Sen. Markwayne Mullin joined Newsmax's "Wake Up America" on Friday morning to discuss the ongoing government shutdown, accusing Senate Democrats of deliberately dragging their feet until November to gain political leverage.
"I really thought we would open it back up Monday or Tuesday," Mullin said. "But if you saw yesterday's vote, they blocked the defense bill."
The Oklahoma Republican expressed disbelief that nearly a dozen Democrats who previously supported the measure in committee turned around and voted against it on the Senate floor.
"Now, what's interesting about that is 11 people that voted for it out of the committee of jurisdiction and then out of the [Appropriations] Committee all voted 'no' on the floor. So that tells you that they're not even — they're just digging in."
Mullin suggested the Democrats' strategy is to extend the shutdown until at least Nov. 1, possibly to coincide with upcoming changes to the Affordable Care Act.
"Now, you start thinking, when will they open the government?" he said. "Maybe their next play is they're expecting the premiums to go way up on Nov. 1, which I don't think they are. I think they're overplaying their hand, and that's where they're going to push the government shutdown to."
According to Mullin, the delay makes little sense given that the "clean" continuing resolution Republicans are trying to pass is identical to one that the Democrats supported when they controlled the Senate.
"What a lot of people are completely overlooking is the clean CR, which is a clean, continuing resolution of operating the government the way that it is now ... was written by [Senate Minority Leader] Chuck Schumer last year," he said. "This is his clean CR. He wrote it when he was leader of the Senate when [former President] Joe Biden was in office last September to prevent a shutdown."
Mullin criticized what he described as the Democratic Party's shift toward the far left.
"This is no longer the party of JFK [the late President John F. Kennedy]," he said. "This is a party of extreme left views that want to turn the country into something that it's not."
The senator warned that every day the shutdown continues, taxpayers bear an increasing burden.
"It's costing the American taxpayers $400 million per day to furlough 750,000 government employees," he said, adding that penalties from halted federal contracts could push the total cost closer to $1 billion a day.
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