LIVE: House GOP Leaders Hold Press Conference on Day 28 of Government Shutdown (Oct. 28)

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to day 28 of the Democrat shutdown. We're almost a month into this. And we wanted to highlight a couple of things and a few members this morning. There are some very important developments. But before we get to all that, one of the things that we wanted to note is that really it's it's painfully obvious to everyone. And the true motivation of the Democrats' historic obstruction has now become very clear for everyone. I want to use a little simple, Lillie, if you show me this real quick, just real quick, simple facts, because these things get obscured too much. But there are simple facts about the Democrat shutdown that everybody needs to recognize. Here's four of them. First of all, we have to have Democrats to reopen the government. You know that in the Senate, it requires 60 votes to break an impasse. Hang on, Lillie, hold it real quick. Get close to the podium. I want everybody to see this. OK. We're going to make it simple. I had my my 15 year old son and some of his friends were together over the weekend, and they wanted me to explain it to him as simply as possible. This is the little formulation. OK. Hey, fellas, remember from civics, got to have 60 votes in the Senate. We only have 53 Republicans. So we must have Democrats to do it. The Democrats are out trying to claim that this is all on Republicans because we control the government. We don't control the Senate without 60 votes. So you have to have them. Now, they voted 13 times, those Senate Democrats counting the House and the Senate together. They voted 13 times to keep the government closed. And what they're demanding as a ransom to reopen the government are some really crazy things. They want they want to restore two hundred billion dollars in health benefits paid for by U.S. taxpayers to illegal aliens and noncitizens. We can't do that. They want billions of dollars in wasteful programs to be returned to foreign countries for things that none of you would agree with. We are not going to do that. They want a half a billion dollars to go back to left leaning news organizations paid for by taxpayers. We can't do that. And then they want to cut 50 billion dollars from the rural hospital fund that Republicans got signed into law July 4th to prop up health care in red states and rural areas around the country. It's too important. But they want to take that away. They know that we can't do it. And now that they've begun to admit what this is all about. Thanks, Lee. You put it on the thing there that they're admitting they're admitting what they're up to. Chuck Schumer said every day of the shutdown gets better for us, meaning the Democrat Party. And you know, we had the top ranked the second ranked Democrat in the House, the minority whip who just said a few days ago at the end of last week that we know that this is causing great pain for the American people, but we have to use this leverage. We don't have many times where we have leverage like this. And so they've shown you what the real motivation is. But ultimately, why are they doing all that? Let me summarize this really quickly, as simply as I can for the civic students back home. Republicans are not demanding anything, literally nothing. All we want is to reopen the government. The Democrats are demanding all those things I just showed you on the chart, plus a lot more when I say they want to send money to foreign countries. This is some of the things that they're that they would propose that we spend money on again. They're demanding this is a ransom to reopen the government. Things like $4 million for global LGBTQI plus awareness campaigns around the world, $4 million for the LGBTQI plus democracy grants in the Balkans. They want $2 million for feminist democratic principles projects in Africa. We're not doing that. But but again, the question is why? Why? This sounds crazy. It is. Why would they do this? And what we saw on vivid display over the weekend was the reemphasis of this fact. This is motivated purely out of fear. What do we mean by that? You saw the Democratic leader in the house, Hakeem Jeffries, endorse Zoran Mondani for mayor of New York City on Friday. It was it was an illustration of what we're facing here. The Democrats right now fear the far left activists more than they fear air traffic controllers, border patrol agents, American service members and so many others missing their paychecks. They fear the Marxist insurgents like Mondani more than they fear families and children going hungry from last benefits that keep food on their tables. They simply fear losing their own political positions next November if they don't appease the angry far left base right now. And they will appease that base at any cost, no matter how much pain is inflicted. In fact, they've said in their own words, this gets better for us day by day. How does it get better? Because they're proving to the angry far left base in their party that they will prioritize them over the American people. And simply put, it's the profound fear in the Democratic Party that drives the shutdown. It is not principle. It is not policy. It is certainly not concern for the constituents that they say that they want to represent. We know that because even their own constituents now are begging Democrats to stop the political games and reopen the government. Just yesterday, the largest union of federal workers, the very people that the Democrats claim that they fight for, came out publicly and urged the Democrats to join the Republicans in passing the House's very simple short term funding bill. Also, yesterday, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association began to put up