Oct. 7 (UPI) — Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said Tuesday that “some good things could happen with healthcare” after he spoke with President Donald Trump about the government shutdown, a vote on which is expected later in the day.
During a news conference Tuesday morning, Johnson said he spoke “at length” with the president Monday about the failure of Congress to pass a continuing resolution to temporarily fund the government.
The inability for the Senate to reach a supermajority vote in favor of the stopgap funding package shut down the government starting Oct. 1.
Johnson said Trump “wants to solve the problem.”
“The president is a dealmaker. He likes to figure these things out and work toward solutions,” the speaker said, according to ABC News.
At issue are subsidies for Affordable Care Act premiums set to expire in the new year. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said his party wouldn’t support the stopgap legislation unless Republicans provisions extending the ADA subsidies.
The Trump administration has said it’s against extending the ADA subsidies, falsely claiming undocumented immigrants are taking advantage of it. Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for health insurance under the ADA, according to the federal healthcare.gov website.
Johnson said Tuesday that negotiations over healthcare won’t happen until “the Democrats stop inflicting pain on the American people and turn the lights back on Congress and get everybody back to work.”
The Senate failed for a fifth time to pass a continuing resolution Monday evening.
Meanwhile, there appears to be some question about whether furloughed government workers will receive back pay when they return to their jobs. A memo by the White House Office of Management and Budget obtained by Axios indicates that 750,000 workers won’t receive back pay despite a 2019 law signed by Trump that guarantees it.
“Does this law cover all these furloughed employees automatically? The conventional wisdom is: Yes, it does. Our view is: No, it doesn’t,” an unnamed senior White House official told Axios.
Senate Republican leader John Thune and he believes furloughed workers would be entitled to back pay.
“I don’t know what statute they’re using,” Thune said, according to CBS News. “My understanding is, yes, that they would get paid.
“I haven’t heard this up until now, but again, it’s a very straightforward proposition … they government reopens, and this question of whether people get paid or not is a non-issue.”
Johnson, however, declined to say definitively whether that would happen.
“It is true that in previous shutdowns, many or most of them have been paid for the time that they were furloughed. But there is new legal analysis — I don’t know the details, I just saw a headline this morning, I’m not read in on it and I haven’t spoken to the White House about it — but there are some legal analysts who are saying that may not be appropriate or necessary in terms of the law requiring that backpay be provided.
“If that is true, that should turn up the urgency and the necessity of Democrats doing the right thing here,” Johnson said.