As the government shutdown drags into its third week, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) said Sunday that a vote from Republican lawmakers to extend healthcare subsidies will not alone be enough to reopen the government, instead calling on the GOP to pledge to help fix the problem.
“We need a real negotiation and we need a fix,” Kelly told host Kristen Welker on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “We need this corrected for the American people. For so many people, their health care is running toward a cliff, and if we don’t fix this, it’s going to go right over it, and having some vote without an assured outcome.”
Sunday marks the government’s 12th day of the shutdown, and Democrats have maintained throughout the fight that they’d vote to reopen the government if Republicans agreed to extending Affordable Care Act subsidies — their central goal in the standoff.
Kelly went on to condemn the politicization of the shutdown, saying it’s “not about winners and losers,” and maintaining that the stalemate over reopening the government is about bringing down the cost of Americans’ healthcare.
“In this situation, we’ve got 2 million Americans that are likely to lose their health care because they’re not going to be able to afford these premium increases,” he said. “And I think it’s important for all Americans to know this fight right now over this government shutdown is about one thing — it’s about the cost of their healthcare.”
In a separate interview with CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Kelly continued to criticize President Donald Trump’s explicit blaming of Democrats throughout the shutdown, saying the focus of the stalemate should instead be on the Americans impacted by the shutdown and the subsequent layoffs carried out by the Trump administration.
“He is trying to politicize the federal government in a way, and he’s picking winners and losers,” Kelly told host Dana Bash in the interview. “These are people with families, and they have mortgages and they have to pay rent. They have to put food on the table. We’ve never seen a president do anything like this before.”
He continued to decry the firing of federal workers, after the Trump administration announced Friday that it would begin laying off employees from some agencies as the result of the ongoing shutdown. Kelly said the administration did “not have to do this,” and urged GOP leaders to meet Democrats at the negotiating table to reach an agreement on healthcare subsidies.
“They do not have to punish people that shouldn’t find themselves in this position,” he said. “And the reason they’re here is because this administration is about to drive our health care system for 23 million people over a cliff when these subsidies go away.”