flyers in airports to explain the real danger that is being imposed for air travel, air safety in this country, highlighting what the Democrats are doing. So I just want to say this simply to our Democrat colleagues, you have an off ramp now. You painted yourself into a corner, but here's your off ramp. The unions, the largest unions are saying, please do this. You can claim that as cover and say that you had to do it. Reopen the government. Get it working for the people. It's our number one priority and responsibility as members of Congress. But Senate Democrats have refused to do it for almost a month now. I've said it over and over, Republicans have done our job. We passed the clean short term funding extension to keep the lights on and pay all these workers and our troops and fund programs like SNAP and WIC that Americans need and rely on. And in the meantime, Republicans have been working very hard around the clock every day of this Democrat shutdown to do our best to reduce the pain for our constituents. In our districts, we've got a video running over here just showing some highlights of what all the House Republicans are doing and have been doing for the last few weeks out in their districts. They're trying to help Americans navigate the crisis that the Democrats have created with their selfish political decisions. Here's a few more examples this morning we wanted to highlight. In Montana, Congressman Troy Downing, these are all Republicans doing work back home. He's met directly with his TSA officers and air traffic controllers who continue to show up to work while Democrats keep the government closed. In New York, Congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis is working around the clock hand in hand, for example, with her local National Park officials to organize community cleanups and maintain our public lands, doing the work Democrats left behind as park rangers and visitors staff remain furloughed under their shutdown. In Sullivan County, Indiana, and down in South Texas, you have Congressman Mark Messmer and Brian Babin. They've strategized with rural hospital leaders to ensure that these communities are able to access that $50 billion rural hospital fund, by the way, that the Democrats want to defund. This is the very funds that the Democrats worked hard to kill in their counterproposal to reopen the government. In South Carolina, Congresswoman Sherry Biggs has been meeting with her small business owners who continue to serve their communities, many of whom are already feeling the benefits from Republicans' work to deliver no tax on tips. We did that in the big, beautiful bill, the Working Families Tax Cut. It's a wildly popular measure that, by the way, every Democrat voted against. In Oregon, Congressman Cliff Bence is meeting with his air traffic officials as they wait on Democrats to reopen the government and deliver the federal funds they need to expand that region's critical air travel infrastructure. And here in Washington, the work has gone on in earnest as well. People keep commenting to me, you look so tired on TV. I am so tired because we're not sleeping a lot. We're working overtime. Here in Washington, our House committees have continued to conference together and do all the work we can to ensure legislation is ready for the floor for action as soon as we get back to legislative session. The House also continues to carry out its essential oversight duties. And you'll be reporting on this all day, but the oversight chairman, James Comer, released a blockbuster report now on the Biden auto pen presidency. And this report includes 47 hours worth of transcripts and testimony revealing that every executive action signed by the auto pen without written authorization from President Biden should be voided. This is an unprecedented situation in American politics and government. The actions of President Biden simply were not all his own actions. And there are major implications to that, including all the pardons that he signed. But don't get me started. OK, on Friday, the energy and commerce chairman, Brett Guthrie, all these are all Republican actions. He launched a bipartisan investigation into the NBA's handling of betting and illegal gambling allegations following the recent shocking reports that raised questions and integrity concerns. And as we covered last week, the House Oversight Committee also delivered its third batch of files from the Epstein investigation, now totaling 43000 pages and documents, pieces of evidence, including personal flight logs, financial ledgers, daily calendars and diaries of Epstein himself. Republicans are here in Washington and we're out in our district, fans out across the country doing good work on behalf of the people we serve and represent. And what are the Democrats doing? You've seen it. They're posting TikTok videos. They're bragging about using the American people's pain as their political leverage. House Republicans are taking this day by day, just like the rest of the country. We have our House Republicans on a 48 hour return notice so they get back, understanding that some flights may well be delayed. But to get everybody back here as soon as possible, as soon as the Democrats decide to do the right thing and reopen the government, we will get back to immediate and urgent and necessary business on the House floor itself. We're anxious to get back to that, but we cannot have a regular legislative session until the Democrats do their most basic responsibility to reopen the government and get this moving again. So today we're fortunate to be joined by several of our good friends and colleagues here. All members of the Republican Study Committee and the chairman of that committee, the largest caucus of conservatives in Congress, is Representative