Chuck Schumer's "real...health care crisis"

A miraculous thing happened during Margaret Brennan's interview of Chuck Schumer. During Brennan's interview, she pushed Schumer. According to this transcript, Brennan opened by saying "I want to pick up on something the Speaker of the House was pointing to. He wants this fight to be about illegals, as he said. And I want to be specific here, because we know from our research that there is no federal money that goes towards health care tax credits for undocumented immigrants in this country. The federal government doesn't fund health insurance for the undocumented. But it is also true that states like yours, New York, does provide health care for people who are in this country illegally. And their argument seems to be the money here is fungible, and bottom line is, it comes out of the federal pocket. Do you want to respond to that?"

Smart policy wonks would reflexively know to throw in the 'money is fungible' line. I suspect that put Sen. Schumer on the defensive. Because it was the opening question, I'm betting that Sen. Schumer was immediately on the defensive.

Here's how Sen. Schumer replied:

You know, they don't want to, Johnson doesn't want to discuss the real issue, the health care crisis facing the American people. So he puts up all these fake lies to try and divert attention. It's his standard operation. He just is concerned with the politics. Every independent agency that looks at this says Johnson's claim is false. And just as you said, Margaret, no, zero federal dollars can go to undocumented immigrants through Medicare, through Medicaid, through ACA. And so we ought to be talking about the real issue here, which is that we have a health care crisis in America caused by the Republicans. They've caught, they barreled us towards a shutdown because they don't want to deal with that crisis. Plain and simple.

That's an obvious dodge. Speaker Johnson has repeatedly said that he's willing to have that discussion the minute that the government is re-opened. Then there's this:

CNN got into the act, too:

When you're Sen. Schumer and you've lost Margaret Brennan and Jake Tapper, you're in trouble.