House Majority Whip Rep. Tom Emmer says the mounting impacts of the 30-day Democrat shutdown could force Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s hand on reopening the government.
More than 40 million Americans will not receive federal food aid beginning Nov. 1 due to a lapse in funding absent congressional action. Emmer, the third-ranking House Republican, has sharply criticized Minnesota Democrats for refusing to fund the government until their partisan policy demands are met. And he is now arguing that the party could be close to folding in the showdown as more Americans feel the impact in their daily lives.
“We have roughly 400,000 SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] recipients in Minnesota. These are people that are most in need. What happens when they don’t have benefits?” Emmer told the Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview Wednesday. “We can’t have this tragic result happen.”
“First 26, 27 days [of the shutdown], Democrats have been able to get away with this nonsense, because most people in this country haven’t noticed, because they haven’t been impacted,” Emmer continued. “That’s changing this week.”
Though Democrats have thus far refused to blink in the shutdown standoff, Emmer believes the prospect of 1 in 8 Americans going hungry could hasten a resolution to the ongoing funding lapse. Hundreds of thousands of federal employees, some of whom live paycheck-to-paycheck, have also not received their salaries during the shutdown.
“The game changer should be putting low-income Americans and in particular — children — in danger of not having food,” Emmer told the DCNF. “That should be the game changer.”
However, the Minnesota Republican also said that growing disruptions to air travel could force Democrats to retreat from their hardball tactics.
Fourteen thousand air traffic controllers missed their first full paycheck of the shutdown on Tuesday and some are turning to second jobs to make ends meet while the funding lapse drags on.
The Federal Aviation Administration has imposed ground stops at several major hubs across the country due to staffing issues — and the problem could get worse as controllers’ financial stress deepens.
“When it starts to become important to Americans, when it affects their lives, I’d much rather be on the Republican side of this argument because we’ve done our job to keep the government open,” Emmer told the DCNF. “Americans are smarter than Chuck Schumer and these guys give them credit for, they’re going to know who’s responsible for this.”
“We [Republicans] voted to fund our troops. We voted to fund the SNAP program and the WIC program,” Emmer added, using an acronym for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children.
Emmer also argued that Democrats are beginning to feel the heat as more public-sector unions call for an end to the shutdown.
The American Federation of Government Employees, the country’s largest federal worker’s union and longtime Democratic Party ally, called for the passage of a “clean” continuing resolution to fund the government on Monday. A majority of Senate Democrats have rejected a House-passed clean funding measure to end the shutdown 13 times.
“I think this is the beginning — a message that’s being delivered to give them an exit strategy, which they have not had,” Emmer said.
“We need five reasonable Senate Democrats who care more about the American public and the people they were elected to serve than Chuck Schumer and the future of his political career,” Emmer added.
Three members of the Senate Democratic caucus have already bucked Schumer to support reopening the government, but Republicans need five more Democrat votes to clear the Senate’s 60-vote threshold.
Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman has emerged as a vocal critic of Schumer’s shutdown strategy and has pleaded with his colleagues to avert the SNAP expiration cliff by funding the government.
“I want people fed and the most elegant and efficient way to do that is to open this [government] up,” Fetterman told the DCNF on Wednesday.
Caden Olson contributed to this report.
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