Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson told callers during his March 23 telephone town hall that Democrats bear sole responsibility for the TSA crisis, that the SAVE America Act is simple common sense, that Iran left the United States no choice but war, and that immigration chaos is a Democratic failure.
On nearly every count, the facts tell a more complicated and contradictory story. What he said doesn’t always hold up to scrutiny.
The TSA/DHS Shutdown: Both sides are blocking, but Johnson won’t acknowledge it
Johnson told caller Danielle from Menominee Falls that Democrats are solely responsible for the ongoing DHS shutdown, which has left TSA officers working without pay for more than 39 days and counting and produced hours-long lines at airports nationwide.
“It’s Democrats that are voting against the actual funding measures that would actually pass Congress,” he said.
He dismissed Democratic unanimous consent requests to fund TSA separately as procedural theater, noting, “it just takes one person to object,” and is not a real way to fund the agency.
On the first point, he has a factual leg to stand on. Reporting from CBS News confirms the Senate has failed to advance the House-passed DHS funding bill five times since Feb. 12, with Democrats blocking it each time by refusing to meet the 60-vote cloture threshold. Johnson is correct that Democrats are blocking the full DHS bill.
But what he leaves out is just as significant.
According to the Senate Appropriations Committee minority office, in a single 24-hour period, Senate Republicans blocked five separate Democratic bills to fund TSA, FEMA, CISA, and the Coast Guard while ICE and CBP negotiations continued. Reporting from The Hill confirms Senate Republicans have blocked eight separate attempts to fund TSA independently of ICE and CBP in recent weeks.
The third obstacle Johnson declined to mention is President Donald Trump himself. As noted in articles from NPR and CNN, Trump has put a condition on any DHS deal moving forward: passing of the SAVE America Act, which is a separate elections bill that doesn’t have 60 Senate votes.
This stance ties TSA worker paychecks to an unrelated partisan priority. Reporter Alexander Bolton from The Hill noted that some of Johnson’s own Republican colleagues privately worry the blame-Democrats strategy could backfire politically, particularly as the Iran war adds pressure.
Johnson is correct that Democrats have blocked the full DHS appropriations bill. He is wrong in naming Democrats as the only obstacle.
Johnson’s record on the Shutdown Fairness Act is accurate
Johnson repeatedly mentioned his Shutdown Fairness Act as a permanent fix for essential federal workers to get paid during shutdowns.
According to Congress.gov, the bill would provide appropriations to pay federal employees who are required to work during a government shutdown that includes workers who under current law must continue without pay until the shutdown ends.
A Fox News report confirms Senate Democrats blocked the bill, and Johnson’s claim that labor unions including the Teamsters support it is consistent with public reporting.
On the other hand, Democrats introduced the True Shutdown Fairness Act introduced last fall, according the NPR. If signed into law, the bill would extend coverage to both excepted and furloughed employees and prohibit mass firings during shutdowns, both of which offer broader protections than the Republican version, which covers only workers required to remain on the job.
THE SAVE America Act is a sweeping solution to an almost nonexistent problem
Multiple callers challenged the SAVE America Act, the voter ID and proof-of-citizenship registration bill Johnson supports. His defense is that it’s simple: Show ID to vote, prove you’re a citizen to register, and if you lack documents, just sign an affidavit under penalty of perjury.
He cited 80% national support for voter ID as evidence the public wants this, but the bill is not simple. More, the problem it claims to solve is infinitesimally small.
According to Congress.gov, the SAVE Act prohibits states from accepting voter registration applications unless the applicant presents documentary proof of U.S. citizenship, specifying acceptable documents such as identification consistent with the REAL ID Act that indicates citizenship. The immediate problem, according to the Center for American Progress, no state’s REAL ID indicates citizenship status, though every person who has one has to prove their lawful presence in the U.S., so the most common government-issued ID Americans carry would not qualify.
The practical burden falls hardest on specific groups. According to analysis from the Bipartisan Policy Center, more than 140 million American citizens do not possess a passport, and as many as 69 million women who have taken their spouse’s name do not have a birth certificate matching their current legal name. FactCheck.org found that 9% of all eligible voters lack ready access to documentary proof of citizenship, and 52% of registered voters do not have an unexpired passport with their current legal name.
Johnson’s claim that voters can simply sign an affadavit about their citizenship shines a spotlight on the ambiguity of the bill’s own language. Specifically, the process for those without documentary proof means local election officials would make the decision about “other evidence” qualifies at the same time they face possible criminal penalties of up to five years in prison for registering someone without the required documents.
The most critical aspect of the SAVE Act, is that it wants to solve a problem that doesn’t really exist.
The Center for Election Innovation and Research published its findings in Feb. 2026, after researchers tracked post-election audits across the country and found that in every examined case, initial claims of large numbers of noncitizen voters fell drastically once subjected to proper investigation.
Michigan’s statewide audit is considered the most comprehensive in the country, and it identified 15 people who appeared to have voted as noncitizens out of more than 5.7 million ballots cast — 0.00028% of the vote. The fact is that no state has found any coordinated effort to place noncitizen votes in any election.