August Pfluger from Texas. We're glad to have him as well. He's going to share a little bit about the reckless decision of the Democrats and what that means for military readiness and families all across this country. We are so grateful for these great members and their leadership. August will reference who's here and then we'll take some questions. So Chairman Pfluger. Thank you, Speaker. Sure. Speaker, you're doing a great job. And I think we all know that today's Democrat party is not the party of JFK, who once famously said, ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. Instead, today, Democrats under Schumer and Clark and Mondami are saying, ask not what you can do for your country, but who you can leverage for your radical agenda. Ask not what you can do for your country, but who you can leverage for your radical agenda. I'm August Pfluger. I'm chairman of the Republican Study Committee. We have some great members, including Burgess Owens, Stephanie Bice, Harriet Hageman, and Craig Goldman, who are with me. And you know, it's really sad to think about what Catherine Clark said last week. She said, of course, there will be families that are going to suffer. But this is one of the few leverage times we have. My colleagues stand for families. The Republican Party stands for families because we believe and we know that our greatest asset in this country is the American family, that our country rests on the shoulders of families, that the Republican Party will always advocate for families, that we will look up for families, that we will legislate to prosper families. And instead, the family is only a point of leverage for our Democrat colleagues. How sad is that? You know, I'm thinking about military families right now. I'm thinking about that soldier who is deployed around the globe to keep our country safe, to push back against a threat. And I'm thinking about that phone call that that soldier probably received this year, this month, in the last couple of days, asking whether or not they're going to get a paycheck, talking about the new baby at home, trying to figure out if they're going to be able to pay their rent or even buy some groceries or put gas in the car. I was there. I'm a veteran. I've been serving on active duty when shutdowns happened. This is a very stressful time for military families. And commanders right now, instead of being focused on the mission, instead of being focused on the threat, instead of being focused on the training and the exercises that keep our readiness and our lethality at the highest possible levels, now they're focusing all of their attention on making sure that their families of their subordinates, their soldiers and their airmen, their Marines, their sailors, are taken care of, that they actually have the resources. And we have members of the Republican Party who are in our communities right now convening groups of community leaders and banks, food banks, and other resources. Because Schumer has chosen not to pay them, now communities are having to take up with zero percent interest bridge loans. Now communities are having to defer those mortgage payments and those car payments. So where the Democrat Party is failing, our communities are succeeding, because they know that the right thing to do is to fund and help in this time of need. You know, the enemy has not shut down. Our enemies around the world want us to be divided. I'm calling on my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who served in the military to do the right thing. We were there. We were there when Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi put CRs on the floor, and guess what? We did the right thing. Multiple times we did the right thing. Where are my Democrat colleagues who served in uniform to stand up and rise above petty politics to do the right thing? Have you not gone home to your districts to hear from your military communities, from your federal workers? Have you not listened to your local communities telling you to stop the nonsense? No. You know what? They're not there. They're in New York City campaigning for Mondami. Maybe they've orchestrated this so that they had the time to go campaign for an outright socialist. Maybe this was orchestrated so they could go do that. Now this isn't the party of JFK anymore. This is the party of Schumer and Mondami, the party that bows to the radical left. I hope that everybody can see the split screen of what's happening in this country. The Speaker has so eloquently talked about the fact that Republicans are doing our job to take care of families, that over 13 times the Senate Republicans have voted to fund our military, to fund TSA, to make sure our Border Patrol can get paid and all federal workers can get paid, and Democrats continue to obstruct. I hope you can see the dichotomy between the two sides here. And I'm calling on Democrat members, especially those who served in the military, to do the right thing and to stop the nonsense. With that, I hand it over to my good friend, our leader, Mr. Steve Scalise. Thank you, Chairman Pfluger. Thank you for your service to our country, especially to all those men and women who are currently serving our nation, whether it be in the military, federal employees that are still working, showing up on their job, but because of Chuck Schumer and Democrats who have bowed to the socialist radicals in their party, those federal workers are not getting paid. We've talked up here for weeks now about some of those hardships, how it's going to affect people, and ultimately now how it is affecting people. Those impacts are now being felt. It's not hypothetical anymore. It's not some memo from a department laying out what might happen. We're starting to hear those stories. You can see, and