Jeffries slams Trump for attending Ryder Cup just days before potential government shutdown
House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries criticized President Trump for attending the Ryder Cup golf tournament in New York on Friday instead of staying in Washington to prevent a government shutdown at midnight Tuesday.
“He didn’t have the time to meet with Democratic leaders to fund the government and address the Republican health care crisis, but Donald Trump, right now, as we speak, is at a golf event,” Mr. Jeffries, New York Democrat, said. “It’s outrageous.”
Mr. Trump told reporters he decided to attend the golf tournament because he heard the American team was not doing so well and he wanted to give them a pep talk.
“So when I heard that, I said, ’Let’s get on the plane. We have to fly and help them,’” he said. “They lost three matches and they tied in one. So that’s not [going] so well. We’ll get it done. One way or the other, we’ll get it done.”
Mr. Trump had been scheduled to meet with Mr. Jeffries and fellow New Yorker, Senate Democratic leader Charles E. Schumer, in the Oval Office on Thursday. He withdrew the invitation two days prior, citing Democrats’ “unserious and ridiculous” demands to help pass a funding bill.
Mr. Jeffries said Democrats still want to negotiate, which he said is the only off-ramp for avoiding a shutdown when funding expires when the new fiscal year begins Oct. 1.
“We’re four days away from a government shutdown,” he said. “Democrats are here in the Capitol, ready, willing and able to sit down with anyone at any time and at any place in order to find a bipartisan path forward to fund the government.”
Mr. Trump has said he does not believe negotiating with Democrats would be productive until they drop their left-wing demands for more than $1 trillion in health care spending.
“We’re going to see if the radical left Democrats want to shut it down,” he said. “I mean, it’s up to them.”
The president said Democrats are threatening a shutdown “to give billions, ultimately, trillions of dollars, to illegal migrants, people that came into our country illegally.”
“Our people aren’t going to stand for it,” he said. “They also want to have open borders. They want to have men in women’s sports. They want to have transgender for everybody. These people are crazy, the Democrats. So if it has to shut down, it’ll have to shut down, but they’re the ones that are shutting government.”
Mr. Jeffries said Mr. Trump is “lying to the American people” about what Democrats want and addressed him directly: “You know that none of the things you’re claiming we’re demanding have anything to do with anything that Democrats have said.”
Federal law prohibits taxpayer dollars from being spent on health care for undocumented immigrants.
“Does Donald Trump not know that law?” Mr. Jeffries said. “We’re not demanding that that law be repealed. We’re fighting for the health care of American citizens, and we’ll continue to make that fight.”
Democrats have proposed repealing the health section of Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill, which seeks to close a loophole in the federal law that has allowed states to spend their own money on Medicaid coverage for illegal immigrants. The new GOP law would reduce federal funding to states that provide such coverage.
The part of the law Democrats want to repeal also blocks Medicaid funds from being used for gender transition procedures. But Democrats have not made any demands related to allowing biological men to play in women’s sports, as Mr. Trump has claimed.
In addition to the rollback of the GOP’s Medicaid changes, Democrats are also pushing to extend their party’s pandemic-era expansions of Obamacare premium subsidies that are set to expire at the end of the year. Notices of premium increases will go out to Obamacare plan holders beginning Oct. 1, ahead of open enrollment, which begins Nov. 1.
Republican leaders have said they are willing to negotiate a potential extension, with guardrails to protect the subsidies from waste, fraud and abuse, but only after Democrats vote to keep the government open.
Mr. Jeffries said Democrats do not have enough trust in Republicans to believe they’d negotiate in good faith.
“We’re supposed to believe, with a wink and a nod, that Republican leaders are actually interested in dealing with the Affordable Care Act issue, when for years they’ve been obsessed with repealing and displacing people off of the Affordable Care Act? It’s ridiculous,” he said. “We need an iron-clad path forward to deal with the health care of everyday Americans.”
