Press Releases

WASHINGTON – This morning, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) joined Fox & Friends on day 30 of the Democrat government shutdown to discuss the Democrats’ continual refusal to reopen the government and the needless pain their political games are inflicting on the American people.

Click here or above to watch Whip Emmer on Fox News’ Fox & Friends.

Whip Emmer on Democrats’ continual refusal to reopen the government:

“You talk about majorities, bipartisan majorities—keep in mind, we passed this spending bill out of the House on September 19th, Charlie, well in advance of the September 30th deadline. There was only one Democrat that joined with the Republicans in the House to pass it over to the Senate. Now, it gets to the Senate and you've got a rule, the filibuster rule. They need 60 votes. We only need a simple majority in the House. They need 60 votes to get something to the floor, and Chuck Schumer has refused to provide the votes necessary to get this to the floor. And as a result, the government's been shut down for 30 days now.”

Whip Emmer on Americans beginning to feel impacts of the shutdown:

“Most people haven't noticed up until this week. Thanks to Donald Trump finding a way to pay our troops last month, that pain was delayed. But starting this week, the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest government employee union in the country, 820,000 members, sent a letter and said, ‘Get this done. Open the government up so you can get back to negotiating.’ Guess what? Tuesday, air traffic controllers did not get a paycheck, and you just outlined for the viewers all the bad things that are going to happen. This is starting to become very real. They are playing with people's actual lives.”

Whip Emmer on the Democrats’ dishonesty and political games:

“Look, you should not be putting your partisan political strategy ahead of the American people that you were hired to serve. They are simply not honest with this. I mean, Chuck Schumer, who's been here for decades, right, makes a statement that's completely untrue. He says, ‘Republicans control the White House, the Senate, the House. Therefore, the shutdown is a Republican shutdown.’ Chuck, everybody knows, and you of all know, that you got to have at least seven Democrats voting with the Republicans in the Senate in order to get this done. And you're the one that's shutting it down. Why? Why? Because he wants $1.5 trillion more in spending. He wants to put illegals back on taxpayer funded healthcare and he wants to gut the $50 billion rural health care fund that Republicans and Donald Trump just created last July. It's insane.”

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