our conference chair, Lisa McClain, has done a really good job of compiling a lot of the work that's being done by many of our colleagues. One of the reasons we're not meeting in session is because the Democrats shut down the government, but also because of that shutdown, our members are now busy in their districts mopping up a lot of the mess created by those Democrats because of the shutdown, the hardships it's created on families. Those are real hardships, and I applaud my colleagues who are in their districts trying to figure out ways to help people during this difficult time, working with food banks to get food to people who are missing SNAP benefits, WIC payments, military members who are not getting paid, but they're overseas, as Chairman Pfluger talked about. While their family's still here, those babies still have needs, and yet the paycheck's not coming in. Those bills are still due, and Democrats think this is some kind of game. Speakers talked about this over and over again, but what has their reaction been? Not figuring out a solution to get out of it, an off-ramp. It's doing stupid TikTok videos, making fun of this situation, thinking that the American people are leveraged, leveraged in their game to get some kind of unachievable goal, a trillion and a half dollars in new spending, $200 billion in taxpayer benefits for illegals, gutting $50 billion out of a health care fund for rural hospitals. And again, they try to claim it's about something else. Maybe it's about health care. Well, if it was about health care, they wouldn't be gutting $50 billion out of the rural health care fund. They wouldn't have fought, by the way, on the Senate floor months ago to remove a provision, the cost-sharing ratios, that would have lowered premiums on families by 11%. It was in our bill. We voted for it, passed out of the House. Democrats are still to this day bragging that they removed that provision from the bill that would have lowered premiums, health insurance premiums on families by 11%. And they want to talk about health care? Give me a break. Look at what they've done. They have wrecked the health care system. They fought to raise premiums on families. Democrats have over and over again, and now they're imposing real pain on American families with this shutdown. We've got some new numbers that have come in, and these are not good numbers, unfortunately. Reuters reported more than 2,700 flights delayed nationwide on Monday, and more than 8,600 flight delays just Sunday, 8,600 flight delays. Think of how many families were impacted. Every flight, well over 100 people on each one of those 8,600 flights that were delayed, all because Chuck Schumer and radical Democrats want to use American people as leverage. A Democrat aide said they won't concede short of, quote, planes falling out of the sky. Who are these people? Didn't they once care about this great nation and making it better? And now they think if a plane falls out of the sky, that's their leverage? For what? Goodness. Chuck Schumer, quote, every day gets better for us. Who is us? Because I can tell you who them are. The American people are sick and tired of Chuck Schumer and his friends thinking it's a better day for him when they are feeling more pain. Senator Coons, quote, the point of this shutdown is not just suffering for suffering's sake, but to make a point, as if suffering of the American people is not enough. We've heard, of course, over and over again, Katherine Clark, shutdowns are terrible. Of course, there will be families that are going to suffer, but it is one of the few leverage times we have. They keep saying over and over again they know American people are suffering. They don't care. They want leverage for themselves. They want to show off to their radical socialist base. Bernie, of course, Bernie Sanders, who was on the stage with AOC over with Mondami the other day with their socialist love fest, Bernie, quote, you reopen the government and we lose our leverage. That's what this whole shutdown is about. They're telling you what they mean. Democrats sourced in the Hill article last week that we talked about, quote, we would have enough votes to reopen the government if people were not terrified of getting the guillotine. This is Democrats being afraid of their own base because their base is so radical that they're afraid of their base. The American Federation of Government Employees, we talked about this yesterday, came out and said, quote, it's time to pass a clean continuing resolution and end this shutdown today. No half measures and no gamesmanship. Rep Amelia Sykes said, quote, we know that people are going to suffer if we don't open the government. People will go hungry. Well, she knows it. She's causing that hunger. But let's put a point on this in an ABC article regarding the 42 million Americans that are going to lose SNAP benefits next week. Joel Berg, who's the CEO of the nonprofit Hunger Free America, said this, quote, we are going to see the greatest hunger crisis since the Great Depression. And that's not hyperbole. That's just true. The greatest hunger crisis since the Great Depression when 42 million people lose their SNAP benefits this weekend. What are these Democrats waiting for? This is not a game. This is not leverage. They're taking food off the table for families, for babies. It's disgusting. It's time to end the madness. They can go on the Senate floor today. Just five of them need to get courage. Just five of them need to get the courage to do the right thing and open the government today and end this pain and end the suffering that they've caused. Then we can go negotiate our differences. Yield to the whip. It's on that one. As has been mentioned yesterday, the largest federal workers union in the country represent 