Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

So I thank you for that.

And I want to make sure that we, of course, pass a bevy of federal protections for workers, but we don't want them to be necessary in the first place.

Well, we already know, and this is a common lie that Republicans have been repeating, that this shutdown is about Democrats trying to provide health care to the undocumented.

And we all know, we already know that it is federal law and federal statute that undocumented people cannot be covered by the ACA.

They cannot be covered by Medicaid.

They cannot be covered by Medicare, period.

That is the law of the land.

There are plenty of federal laws on the books.

Now, the vice president...

has been trafficking this other misconception, saying that the emergency Medicaid program is providing healthcare to undocumented people.

That too is a complete, just, I don't even know, whole cloth storytelling, we should say.

The truth of the matter is,

that we have a federal law, as it should be, that any person who walks into a hospital in desperate need of medical attention receives that medical attention regardless of their insurance status and regardless of who they are.

And I don't know about you, but me as a human being, I don't want to live in a world where if a human being is struck by a car

or is getting rushed into a hospital that the people in the ER surgical room are asking for your insurance information or asking for documents before they save your life.

The problem is that this administration, the Trump administration, folks like Russ Vogt, they think that destroying our healthcare, making sure that housing is too expensive to live in, that jacking up the costs of our groceries, they think all of this is about hurting Democrats.

What they are doing is hurting Americans and they are hurting this country.

And if Mike Johnson wants to say that this shutdown is going to last a long time, it is because he is choosing to punish the American people and we cannot stand for it and we cannot allow it.

And we also cannot enable it by acquiescing and enabling the behavior of bullies.

So it ends today.