Sen. Tim Kaine on Meet the Press this morning again defended his decision to “[switch] my no vote to yes” to end the federal government shutdown – said what changed is “we got a couple other key wins for the American people…full-year funding for the SNAP program…and full-year funding for some other important priorities like the Veterans Administration…key protections for federal employees…guarantee of no mass firings, no RIFs going forward…guarantee of a vote on health care.” See below for video and some more highlights.
- Asked why he voted yes but Sen. Mark Warner voted no: “I don’t want to put words in anybody else’s mouth. But…it was an assessment of what Republicans would do. You know, today there will be a lot of good football games and every team goes in with a game plan to start, but if the game plan isn’t producing what you want at halftime, the coach goes in and says we’ll make some adjustments. 40 days in, the Republicans were saying, ‘we know we need to talk about health care, but we will not engage on healthcare until government is reopened.’ Now it’s fair to test somebody’s red lines, and we tested them over and over again in October and they didn’t budge from that. Frankly, i viewed the situation last weekend as we had no path – none – to a health care fix until we reopened government. Now we have a path, not a guarantee, but we at least have a path. And Democrats have to do all we can to put the best proposal on the table within a month and force everyone, Democrats and Republicans, to declare whether they’ll stand on the side of the American public and reduce health care costs.”
- Asked “what do say to that argument that Democrats projected weakness here?” “So twofold. I have 220,000 federal employees in Virginia. And together with their families, that’s probably 700,000 dependents. Getting them all back to work with two paychecks that they’ve missed restored, with protections against future firings. You know, folks like AOC may think that’s nothing. Virginians think it’s an awful lot. And second, if the goal was to try to get health care front and center, she was not at the table with the Republicans in the Senate, and so maybe she thinks that the Republicans would have caved. Would it have been another week of SNAP recipients losing their SNAP benefits? Another month of air travelers enduring chaos and even danger? Another two months of federal employees losing their paychecks? I was at the table with the Republican senators, and I knew if we wanted to get to the health care discussion, we had to open up government. And that was a vantage point I had that a lot of folks who were lobbing criticism didn’t. I’m getting great feedback from Virginians and those are the 8 1/2 million people I represent.”
- Asked “Do you believe the Democrats lost any leverage that you might have against Republicans moving forward for the next fight?” “What I was saying during the whole month of October is for me, Tim Kaine, I’m not speaking for anybody else, I didn’t need all of the i’s dotted and t’s crossed on health care, but what I needed was a moratorium on mischief so that the president couldn’t continue to abuse federal employees and congressionally funded programs. So I actually achieved what I had put on the table really beginning on October 1 with the federal protections that I gained and I also moved us to a path forward on health care where there was none. Would I have liked to get the full health care issue fixed? Absolutely. I’m very focused on working with all Democrats to put a good proposal on the table. But I fully believe had we not reopened government there was no path forward to do what we all want to do, and now there is that path forward and we have to do our very, very best to make it mean something.”
- Asked, “What, if any, assurances do you have from House Republicans that they will hold a vote on extending these Obamacare subsidies?” “So here’s my experience based on 13 years in the Senate. If we do something in the Senate that gains bipartisan support and that’s what we need, it can’t just be a Democratic messaging document, many Republicans in the House and Senate say we know we need to fix this. The reconciliation bill is responsible for jacking up people’s health care costs and if we don’t fix it, we’ll face an angry electorate. If we come up with a good bipartisan proposal that passes the House, you’re right, the Speaker gives no guarantees, but with a number of Republican members including from my own state who said we’ve got to fix this, it would be political malpractice of the highest order for the House to not take up a bipartisan bill coming out of the Senate. And if they don’t take it up, I’ll give you a prediction – the November 2026 elections are going to look a whole lot worse for Republicans than the November 2025 elections did, when we just swept Virginia in a historic way and won big races in New York, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Ccalifornia, all over the country. Americans will see who is standing with them and who is standing against them on affordability of health care. That will be clarifying. And the fact of that is the window that we have of being able to find a solution.”
- Asked, “if Democrats cannot get an agreement on Obamacare subsidies, do you rule out shutting down the government again in January?” “Don’t ask me to assume failure on the effort that we are undertaking. I think we can – we ought to plan for success and then adjust if we don’t get it. As you point out, the continuing resolution goes to January 31. We are guaranteed a health care vote in December. So we’ll have a chance to put our best foot forward and let the American public see. And the public will see this debate on health care without it being drowned out by air traffic delays, SNAP recipients losing benefits and federal employees losing paychecks for the third or fourth time. It would have been hard to grab everybody’s attention on the health care issue if all of the other consequences of shutdown were drowning it out. Now the government is open and now the American public will watch this health care debate and will see which side are you on?”
- Asked, “given that so many Democrats are calling for Leader Schumer to step aside, can he be an effective leader?” “Yes. Chuck has been an effective leader. Remember when Chuck was Majority Leader during the Biden administration, he produced a string of legislative wins with a bare majority nearly unparalleled in recent history – infrastructure, the American Rescue Plan, the Inflation Reduction Act, fixing the electoral college, first gun safety bill in 25 years, important veterans legislation. Being Minority Leader is tough. In the Senate, we have some tools in minority, but not many. We don’t control what’s on the floor and you know if you’re dealing with senators…it’s not exactly like senators just get in line and follow the leader. So I don’t tell Ro Khanna or AOC or anybody else who you should pick as your House leader because I have a full-time job being a senator, I don’t need to freelance opinions about House leadership. They should focus on their own leadership and let Senators do what they need to do to keep this country moving forward.”
- Asked, “Did Leader Schumer give you his blessing to end the shutdown…tacit or otherwise?” “Absolutely not. But Chuck and I had a really interesting argument about an unrelated topic a couple of years ago where I was going in a different direction than he was on something and he was really, really pushing me. And I said Chuck, my goal with you is always to inform you, but I don’t need a permission slip from you because 8.5 million Virginians gave me that permission slip in November of 2024. He voted the other way. He would have preferred that I’d not voted the way that I did. But he knows that U.S. Senators are going to do what’s in the interest of their constituents. And my 320,000 federal workers and their families are a powerful, powerful part of who I represent. And when I can get important protections f for them after a year of getting kicked around by Donald Trump, I said I’m ready to sign on.”
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