820,000 federal workers released a statement calling on Democrats to stop playing political games, pass our clean CR and reopen the government. What was Chuck Schumer's response? Silence. Crickets. He declined to comment. Meanwhile, millions of federal workers are reevaluating how to make ends meet. Air traffic controllers missed their first full paycheck today. Some are turning to food banks, as we've discussed, in order to feed their families. Here is what one Democrat and retired federal worker had to say about the current state of play. Quote, the Democrats are the ones that actually in the Senate side shut down the government, so they have to get together and stop holding Americans hostage. We're about to have people without food, and that's ridiculous. It's not worth it. Remember, that's coming from a Democrat and retired federal worker. Since Chuck Schumer and company won't listen to us, maybe they'll start listening to members of their own party. Enough is enough. You're playing politics with people's lives. And as leader Scalise and the speaker have reminded us for what? So that you can appease the radical pro-terrorist wing of your party. So that you can fundraise off of picking a fight with President Trump. It's not worth it. In fact, it's despicable and downright wrong. There's a nonpartisan government funding bill waiting in the Senate to be sent to President Trump's desk immediately. It will come to the floor for a vote for the 13th time this morning. Put an end to the madness. Do the right and reasonable thing that you did back in March, by the way, and vote yes on our clean CR. Instead of complaining about a new White House ballroom, how about you try doing your actual job and reopen the government for the people you were elected to serve? Our conference chair. Thank you and good morning, everyone. And I first want to extend a thank you to the RFC chair and the members of the RFC who are here today. And thank you for all the work that you've been doing in the district. I know we appreciate it. More importantly, I know your constituents appreciate it. I know I've been standing at this podium with Speaker Johnson and House leadership for weeks now. And every time we have said the same thing. Republicans voted to keep the government open. Democrats voted to shut it down. Period. And if they did, it is that simple. This week, more than any other week, the consequences become impossible to ignore. As of yesterday, more than 10,000 flights have been delayed because of staffing shortages. By the end of this week, nearly 2 million, 2 million paychecks will be missed by Americans. And by Saturday, 42 million Americans will lose their SNAP benefits. Let that sink in. 42 million Americans will lose their SNAP benefits this Saturday because Democrats want to use them as leverage. This is real pain, real fear, and real consequences. And Democrats are using that as political leverage. And leverage for what? Ask them this. Leverage for what? To force through illegal benefits for illegal immigrants to the tune of $1.5 trillion? 42, they'd rather do that and put 42 million Americans at risk of losing their SNAP benefits. That's, that's the, that's what they're choosing. That's what they're choosing. Let that sink in for a minute. This isn't leadership. This is cruel and disgusting, and it's cruelty disguised as politics. Even the president of the largest federal workers union, and I don't know if you noticed that, but he doesn't exactly always cheer for Republicans, but this gentleman is actually begging the Democrats to do the right thing and end the shutdown. While Democrats posture in front of the cameras, Republicans are actually out in their districts working. Just take a look at the video that we've been playing all morning, right? Don't let the facts get in the way of the good story. Republicans, like the colleagues you see behind me, have been in their district working for the American people who are suffering from this Democratic Schumer-led shutdown. You will see Republicans volunteering at food banks, Republicans supporting rural hospitals, Republicans cleaning up national parks, and Republicans helping people in real ways. Republicans believe in solutions, not stunts. We believe in serving the American people, not using them. So while Democrats try to turn American hardship into political currency, Republicans are working to reopen the government, to restore paychecks, and bring stability back to American families. Because this isn't about leverage, it's about people, and we are here to serve. It's about time the Democrats remember who they serve. Thank you. All right, questions? Go ahead. Well, there is the 22nd Amendment. I spoke with the president about an hour ago. It's late in the evening in Japan. He's working around the clock, serving the American people. He doesn't stop. Talk about someone who works around the clock. And as Chairman Pfluger mentioned a moment ago, and as we've reiterated in here so many times, you're looking at the split screen, because under President Trump, the Republican Party has delivered. I mean, you're talking about reducing taxes, reducing regulations, cutting fraud, waste, and abuse, ending the border crisis, ending the crime crisis, resolving conflicts, wars around the globe, and working on these amazing trade agreements. It's been a great run. But I think the president knows, and he and I have talked about, the constrictions of the Constitution, as much as so many of the American people lament that. The Trump 2028 cap is one of the most popular that's ever been produced, and he has a good time with that, trolling the Democrats, whose hair is on fire about the very prospect. But I do believe that we've got three extraordinary years ahead of us, and the two years of