Senator Jeanne Shaheen Discusses Trump’s Disastrous Shutdown

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2:52Ben Meiselas:Just why don't you support funding and paying essential workers? Like, why don't we start there, Mike Johnson? Because the Senate seems willing to do that. Why don't you do that? Why do you keep telling the House members that they need to be on vacations and not show up and not speak to Democrats, yet alone negotiate with Democrats. Like isn't schoolhouse rocks, isn't like fifth grade government, like the parties are supposed to talk to each other. Why are you telling your members don't talk to Democrats? That's kind of odd, Maga Mike, don't you think? Here's what he says. Here, play this clip.

3:29Ben Meiselas:If it's so important to pay the aircraft, you said you want to see what happens in the Senate, Why would you do that right now and say, we're going to have the House back in session, we're going to vote? Because you know as well as I do sometimes when one body moves something, it can be exempted to the other. Well, no, I don't know that. We just demonstrated it's not true, Chad. We passed the CR to get everybody paid. If I brought everybody back right now and we voted on a measure to do this, to pay essential workers, it would be spiked in the Senate. They're going to show you this afternoon that they would spike that bill.

4:00Ben Meiselas:So it would be a waste of our time and it would it would take the pressure off Chuck Schumer to get his job done and open the government again. This is what's so infuriating to us. Yes, sir. As Megan Mike says, you don't want to see mad, Megan Mike. He wants to be the happy warriors, what he's been repeating over and over and over again. Well, then he threatens people who are going to football games. I think that's their approach. I guess first it was blame immigrants, then transgender people in Peru and then go back to immigrants. And now say Democrats are destroying football. here play this clip.

4:32Ben Meiselas:We're rounding into a holiday season, as we all know, and we're in the middle of the height of the football season. This is peak travel time for the U.S. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are going to travel to football games this weekend, for example. And if the current trajectory continues, many Americans could miss watching their favorite teams and reconnecting with friends and family. So football fans, hey, if you're stuck in the airport this weekend while your favorite team is about to kick off, you can blame the Democrats for that. All right. I mean, who's writing these scripts for him?

5:00Ben Meiselas:I mean, this would be like on Saturday Night Live and maybe mildly funny if they weren't ripping away the health care of 20 million people. Hey, football fans, blame the Democrats. Who writes these things? And then they claim that they're the party of health care as they're ripping away health care from 20 million Americans. And everybody knows it. Just extend the Affordable Care Act subsidies and protect Medicaid. But he goes, we've shown that we're here to do it. Remember that budget bill? We saved it. We did it. We gave you help. No one believes this. Here, play this clip. When the government dumps more money on a bad system, it makes it worse.

5:35Ben Meiselas:And that is the reality. We have to make everybody face that. And then we got to build the consensus around the solutions. We have lots of ideas. The Republican Party is the party ready to fix that. And we're demonstrating that every day. We brought down costs in Medicaid and we strengthened the program in the big, beautiful bill because we got ineligible enrollees off the program. And we brought down the cost. It's measures that we did in that bill on Medicaid, for example, going to save$185 billion. So they're good ideas, Joe. We just need time to work through the consensus to do it. But we got to get the lights back on here again.

6:07Ben Meiselas:We got to open the government so that all of that can happen. Open it. Trust us. We're going to do it this time, even though we're the party that rips away your health care. The ragged Republicans, what are they talking? Let's bring in Senator Gene Sheen, New Hampshire. Senator Sheen, great to see you on the Midas Touch Network. Nice to be with you. You see Mike Johnson every morning. It's like blaming someone new for the fact that Republicans are ripping away people's health care. What's your perspective on the Senate side when you see what he's doing, telling his members, don't even show up to work and don't even talk to the other side?

