House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said this week that he’s ready for a public debate with Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) amid the government shutdown, now in its third week.
“I look forward to that,” Jeffries told a small group of reporters on Tuesday in his office in the Capitol.
“We’re going to try to get it scheduled, absolutely.”
Johnson had earlier declined a challenge from Jeffries to debate on the House floor, saying the time to debate the Republicans’ spending bill had come and gone.
But in a rare appearance on C-SPAN last week, the Speaker said he wanted to sit down with Jeffries on the network’s new program, “CeaseFire,” which aims to bring together figures of opposing viewpoints to discuss the issues of the day.
“I’ll sit down with Hakeem Jeffries, my counterpart. I’d love to,” Johnson said last Thursday on the network’s “Washington Journal” program. “Sometime we’ll get that done.”
The latest remarks from Jeffries come weeks into a government shutdown that’s found both parties digging into their positions without giving an inch. Amid that debate, Jeffries and Democrats have demanded the launch of new negotiations in search of a bipartisan spending bill that can pass through both chambers of Congress and reopen the government.
GOP leaders have rejected those demands, saying such talks are unnecessary because their clean spending bill merely extends funding temporarily at current levels.
“I don’t have anything to negotiate,” Johnson told reporters Tuesday in the Capitol.
Updated at 8:19 a.m. EDT
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