Bryan Steil

We should be three weeks into the CR, utilizing the time that we're burning right now to negotiate those policy priorities.

Many of these have year-end deadlines, appropriate conversations for us to be having, but we should be doing that in the context of an open and operational government.

Again, the House did our job.

The Senate is running into...

filibuster challenges.

Senator Fetterman is even calling now and saying maybe we have to overcome that because a minority of United States senators are standing in the way under the leadership of Chuck Schumer from reopening the federal government.

Well, I think what we see is the data continues to come in that the Affordable Care Act was anything but affordable for the American people.

The program the Democrats put in place, and again, the Democrats set the sunset date themselves.

This was a Democrat decision to sunset it at the end of the year.

But what we continue to see is challenges inside the structure of the program.

There is plenty of evidence of the waste, fraud and abuse.

inside this Democrat-created program.

There's a Treasury report that came out under President Biden that identifies the significant flaws inside these premium credits that go back to insurance companies as to why it's structurally unsound.

So at an absolute minimum, we would need to make meaningful and substantive reform in the program.

But again, these are the conversations and the debates that we should be having right now on Capitol Hill.

Instead, we're shut down

all because Chuck Schumer and Democrats in the Senate refused to open the government with a clean CR to allow these negotiations and debates to take place.

I had a long conversation with two soybean farmers from Wisconsin yesterday talking about this exact challenge.

The short-term fix may be that type of a subsidy, but the long-term fix is getting trade agreements in place and having China once again purchasing U.S.

soy.