6:44Well, I just want to correct what he said about the reconciliation bill, the big, beautiful betrayal, as I call it, that was passed last summer. The reason it saves$185 billion in Medicaid is because it kicks people off of Medicaid. We are going to have tens of thousands of people in my state of New Hampshire who are going to get kicked off of Medicaid as soon as those provisions go into effect. And that's going to have a huge impact on the entire healthcare care system. Not to mention right now what this fight is about. And I've said from the very beginning that we ought to be able to keep government open and ensure that we can provide, make sure that people can afford access to their health insurance.

7:31That's the position I think we ought to take. And we can do both. And the fight is about ensuring that we are not going to see 20 million Americans who are going to have their health insurance premiums become unaffordable and kick 4 million people off of their health insurance because of those rising costs. And, you know, they keep claiming that we knew about this and why did we let this happen? Well, we tried to extend the end date for those tax credits four times this year, and the Republicans refused to let us do that. So this has been coming. Our Republican colleagues know it's been coming and they refuse to acknowledge that it's going to have a huge impact on people's ability to afford health insurance.

8:24And that's going to have implications for the entire health care system.

8:28Ben Meiselas:You know, at least on the Senate side, the Republicans are showing up. I mean, like to work, like I guess we'll start with let's start with the floor, you know, that on the Senate side, there's there's work being done. there are committees that are meeting. On the House side, in the past 90 days, they've showed up. I don't know what it was, like 11 or 12 times, if that. All summer, they said they weren't showing up because once people started talking about the Epstein files, they're like, all right, we're leaving, go home. And now, like to me, I just remember growing up in government class with schoolhouse rocks and fifth grade, parties got to talk to each other.

9:09Ben Meiselas:Our system relies on conversations. So it's just strange to see Mike Johnson every morning do that press conference and then tell his members, you know what, don't even talk to the other side. Like, their ideas don't matter. Don't speak. And that to me is like, what do you mean, what are we? Like, that's not what our country is about. Well, Speaker Johnson seems to be more concerned about his own future than he is about solving problems that this country faces. And the fact is we are in this situation because people have refused to talk to each other. The reason there was no government shutdown during the four years of the Biden administration is because we understood that this is not just about who's in the majority and who's in the minority, certainly not in the United States Senate.

9:53It's about ensuring that we address the minority concerns as part of what we do. And they knew they needed 60 votes coming out of the Senate, and they have been unwilling to sit down and talk to us to negotiate. You know, I was governor of New Hampshire for three terms. And when we had serious issues, I went and met with the Speaker of the House. I had a Republican legislature. I met with the Senate president. And we talked about how we could work together to solve the issues that we're facing the state of New Hampshire. And that's what we need to do now. We need to see President Trump, who's only met once with the leadership of Congress before the shutdown began.

10:34And now he's off again to Asia for a week. Last weekend, he could have been here meeting with the leadership of Congress, helping to solve this issue. And he was down in Mar-a-Lago playing golf, doing whatever he does in Mar-a-Lago. So he has not shown any kind of leadership. and there has been no willingness on the part of the leadership in Congress to sit down, to meet, to solve this. That's, as you pointed out, that's what this government is founded on. It's founded on compromise, on people working together. And the idea that you shouldn't talk to members of the other party and solve problems is totally antithetical to what this government is about.

11:27Ben Meiselas:And then while there's this shutdown, it's literally demolishing the East Wing, just like putting a bulldozer. I just thought there's no more East Wing of the White House now. I never thought that I would say that. $40 billion bailout to Argentina now says we're going to bring in Argentinian beef. And our cattle ranchers here are absolutely are absolutely livid. He's focusing on his own private Qatari jets that he's bringing in. and a settlement with himself, with the Justice Department. Apparently, he has pain and suffering from the 2020 election and the investigation. So he believes that the DOJ should be settling with him for$230 million.

