Representative Johnson criticizes Biden’s lack of involvement in shutdown talks, tells Newsmax

President Joe Biden is “absent at the table” for discussions on the spending bill and the looming potential government shutdown, and he’s “basically threatened to veto everything we’ve tried to do in governing,” Rep. Bill Johnson said on Newsmax Saturday. 

“When you don’t have the president of the United States at the table, telling us what he’s going to be willing to accept, it makes it really hard to get this job done,” the Ohio Republican told Newsmax’s “America Right Now.”

“He did the same thing with the debt limit, by the way, but we’ll find out later this morning what we’re going to be voting on.”

A stopgap bill was defeated in the House Friday, with 21 Republicans voting with Democrats to kill the measure, and Johnson, who voted for the bill, said “we’re still trying to figure that out” when asked why the bill failed. 

“That plan that we had yesterday was about as strong of a government stopgap funding plan as you could get, a 30-day extension of government funding,” said Johnson.

“[It had] strong border security and protected the VA, protected homeland and defense. It was a 30% cut to current spending levels. It would keep the government open and it had a bipartisan debt commission as well.”

The small group of GOP opponents, he added, “haven’t articulated what they’re for.”

“What conservative Republican could vote against the package that we had yesterday?” said Johnson. “The biggest element of that was border security…you heard the speaker of the House talk about 300 Americans per day dying from fentanyl poisoning within all that’s coming across our southern border. That’s 300 every single day. Why is border security not the most important thing on the president’s list?”

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