Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson and Fox’s John Roberts sparred Wednesday on “Special Report with Bret Baier” over whether Democrats’ reasoning for shutting down the federal government is to provide illegal immigrants with healthcare benefits.

On Tuesday evening, Republicans in the Senate failed to gain enough support from Democrats for a spending agreement, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer leading his party to shut down the government at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday. Roberts asked Johnson how he would respond to Democrats’ claims that their bill does not fund healthcare for illegal immigrants. (RELATED: Even CNN Is Skeptical When Democratic Senator Denies That Party Pressure To Fight Trump Real Reason For Shutdown)

“I say they obviously have not read their bill. This counterproposal that he filed, everybody can Google it, go pull it up. It’s on the Senate’s website and in the legislative text,” Johnson said. “Go to page 57 of Chuck Schumer’s bill and look at section 2141. It says right there in plain language [that] they want to repeal the health provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill.”

“I do part ways with you here on this idea of plain language. I read that whole section. It might as well be written in Mandarin,” Roberts pushed back.

During a Wednesday interview on “FOX & Friends,” Vice President JD Vance said Democrats are attempting to reinstate a Biden-era federal funding program that provides healthcare for illegal immigrants. The program ended under the Trump administration.

In response to Republican backlash, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer

 

Johnson went on to say that Democrats “probably” don’t understand their own filing, explaining how Section 2141 is the party’s way of “trying to take out in its entirety the reforms” that Republicans included in the “Big, Beautiful Bill” regarding health.

“That’s probably why the Democrats don’t understand what they filed,” Johnson said. “But if you interpret that and you get through all the subsections, what you realize is they’re trying to take out in its entirety the reforms that we put into the Big Beautiful Bill pertaining to health. And why is that so important? Because what we did was we strengthened the Medicaid program by making sure that ineligible recipients are not on the rolls.”

“The CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, on August 25 published a letter, and they said this is going to do exactly what Republicans said. They estimate that 2.3 million illegal recipients for Medicaid will be pushed off the rolls because of our reforms,” Johnson added. “It’s going to save $185 billion of taxpayer funds. So they want to return all those ineligible people back to the rolls, and many of them are illegal aliens. That is a fact. Anybody who looks at it objectively has to say it’s true.”

According to the Democrats’ proposed continuing resolution, Section 2141, titled “REPEAL OF HEALTH SUBTITLE CHANGES,” seeks to repeal the “Big, Beautiful Bill’s” Title VII, Section B, which pertains to Medicare and efforts to curb waste, fraud, and abuse in the system, including the restriction of “Alien Medicaid eligibility” in Sec. 71109.

Since June, the Trump administration has been aware of illegal immigrants on Medicaid, as officials provided deportation officers with information that included millions of Medicaid enrollees to aid in enforcement efforts. The data included individuals living in areas that allow illegal migrants to enroll in their Medicaid programs. Those areas include California, Washington, D.C., Illinois and Washington state.