12:08Ben Meiselas:It's also what he's doing in messaging, which to me just is telling the American people, I really don't care about you. This is the White House. This is my vanity project. Go screw yourself. I think that's how I see it. Is that how the people of New Hampshire are seeing it now? Well, I think the people of New Hampshire want to see us get this done. They generally share my view that we ought to be able to keep the government open and address the costs that people are facing because of the rising costs of healthcare. We need to take action on that. That's what, as I said, that's what this fight is about because those tax credits that millions of Americans rely on are going to expire at the end of December.

12:53But more importantly, November 1st is when the marketplace for the Affordable Care Act opens up. And so people are now getting their bills because insurance companies have had to set rates based on the assumption that we are not going to extend those tax credits. And so what we're seeing with people across the country is those bills doubling for people. And the people who are getting hit the hardest are older Americans, people who live in rural areas, small business owners. About half of the people who are affected are either small business owners or their employees. So this is going to have a huge impact, not just on those people who benefit from those premium tax credits, but on the entire health care system, because the expectation is that people who are healthier and younger will drop out because they're not going to be able to afford their health insurance.

13:55They're going to roll the dice. When they get sick, they're going to go to emergency rooms, and that's going to drive up costs for everyone. We're going to have a risk pool for health insurance that's going to be older and sicker, and that's going to drive up costs. So just because you don't benefit from those premium tax credits doesn't mean you're not going to be affected by what goes on here. And we can do this. This is not that challenging. If we sit down and talk to each other, we can come up with a compromise that can address some of the concerns we've heard from our Republican colleagues and still extend those tax credits for people who need them.

14:39And what's ironic about this, Ben, is that 57 % of people who identify as MAGA Republicans who benefit from those tax credits. And 76 % of people who are premium tax credit receivers are in states that Donald Trump won in the election. So it's in everybody's interest to try and solve this problem. I don't understand why our colleagues have been so reluctant to address what they know is a looming problem.

15:14Ben Meiselas:And something that's also, as we pivot to foreign relations, you sit on the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, that I just feel that in a few years from now, people are going to look back on to me what's happening in the caribbean now in the pacific with uh the united states military without providing any transparency i mean shooting at these fishing boats um and then providing protectual justifications for it that don't really just kind of logically make sense based on knowing the types of drugs that are in the area the size of the boat where the boat's located, the amount of times it would need to refuel where it looks like.

15:57Ben Meiselas:I mean, just looking at it logically, look, we should have the most serious interdiction policies when it comes to drug boats and drug running. I just think back, this is how I talk about it on the show, to Abu Gray, but when we talked about how horrible it was to waterboard and to torture individuals who were believed to be like Al-Qaeda terrorists and to be, you know, and now it's not waterboarding. where the federal government is killing people without any process, just killing and just saying, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. And I'm thinking to myself, what's going on here? And what's the perspective now going on on the Foreign Relations Committee?

16:36I think there's real concern on both sides of the aisle about what we're seeing in the Caribbean and now in the Pacific because of the strike off of Columbia. You know, in New Hampshire, we've been very hard hit by the opioid epidemic. We've had one of the highest overdose death rates in the country. It's finally gotten better in the last couple of years. But I appreciate the fight against the drug cartels. It's something that we need to engage in. But we need to do it in a way that is going to be effective and that's going to not risk escalation that puts at risk American lives and men and women in the military.

17:19I was down in South America with a bipartisan delegation almost three years ago now. And one of the things we did was to meet with the Coast Guard in Columbia and see how they were cooperating with the United States to address drug running in the country. We went out and we saw efforts to close up the cocaine labs that are in the country. And that's an effective way to go after the drugs that we all want to eradicate. Nobody is interested in seeing drugs get into the United States. We need to stop that. But we need to do it in a way that doesn't put at risk Americans and that cooperates with those countries who are working to try and address it within their own country.

18:17Ben Meiselas:Senator Shaheen, I appreciate your time. We've got to talk more. I want to talk more about what's going on in the Foreign Relations Committee, but we'll get you back on soon. Great. Nice to be with you. Thanks. Great to see you. Everybody hit subscribe. Let's get to 6 million subscribers.

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