Majority Leader | Press Release | Press Releases | THE NE...Skip to primary navigation Skip to content×Close THE NEWSROOMRemarks Press Releases The Leader Board Op-Eds Videos SENATE RESOURCESRepublican Senators Committees Congressional Record Congress.gov Senate Floor Webcast ABOUT LEADER THUNE×Close THE NEWSROOMRemarks Press Releases The Leader Board Op-Eds Videos SENATE RESOURCESRepublican Senators Committees Congressional Record Congress.gov Senate Floor Webcast ABOUT LEADER THUNExxsearchxMENUFacebookXInstagramFacebookXInstagramVisit Leader Thune's South Dakota Site Here THE NEWSROOMRemarks Press Releases The Leader Board Op-Eds Videos SENATE RESOURCESRepublican Senators Committees Congressional Record Congress.gov Senate Floor Webcast ABOUT LEADER THUNExxsearchxMENUHomeTHE NEWSROOMPress Releases10.09.25Thune Joins Squawk Box, ABC News“[Democrat] leadership has no interest in a solution. When Chuck Schumer is saying ‘this is getting better for us every day,’ that’s not somebody who wants to see this get resolved.” Click here to watch Squawk Box and here to watch ABC News.WASHINGTON — U.S. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) joined Joe Kernen on CNBC’s Squawk Box and Linsey Davis on ABC News.On Congress’ responsibility to fund the government:“The only thing standing between the government being opened up again and us having a conversation about this is five Democrats coming forward and doing the right thing for the country.”[…]“This is a political game for [Democrats] … I understand they’ve got these outside groups and this left-wing constituency that is clamoring to fight with President Trump. But this isn’t about the game … These are the real life consequences that happen to the American people if their government doesn’t act in a responsible way.”On Democrats’ shutdown hypocrisy:“[Democrat] leadership has no interest in a solution. When Chuck Schumer is saying ‘this is getting better for us every day,’ that’s not somebody who wants to see this get resolved. And they are pandering to the left-wing special interest groups out there who have demanded this and demanded this showdown with the president of the United States.“We’ve got a bill … that’s passed the House, that’s sitting at the desk in the Senate, that we could pass today, put it on the president’s desk, he would sign it into law, and this shutdown, whole fiasco, ends, and people can get back to work, and we can start paying the federal employees who are starting to miss paychecks.”[…]“The last year the Senate Democrats had the majority, we didn’t do a single appropriations bill. We’ve done three [this year]. We want to do more. The funding resolution is about … giving us the opportunity to finish the annual appropriations process in the way we should be doing it – transparent, open, through regular order …“We’ve got a very straightforward proposal out there: Keep the government open, and then let's sit down and talk about these other issues.”On the consequences of Democrats’ shutdown:“Right now, it’s all about politics. And as Chuck Schumer pointed out in his interview yesterday, this is a big game for the Democrats. He actually said yesterday, ‘Every day, this is getting better for us.’ I mean, do you think it’s getting better for the troops that aren’t going to get paid, the air traffic controllers that aren’t going to get paid, for the Border Patrol agents that aren’t going to get paid?“This isn’t a game. This is real. This is people’s lives we’re talking about. This is the families of the American people. And it’s important to get the government open again. We give the Democrats an opportunity, pretty much on a daily basis, to actually vote to do that.“We have 55 senators – a majority, 55 out of 100 senators – who are voting to open the government. We need five more Democrats, because, as you just pointed out, it takes 60 to do anything in the Senate.”On Democrats’ health care crisis:“Obamacare, at its core, is inflationary. It’s been driving up costs … The fundamental problem here is the underlying program … needs to be reformed, and the president wants to do that. The president would like to overhaul Obamacare and give people health insurance that is higher quality and more affordable, but you’ve got Obamacare now embedded for the last 15 years.“The Democrats … enhanced these subsidies a few years ago, so there’s no income cap on it … I think the president is more than open to sitting down and working on solutions that would improve quality and affordability for people in this country when it comes to health care. But part of the problem you have is the Obamacare program in the first place, and everything that goes with it, has an inflationary impact on health care costs.“Health care costs have been going up. They’re going to go up irrespective of what happens on these enhanced subsidies, they were going up anyway … I think that’s a problem that needs to be addressed [and] needs to be looked at … We’re willing to do that, but you can’t do it while you’re holding the federal government hostage.”[…]“The question you have to ask yourself is, should the American taxpayer be subsidizing people who are making $500,000 a year, when it comes to their insurance? … The very fact that it costs $400 billion to extend it … suggests that this thing ought to be ripe for reform …”[…]“When you have people making half a million dollars a year that are getting subsidies from the taxpayers for these federal subsidies for these insurance plans, something might be a little bit amiss there. There are no income caps on it. There are a lot of what you’d call premium-free policies – in other words, nobody … pays anything for it.“They don’t even know they have coverage. Insurance companies are incentivized to enroll people. They do that automatically, sometimes without the insurer’s knowledge … The subsidies are going directly from the government to the insurance companies. And as a result of that, last year … a little more than half of the people who were covered never filed a claim, because a lot of them don’t even know they have coverage.”PrintEmailTweetNextPreviousTHE NEWSROOMSENATE RESOURCESABOUT LEADER THUNEFacebookXInstagram
