Please note that this call may be recorded. Hi, this is ███████ with Americans for Prosperity. We are calling to invite you to join our live telephone town hall with Congressman ██████████ taking place in just a few moments. We'll be discussing the government shutdown in ██████████ and taking your questions. Please stay on the line and you'll be automatically connected or press 1 on your telephone keypad to join right now. Please note that this call may be recorded. Good evening. And welcome. Thank you so much for joining us tonight for Americans for Prosperity. Telephone. Town hall. My name is █████████. I am the state director for Americans for Prosperity, ████████. And I'm honored to be joined by special guest Congressman ██████████. If you have a question for the congressman at night, you're in a town hall. Please press Star three to be put in the queue. Again, that's Star three. We'll be discussing many of the different pressing issues facing Nebraskans in our country, including the state of the government shutdown and the working families tax cut that Congress passed just this last summer. At this time, I would like to introduce our special guest, Congressman ██████████. Congressman, thank you for joining us. Can you give us a quick update on what's going on in ████ with this government shutdown and how it's developing? Well, first of all, thank you very much, ████. And thank you to Americans for Prosperity for hosting this call tonight. Hi, everybody, this is ██████████. I'm sitting behind my desk in the ██ Capitol. It's just after ████ Eastern here, ████ Eastern in ████████. At least to the eastern side of ████████, ████ in the west in mountain time zone. I just want to say what an honor it is to represent the Cornhusker State in ██████████. And I'm out here doing what I can to try and bring this shutdown to a close. It's absolutely unnecessary. Quite frankly, it's embarrassing. I went through the Omaha airport today, and I just said to the TSA agents, thank you for working. I know you're not getting paid. Thanks for keeping our skies safe. I went to the National Weather Service office in ████ on Friday. I told the meteorologists and the scientists, the staffers there at the weather service that appreciated them. Being on the job. There's just so many people that make America run on the federal side, and the fact that they're still at their jobs, knowing they're not going to get an immediate paycheck. Well, the Democrats continue to refuse to extend the same budget that they voted for to start with. It's just hard to swallow. So the fact that you're on this call with me tonight, I appreciate it. My goal tonight is to kind of explain what's happening in ██████████, make sure folks in the ████████ understand what we're doing here in the House of Representatives, to try and keep everything on track. And some of the consequences that come from having a government shutdown. Right now, as you know, as a House Republican, I voted to fund the government. I voted to fund all of the agencies that were worried about the military, law enforcement, air traffic controllers, the TSA food inspectors that are beef and pork and chicken plants, all of the important federal jobs, the FSA and all the different USDA agencies that help our farmers and ranchers. Despite this, the Senate Democrats so far have blocked Progress. It takes ██ votes to move a bill. We only have ██ seats. And so when you hear people say, oh, the Republicans control the House, the Senate and the White House, Well, for purposes of passing bills in the Senate, you have to have ██ votes, and we have ██ Republicans. now we do have two or three democrats on any given day willing to vote for us but we really need five votes over there to shut this shutdown down so we just need a handful of senate democrats to apply common sense do what they did last march