{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.daines.senate.gov/2025/11/07/daines-on-fox-business-schumers-plan-is-nonsense/", "Daines on Fox Business: Schumer\u2019s Plan is Nonsense", "2025-11-07", "2025", "2025-11", "Republican", "Senate", "MT", "Steve Daines", "D000618", "www.daines.senate.gov", "daines", "https://www.daines.senate.gov/news/press-releases/", "scraper", "\u201cDemocrats Are Shutting Down the Entire Government Because of Subsidies That Were Always Meant to Expire\u201d\n\nU.S. SENATE \u2013 U.S. Senator Steve Daines today joined Fox Business to discuss how Chuck Schumer is using Obamacare as political leverage to hold the government hostage.\n\nWatch the full interview HERE.\n\nDaines on how Schumer is using Obamacare to hold the government hostage:\n\nWe want the shutdown to end immediately. It should\u2019ve ended weeks ago. You look at the Fox charts at the moment- they are showing flights delayed, flights cancelled. This is only going to get worse. Secretary Duffy is having to take extraordinary action to protect the flying public. You saw what Schumer just offered on the floor- it\u2019s nonsense. It\u2019s a nonstarter. Let me just step back for a moment and define the problem. Obamacare premiums have gone up 220 percent since it was implemented in 2014. Remember Barack Obama said Obamacare is going to lower health care costs by $2,500. That was the promise. It\u2019s up 221 percent. These now-subsidies that were put in place temporarily by the Democrats during COVID are set to expire. They were never meant to be permanent. What Chuck Schumer\u2019s asking is to now extend these temporary subsidies that are paid to Americans for like a family of two that make over $100,000 a year. But where do these subsidies go? They go directly to the insurance companies. So, it\u2019s doing nothing to address the issue of the unaffordability of Obamacare and health care. Their stock prices, Larry, if you look at the major health care insurance companies over that same period of time, going back to 2014, are up 500 percent to over 1,000 percent. So, the insurance companies are making out like bandits, while the American people are feeling the pain of Obamacare. And remember, when you think about how many Americans receive Obamacare, it\u2019s seven percent. So, 93 percent of the American people receive their health care through Medicare, through Medicaid, through private health care. It\u2019s seven percent that receive it through Obamacare. And it\u2019s a much smaller subset of that seven percent that actually get this subsidy paid to the insurance company, not even to the consumer. And so, the Democrats, bottom line, are shutting down the entire government, disrupting air travel, not paying the troops, because of these subsidies that were always meant to expire. That\u2019s the fight. So, what did Chuck Schumer just do? He says, let\u2019s extend them another year. We\u2019re not going to do that without significant reforms at best. Twenty percent of these subsidies are fraudulent. This is a terrible, $50 billion a year fraudulent subsidy program that we have got to stop or dramatically reform. We\u2019re not going to let Chuck Schumer extend another year. That\u2019s what he proposed here about an hour ago, and its nonsense.\n\nDaines on how the shutdown could end:\n\nWe\u2019ve given the Democrats now 14 or15 times the opportunity to have a vote for what they call a clean CR [continuing resolution]. And by the way, they voted for a clean CR 11 times when Joe Biden was President. But now that President Trump is in charge, they vote against it. Chuck Schumer voted for it back in March and nearly had his head handed to him, politically speaking, and so he\u2019s got to show this fight to save his political career with AOC and so forth in New York. This is political gamesmanship, and sadly, the American people are suffering. We\u2019re suffering in many, many ways. It\u2019s got to stop. So how do we get out of this mess? We\u2019ve got to first agree, like we\u2019ve always done in Washington for a long time, for many, many years, on a short-term extension of the CR. Now, November 21st is not enough time. Punt it out to January. By the way, we have serious discussions with a handful of Democrats. Let\u2019s call them the Common Sense Caucus. They want to end this thing as bad as we want to end it. They are willing to push back against Chuck Schumer\u2019s iron fist and do the right thing for this nation. I\u2019m hoping, Larry, that this weekend there\u2019ll be time for the temperature to come down and that by perhaps next week we could get something accomplished here, having a handful of Democrats join us, do the right thing, buy the time needed to do the negotiations for these final spending bills. That\u2019s the right answer, Larry. That\u2019s what we\u2019ve always done here in Washington, and they\u2019re not agreeing to that because of Chuck Schumer\u2019s iron fist.\n\nDaines on federal employees who aren\u2019t getting paid:\n\nRon Johnson has a bill on the floor that simply says this, let\u2019s pay the federal employees, giving their back pay to the first of November. Air traffic controllers, anybody else who is going to work every day in the federal government and not getting a paycheck. Let\u2019s just pay them for now and not have them suffer, not be able to make the rent payments, pay for their groceries. I\u2019ll tell you what, we\u2019re going to test the Democrats to see if they\u2019ll at least do that to take care of these civil servants who are serving us every day. I\u2019ll bet you that they will vote against this, which just shows you again, frankly, the bad state of mind they\u2019re at the moment and why they\u2019re yielding to Schumer\u2019s political gainsmanship doing the right thing instead of the right thing for the American people.\n\nDaines on withholding his paycheck during the shutdown:\n\nIt\u2019s terrible. Many of us, including myself, have just asked to withhold our paychecks. So, I\u2019m in that camp. So, I ask them to do that. You know when I walk by the Capitol Police who protect us here every day, every morning, they got smiles on their face, they\u2019re doing their jobs. They\u2019re not getting paid right now. And I think it\u2019s important that we stand at least in solidarity and say even though you\u2019re right, legally we do get paid, that\u2019s wrong. We should tell them to hold.\n\n###", 1, "2026-03-30T01:40:41Z", "2026-04-06T19:52:45Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.daines.senate.gov/2025/11/07/daines-on-fox-business-schumers-plan-is-nonsense/"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.8165889885276556, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}