Vice President Vance offered the following message to Democrats ahead of Wednesday’s White House briefing on the first day of the 2025 “government shutdown.”

VICE PRESIDENT J.D. VANCE: Number one, Democrats say that they care a lot about lowering healthcare costs, and yet when the president took historic action to work with the drug companies to lower prescription drug prices, the Democrats did nothing to help us. In fact, we would have loved to have the Democrats helping us, but they didn’t. They talk about doing something, but they don’t actually do the hard work of making it happen. What they have done instead is to shut down the government because we won’t give billions of dollars to healthcare funding for illegal aliens. That is what has actually happened. To the American people who are watching: the reason your government is shut down at this very minute is because, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of congressional Republicans-and even a few moderate Democrats-supported opening the government, the Chuck Schumer/AOC wing of the Democratic Party shut down the government. They said to us, We will open the government, but only if you give billions of dollars of funding for healthcare for illegal aliens. That’s a ridiculous proposition. Let me say two other quick things, and then again, I’ll take some questions. Number one: we all understand that Democrats and Republicans have policy disagreements. The Democrats want to do things. Look, when Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries were here a couple of days ago, they made some suggestions that the president was more than happy to say, Yes, let’s sit down and talk about how we can solve the healthcare crisis that we inherited from the Biden administration. But it’s one thing to say that we should solve the healthcare crisis for Americans. It’s another thing to say that we’re going to shut down the government unless we give the Democrats every single thing that they want-which, as Karoline says, includes giving billions of dollars of taxpayer funding for healthcare for illegal migrants. That’s ridiculous. You don’t have policy disagreements that serve as the basis for a government shutdown. Let’s have the conversation about how to fix American healthcare, about how to make healthcare more accessible-as the president showed, he’s more than willing to act on behalf of the American people for this very reason. What you don’t do is say, Unless you do exactly what we want, congressional Democrats will take hostage-and the hostage, it turns out, is critical, essential services that the American people need. Karoline talked about some of it. Let me talk about some more. Our troops are not getting paid starting today because of the Chuck Schumer wing of the Democratic Party. We have people who require food assistance-low-income Americans who require food assistance-who will not get it unless we reopen the government, thanks to Chuck Schumer and his wing of the Democratic Party. We have flood insurance, as we start hurricane season in the southeastern part of our country. That flood insurance is going to disappear because of Chuck Schumer and the far left of the Democratic Party. We need to reopen the government. Let’s fix America’s problems. Let’s work together to solve them. But let’s reopen the government before we have our negotiation about healthcare policy. That’s what the American people demand, and that’s certainly what the President of the United States wants. Let me make one final point. I think a lot of Americans are asking themselves, Why did this happen? Why did the Democrats shut down the government, despite-as Karoline said-voting on the exact same piece of legislation six months ago? And there are a lot of different spins we can put on it, a lot of different answers we could give-all of them true. One answer I already gave is that they want to give healthcare benefits to illegal aliens. That is true. They gave us legislative text that would have undone us cutting off healthcare benefits for illegal aliens. That’s one of the things that they asked for. But the reality here-and let’s be honest about the politics-is that Chuck Schumer is terrified he’s going to get a primary challenge from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The reason why the American people’s government is shut down is because Chuck Schumer is listening to the far-left radicals in his own party, because he’s terrified of a primary challenge. So I’d invite Chuck Schumer to join the moderate Democrats and 52 Senate Republicans, do the right thing, open up the people’s government, and then let’s fix healthcare policy for the American people.

RealClearPolitics Videos