Democrats are playing politics by keeping the government shut down, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito told “Fox News Sunday.”
The West Virginia Republican said, “I think they are loving this shutdown, because they think it is enhancing themselves politically,” adding that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer “has already said, ‘This is getting better for us every day.’ That’s the game they’re playing, and now it’s really impacting a lot of people all across this country.”
Capito continued, “We’re not going to drop the filibuster” in order to have the votes necessary to stop the shutdown.
The senator explained that a measure to drop the filibuster “wouldn’t pass, number one. I signed a letter in 2017 I would not vote to get rid of the filibuster. The simple vote here is to simply open the government. We have a bipartisan measure that has no strings attached to it, except for a seven-week extension of government [funding]. That’s the easy part here.”
She noted that Senate Majority Leader John Thune has said “numerous times in his speeches on the floor, and also to the press, that the GOP is ready to talk about health care, to talk about the system [Democrats] created, to talk about Obamacare that is now unaffordable, which we knew it would be when we voted against it several years ago.
“But Sen. Thune has said numerous times that we will talk about this, but he’s not going to let the government be held hostage and hijacked over an issue.”
When Capito was asked why there has not been more movement on the bipartisan bill imposing additional sanctions on Russia to help end the war in Ukraine, she said, “I think [President Donald Trump] is hoping that by getting [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to the table again that he can reach some kind of agreement.
“He has reiterated numerous times, no war, stop the killing, we need peace. This is what the president really feels. You can see what he did in the Middle East, and I think that gives him good momentum.”
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