Eight days into the government “shutdown,” Senate Democrats on Wednesday cast their sixth vote to keep the doors closed. They remain hellbent on their ransom demand to add another $1.5 trillion in spending, a big chunk of which would help pay for health insurance for illegal immigrants. They insist that’s not the case. 

They’re lying. And Americans know it. 

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey shows 49 percent of likely U.S. voters agree with White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who said: “Democrats shut down the government to give hundreds of billions of free healthcare to illegal aliens, including the millions of illegal aliens to whom [Joe] Biden [and the] Democrats gave illegal amnesty.” Nearly one-third of respondents (32%) strongly agree with Miller’s assessment. The poll found 44 percent disagree, 38 percent strongly. 

‘Reserved for Eligible Individuals’

Health policy expert Elle Minarik says Miller is “100 percent” correct. The Democrats’ ransom demand, Minarik  says, would repeal the health title of the One Big Beautiful Bill, now known as the Working Families Tax Cut Act. Section 71109 of the package, passed earlier this year by the Republican-controlled congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump, ensures that “Medicaid funds are reserved for eligible individuals by ending federal funding when an individual’s citizenship or immigration status has not been verified.”

The Democrat proposal repeals that provision and others in the Big Beautiful Bill, provisions that secure Medicaid for those it was created for — the elderly, disabled, children and other American citizens truly in need. 

“It’s just proof that they do not even know what is in their own bill that they shut down the government over,” Minarik, program manager at Paragon Health Institute, told me Wednesday on the WHO Morning Show with Jeff Angelo in Des Moines. 

It shouldn’t come as a shock that Democrats don’t know or don’t understand what’s in their own spending bill. After all, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi once said of the behemoth government health care bill known as Obamacare, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” 

‘The California Loophole’

The Trump-led tax cut and spending law includes a provision ensuring government-funded health care benefits go to U.S. citizens. Minarik said there are two main points of the law Democrats are attempting to repeal through their alternative Continuing Resolution to keep the government running.  

“It uses the Medicaid money-laundering apparatus to inflate federal costs through increased in-state Medicaid spending, [and] then invoice the federal government to be reimbursed,” she said. 

In short, it’s a scam on taxpayers. 

Last year, leftist-led California drew down an additional $10 billion without putting up a single state dollar, Minarik said. The state then turned around and used the money to expand Medicaid assistance to illegal immigrants. In total, the Golden State used about $4 million to finance free health care for illegal aliens in what Minarik calls the “California loophole.”

Beginning in 2024, illegal immigrants of all ages qualified for the state’s Medi-Cal health insurance program intended for the poor. 

“It makes California among the first states to fund comprehensive health care for undocumented immigrants,” CalMatters reported in late December 2023. “Oregon in July dropped age restrictions for undocumented immigrants in its low-income state health insurance program.” 

Guess who ultimately pays for California’s generosity to “undocumented migrants”? 

As the Paragon Institute reported earlier this year, blue states like California tax Medicaid insurers and then make higher payments to the same insurers with the higher “taxes.” 

“The higher payments enable the state to claim additional federal matching dollars. These federal funds leave California with surplus money to spend elsewhere,” the Paragon Institute explains in the report titled, “California’s Insurance-Tax Shuffle: How Federal Money Ends Up Paying for Medicaid for Illegal Immigrants.” 

“This scheme effectively allows the state to ‘launder’ federal Medicaid funds without spending any of its own money,” the institute asserts. The scheme allows the state to circumvent restrictions on federal Medicaid funding for illegal immigrants. 

Shockingly (not really), California spent significantly more than anticipated on Medi-Cal, thanks in no small part to the illegal immigrants receiving coverage through the money-laundering scheme. Far-left Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration borrowed $3.4 billion from California’s general fund earlier this year to fill the gap from the “unexpected cost increase,” CalMatters reported. 

The second provision Democrats are trying to kill involves “emergency Medicaid.” Up until the signing of the Big Beautiful Bill, illegal immigrants throughout the country were receiving higher Medicaid reimbursements than U.S. seniors, children, the disabled and others through Medicaid. The reforms in the Republicans’ Big Beautiful Bill changes that, making sure illegal aliens do not receive higher rates than “America’s most truly vulnerable and indigent,” Minarik said.

Last year, the Congressional Budget Office reported that former President Joe Biden’s open border policies cost taxpayers more than $16.2 billion to provide the emergency services to illegal aliens during the first three years of the administration. 

The reforms in the Big Beautiful Bill change who qualifies for an Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) tax credit and get rid of some blanket coverage for the millions of so-called “parolees” the Biden administration allowed to invade the United States. 

Democrats and their partners in the accomplice media are parsing language to get around the facts. The Big Beautiful Bill restricts eligibility to the 2.8 million inadmissible aliens given sweeping parole by the Biden administration to stay in the United States. A rose by any other name is a rose, as a Biden parolee is an illegal immigrant to most Americans. 

As my Federalist colleague Brianna Lyman wrote, whatever “parole” distinction Biden gave the hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals he quietly dumped on U.S. communities, “most Americans would consider those people illegal aliens.” 

“So states are using awful loopholes trying to circumvent federal law so that [Democrats] can get on the news and say, ‘There’s nothing in the law that says that we can do this, nothing that allows illegal immigrants to get free health care’, when in reality they know the different, egregious scheme they are entering in to try to get their blue state priorities,” Minarik said. 

‘This is Their Shutdown’

With U.S. debt well north of $37 trillion, Democrats want to add hundreds of billions of dollars more to make permanent Obamacare tax credits put in place during the pandemic. Taxpayers have been on the hook for “enhanced” eligibility to individuals and families earning four times the federal poverty level — or about $62,600 for a individual or $124,800 for a family of four. Democrats have warned of catastrophe if these pandemic-era health insurance subsidies go away, despite the fact that we are long past the pandemic.  

“That’s what’s going on now. The Democrats are shutting down the government because they would like this subsidy for high-income taxpayers and also for illegal immigrants to continue,” Veronique de Rugy, the George Gibbs Chair in Political Economy and Senior Research Fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, said in a recent episode of The Federalist Radio Hour. 

Asked who is to blame for the shutdown, de Rugy without hesitation pointed to the Democrats. 

“It’s really kind of shocking when you think that they want; Democrats are for tax cuts without paying for them,” she said. “This is their shutdown.”