the Trump administration are going to be an incredible thing. And I don't see a way to amend the Constitution, because it takes about 10 years to do that, as you all know, to allow all the states to ratify what two-thirds of the House and three-fourths of the states would approve. So I don't see the path for that, but I can tell you that we are not going to take our foot off the gas pedal. We're going to live with the American people, and we've got a great run ahead of us. We'll have four strong years. Second round. The White House is able to find funding for the military, for WIC, for farmers. Should the White House not be able to find some funding for the staff program if they cut it for all these other ones? They certainly tried. I mean, one of the reasons that this shutdown has not yet been as painful as it might otherwise have been is because the president is bent over backwards the administration. Think of it this way. The White House, the executive branch in a shutdown, has a large control panel full of dials. Under the Obama administration, they turned those dials, the pain dials, to 10 immediately. You remember it was so egregious to us. Speaking of our veterans, I mean, they put yellow crime tape around the World War II memorial so that people who had served their country could not go visit the memorial. They wanted it to hurt. The Democrats have shown, and they've said in their own words, this is leverage. It gets better for them every day. They don't mind inflicting pain on the American people if they can somehow get some sort of political points out of it. The Republican Party is the opposite. President Trump has proven that. Every day of this shutdown, he has tried to move funds around to find unobligated funds to cover the bases, to get the troops paid in the middle of October, and to make sure that WIC funding is not resolved. You know how he's getting women, infants, and children funding done? They did some very creative legal research I've quite admired. They found a statute in the 1930s that they could use to say that some of the tariff revenue could be used to cover nutrition because so much of that was transported over the border. So they've done some creative, amazing things to mitigate, to lessen the pain as much as possible. We've been out all over the country, all these Republicans. I mean, Craig Goldman flew in here to do this press conference with us, but he's been in Texas serving his constituents. Stephanie Bice has been in Oklahoma. Harriet Hageman has been out West. You've got Burgess Owens out in Utah. They've been serving their constituents in August Pfluger, but they came in to help us articulate what's going on. All that effort has mitigated the pain, but we're running out of the resources. We want to fund SNAP, but they did the legal research and they could not find a 1930s-era statute to bootstrap that one. The contingency fund was approved by Congress, and when the Democrats voted against the CR, they voted against the ability of us to use that money, and so 42 million people are going to suffer because they're playing political games. The White House has run out of it. They have all the pain dials turned back to just a zero or a one as best they can, but when you're out of resources, they go all the way up, and it's out of their hands. It's out of our hands, and that's why we're so frustrated. You don't see the happy warrior Steve Scalise pound the podium very often, but we're angry about this. We're frustrated. We should be because it's wrong for the people, and all of you should be angry about it as well. I know many of you are. Yeah, right. What's your reaction to yesterday's purge of senior ICE officials from the field offices around the country? Are you worried that that's going to result in less experienced leadership at ICE, and again, when is it time for Congress to do something about it? I don't know any of the details of that yet. I just heard about that literally as I was walking in, so I'm not going to comment on it until I find out the details. I know some of these things get misportrayed. Yeah, back row. On the Autopen investigation and the oversight committee's report that was released this morning, some Senate Republicans have suggested that perhaps there isn't a legal avenue to void the pardons that were signed by the Autopen, these executive authorities. Do you think that there is a legal avenue? That's what the investigation concluded, that any of those executive actions that were signed by the Autopen were biased? Nothing this incredible and insane has happened before. This was not something that the forefathers anticipated. It's unprecedented. There is no legal precedent because no previous president had an Autopen or had the audacity to have people signing things on their behalf when they didn't even know what was in it. And so we're in uncharted waters as a nation. As we say up here all the time, we're so tired of making history. I just want normal times, normal Congress again. But the Biden administration was unprecedented in so many ways. And the president was checked out of his job for quite some time. And everybody knows it. And there was a cover up with people around him who were using, they would give him scripts to follow. They would point him literally in the direction. Stand here, sir. Wave like this. And he didn't know what he was signing. So there's all sorts of just incredible implications. It sounds like a terrible novel or something. But this is reality. And so the pardons, for example, he pardoned categories of violent criminals and turned them loose on the streets. And he didn't even know who, he didn't even know what the categories were, apparently. Much less the individual people that he pardoned. They're invalid on their face. I mean, I