Democratic analyst Brian Tyler Cohen unmasked what he sees as a GOP plot underpinning the government shutdown during a new episode of the "Brian Tyler Cohen" podcast on Monday.
The federal government has been shut down for almost a month, which has put government services from food stamps to air traffic control in jeopardy. Republicans have blamed Democrats for not signing their government funding bill. Democrats have said they are using the shutdown to re-negotiate cuts to Medicaid that were part of Trump's budget.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) attempted to blame Democrats for the shutdown during a press conference on Monday.
"Republicans do not have the ability to do this on our own," Johnson said. "It's a simple math problem. We need Democrats to help."
Cohen argued that Johnson's claims revealed the plot behind the government shutdown.
"The reality here is actually quite simple," Cohen said. "Mike Johnson does not want to protect the [Affordable Care Act], which 24 million Americans rely on. He and his party hate this law that enabled millions of Americans to get coverage. They do not believe in healthcare as a right. This is their way of destroying it from within, allowing it to become so ineffective, so expensive that it becomes less popular, and therefore easier to destroy and replace with their own plan that, by the way, they've had 15 years to uncover."
"But when that plan magically does materialize, I can assure you that a lot of middlemen will get very rich from it because that is how Republicans view healthcare," Cohen continued. "But he knows that if he relents here and extends those subsidies, he will undermine that plan. And so instead, he pretends that he and his party are the victims at the hands of the big bad Democrats and that all those Democrats need to do is hand over what little leverage they have and then just totally trust the GOP when the Republicans say that they'll work with the Democrats on healthcare."
