Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is calling Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) “a liar” after he claimed the White House “certainly tried” to find money for the SNAP Program (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), despite locating funds for other programs, plus $40 billion for Argentina.
On Tuesday (October 28), Johnson held a press conference as the U.S. government shutdown entered its 28th day. As Republicans and Democrats play the “Blame Game,” trading blame for the shuttering, the White House has frozen billions of dollars in funds meant for Democratic-led jurisdictions, and have sought to lay off thousands of federal workers.
Meanwhile, the White House has moved money around to guarantee that military personnel and gun-carrying law enforcement officers will not see their pay disrupted. However, in the midst of moving funds, the Donald Trump-led administration has also found $40 billion to bail out Argentina. Earlier this month, the Trump administration announced it approved the billion-dollar bailout, with the hefty rescue package helping Argentina’s struggling economy.
House Speaker Mike Johnson Claims White House ‘Certainly Tried’ To Find Money For SNAP Program Despite Locating $40B For Argentina
Opening his press conference, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said, “Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Day 28 of the Democrat shutdown. We’re almost a month into this. We wanted to highlight a couple of things this morning. There are some very important developments.”
During the questioning portion of the press conference, a reporter boldly asked Johnson about the SNAP Program. The reporter asked, “The White House was able to find funding for military, for WIC (Women, Infants, and Children), for farmers. Should the White House now be able to find some funding for the SNAP Program if they’ve done it for all these other ones?”
Johnson quipped, “They certainly tried.” He continued to fire off:
“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, [and] the administration.
Think of it this way, the White House executive branch, in a shutdown, has a large control panel full of dials. Under the [Barack] Obama administration, they turn 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 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, and 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 and 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. There’s nothing that 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 Scaliz 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 you should be angry about it as well, and I know many of you are.”
According to Johnson, SNAP funding is going away because “the Democrats voted against the [clean resolution],” adding, “They voted against the ability of us to use that money.”
RELATED: No SNAP Benefits To Be Issued In November As Government Shutdown Continues
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer Calls House Speaker Mike Johnson ‘A Liar’ After Claiming White House ‘Certainly Tried’ To Find Money For SNAP Program
Reacting to House Speaker Mike Johnson’s claim about the White House “certainly trying” to find money for the SNAP Program, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called him “a liar.” The Senate Democratic Leader said Johnson is straight up lying about the Donald Trump administration’s ability to continue funding SNAP, with millions of Americans set to lose their food aid at the end of this week/month. Schumer fired off:
“Just think, if they have all this money for Argentina and all this money for other things, they have enough money to keep funding SNAP, and they know it. Johnson just lies. He lied about — on immigration, on the undocumented. He’s lying about this. He just outright lies, plain and simple. It is not illegal, and his own president has done it. The bottom line is they can fund it, just as in 2019, just as in other shutdowns, for a long period of time.”
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