used to be a constitutional law litigator. I would love to take this case and go into the courts and make that law to set the precedent. You can't allow a president to check out and have unelected, unaccountable, faceless people making massive decisions for the country. Think of the executive orders that were signed with the auto pen. When he paused LNG exports, liquefied natural gas to our European allies around the world, I confronted him about it, by the way, the one meeting they allowed me to have with him as speaker in the Oval. And he looked at me as if it hadn't happened. And he said, I didn't do that. And it occurred to me, he wasn't lying. He honestly didn't know. Do you know what the implications of pausing LNG exports were around the world? It made all of our European allies had to buy their natural gas from Vladimir Putin, which fueled his war machine to go, you know, conduct his war on Ukraine. It destabilized our energy sector. And it had us step back three or four steps of energy dominance around the world. Thankfully, we're back now because we have a commander in chief who's fully in command and understands the necessity, energy policy being national security policy. I could go on and on and on in every category. Huge implications. What does it mean for us? How do you unwind it? I don't know. But it will be determined in the courts ultimately. And these are unprecedented cases of first impression, as we say, because it's never been tested before. But, man, is it dangerous stuff. Front row. Because you win the boot game today. Go ahead. I'm curious. You guys, a lot of you were talking about the government unions. Many of the Democrats reopened the government at this point. Do you think that that is building on President Trump's gains with Medvedev's 2024 election? Do you think that this is a sign of employees? Do you welcome these people in your test? Of course. President Trump and the Republican Party achieved some very important historic things in the last election cycle. We had a true demographic shift in the election. We had a record number of Hispanic and Latino voters, for example, who came into the Republican Party. Record number of African-American black voters, Jewish voters, union workers, young people. You know, demographics that had not traditionally in recent years been with the Republican Party in large numbers. And they came to us, not reluctantly, but with hopeful anticipation. Why? Because they wanted a return to common sense. And they saw what the other party had done to them with their terrible policies and their terrible ideas and the radical, woke, Marxist, progressive agenda. And they realized it didn't work for them. So they came to us and they said, can you do better? Well, we did. We have. And we passed the one big, beautiful bill, the Working Families Tax Cut. And all of our legislation and everything the President's done with executive orders, fulfilling his promises, are codifying those things and doing the rest of our legislative agenda, which is being held up right now because of this. We're delivering for those people. So it is not a surprise to me that union workers would come enthusiastically supporting common sense. What we're asking for here is common sense. They're supporting the party. They're supporting the President. Because they know who's working for the American people and who is not. Who is causing and inflicting pain on the American people. The contrast has never been more clear. We say all the time, this is not your father's Democratic Party. I grew up in Louisiana. When I was a kid, I didn't even know a Republican. Literally, like, everybody was Democrat. And, you know, there's Southern Democrats. You know, conservative Democrats down in Louisiana. That party doesn't exist anymore. My grandfather would not recognize what this party has become. He would clearly... They'd all be Republicans because Republicans stand on the side of common sense. And working families. Hardworking, middle class, lower class earners in the country. We drafted the working families tax cut to be geared for them, to help them. And we infused the legislation with all this pro-growth policy so that all boats will rise. People see that. They see the effects. Ideas have consequences, my friends. And the policies and ideas that are advanced by the Republican Party are right for America. Because they comport with our founding principles. And we stand on those principles to defend them. And by contrast, on the other side of the screen, they're going for communism and Marxism. Take your choice. Jake. Hi. You're going to be in the United States one-off funding bills now. And you've got control. Is that still your view? We voted September 19th to fund every one of those priorities. And every Democrat in the House except one voted to not fund them. The Democrats are playing games. They put a few of the one-off bills on the floor, as you've seen, in the last week or so. They put a bill to pay the troops and pay essential workers. And the Democrats voted it down. So it would be a futile legislative effort for us to do this again, repetitively in the House, and send it over there so Chuck Schumer and the gang can play games and spike it. It's a waste of our time. They need to vote for the clean, continuing, nonpartisan CR, turn the lights back on, and get the country working again. And then we can resolve all the rest of the issues that were always on the calendar for the remainder of the year. I want to thank our Republican Study Committee colleagues for being here and standing in the gap for your constituents. All the Republicans out there, they're still at work. They're not even watching these press conferences because they're working for their constituents. Thanks for that. Appreciate it.