said. “It’s like they got a $5 bill and they throw it on a fishing line and run it down the hall to the Senate chambers, and they are all the Democrats are chasing it, and that’s exactly what this is about.
“It’s not about taking care of people. It’s about power. It’s about control. It’s arrogance. It’s Washington, D.C., to a T and it needs to change.”
Earlier in the day, Senate Democrats offered Republicans a short-term funding stopgap with an attached three-bill “minibus” and the extension of tax credits for a year. Republicans saw the offer as a “nonstarter” and, as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) called it, as “terrible.”
“The five largest health care companies in America have had a 1,000 percent increase in their stock prices since 2010. We’re flooding these people with money that’s creating inflation,” Graham continued. “The program is broken, and I’m not going to keep giving hundreds of billions of dollars to insurance companies.”
While Democrats have made extending Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies their central focus amid funding negotiations, Republicans have consistently said they will negotiate only after the government reopens.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) held the same line.
“A one-year extension along the lines of what they’re suggesting … it just doesn’t even get close,” Thune said, and added that the Democratic offer also does not include protections for the Hyde Amendment, which bars the use of federal funds to pay for abortions.