Johnson’s 80% support figure reflects general polling on the concept of voter ID, but support consistently drops when respondents learn the specific document requirements, costs, and access barriers involved, according to an article from the Brennan Center for Justice.
Johnson blames Iran for the war while ignoring what Trump set in motion
Johnson told multiple callers that Iran “declared war on us 47 years ago,” that Iran’s nuclear program left Trump no choice but military action, and that the conflict is the inevitable consequence of Iranian aggression.
Iran’s four-decade record of hostility toward the United States is well-documented, and on this point Johnson’s description is largely accurate.
According to the American Jewish Committee, the Iranian regime’s anti-American campaign began with the 1979 seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, where 52 Americans were held hostage for 444 days. More, Iran has been formally designated a state sponsor of terrorism since 1984, a designation that has held through administrations of both parties.
“The ayatollahs would have had to do, and to be left alone, is just say that we’re not going to pursue a nuclear weapon,” he said.
But Johnson conveniently ignores a crucial documented fact: there was a working diplomatic framework constraining Iran’s nuclear program, and under Trump’s direction during his first term the United States unilaterally walked away from it.
According to a detailed timeline maintained by the United States Institute of Peace’s Iran Primer, the International Atomic Energy Agency issued quarterly compliance reports from 2016 through 2018 finding that Iran was meeting its obligations under the nuclear deal. The IAEA confirmed Iran had reduced its enriched uranium stockpile, capped its enrichment capacity, modified the Arak reactor to block plutonium production, and allowed expanded monitoring.
According to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, a full year after the United States withdrew from the deal in May 2018, the IAEA was still routinely verifying that Iran was in full compliance with the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action). Iran did not begin stepping back from the deal until May 2019, which was in direct response to the U.S. withdrawal and the reimposition of economic sanctions.
The RAND Corporation said at the time of the U.S.’s withdrawal could be disastrous for the Middle East under any conceivable scenario. Specifically, RAND warned that the collapse of the agreement would allow Iran to quickly resume enrichment capabilities to levels that were in place before the deal.
Time has shown those warnings to be accurate. According to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, after the U.S. exited the deal and Iran stopped honoring some of its commitments, Iran’s breakout time, or, the time needed to accumulate enough material for a nuclear weapon, shrank from more than a year under the deal to roughly three to four months.
Johnson wants constituents to believe Iran’s nuclear advances is unprovoked aggression, and the U.S. was forced to answer, but the truth is that Trump pulling America out of the JCPOA is the primary reason Iran’s nuclear capabilities advanced so quickly.
The record clearly shows Iran was in full compliance with an internationally verified nuclear agreement when the United States ended it.
Johnson blames Democrats for the immigration crisis, but his own party manufactured it
Johnson told callers that Democratic open-borders policies drove the immigration crisis, blaming it entirely on former President Joe Biden-and referencing his own past work on immigration reform with Trump’s team.
The timeline of what actually happened is much different.
In early 2024, a bipartisan group of senators, including Republican James Lankford of Oklahoma, Democrat Chris Murphy of Connecticut, and independent Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, spent months developing a comprehensive immigration overhaul at the explicit request of Senate Republicans who had insisted border security provisions be included in a foreign aid package.
According to NBC News, the bill would have raised the bar for asylum claims, expanded detention facilities, hired more border agents and immigration judges, and provided new emergency authority to restrict crossings.
Then, according to NPR, before the bill was even fully released, many of the same Senate Republicans who had demanded the negotiation reversed course because Trump publicly lobbied lawmakers to kill it, arguing its passage would be a political gift to Biden ahead of the election.
An article from The Hill notes that the bill collapsed less than 48 hours after its release, with more than half the Republican conference declaring opposition after Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell declared the effort dead.
The president did not merely oppose the bill; Trump bragged about killing it. Reporting from The Hill captured Trump telling an NRA audience about it in February 2024, saying “Which we, by the way, killed.”
The best chance to reform immigration law in 30 years was deliberately shelved so it could remain a campaign issue in the run up to the 2024 election.
During multiple telephone town halls, Johnson refuses to acknowledge that his own party killed the last meaningful bipartisan path to border reform.
Johnson is right on farmers for beef prices but silent on policy
Johnson acknowledged to a caller that beef prices are genuinely painful and noted that farmers are finally making money. Both are accurate.
According to CNBC, at the the start of 2025, the U.S. had the lowest cattle numbers since 1951, primarly because of years of drought that made it challenging to rebuild herds that for ranchers drove up costs more than 50% over five years.
What Johnson did not address was that Trump’s tariff policies have only compounded the problem consumers are feeling.
According to Axios, a 50% U.S. tariff on Brazilian beef imports prompted Brazilian meatpackers to reconsider future shipments. Brazil exports to America about 23% of all U.S. beef imports.
Where Johnson is right
Several of Johnson’s claims hold up.
His claim about Democrats blocking TSA funding is accurate, but he ignores that Republicans have also blocked Democratic alternatives. On the specific bill Johnson described, the voting record supports him.
His account of the Shutdown Fairness Act is accurate. He co-authored the bill, it would pay essential workers required to work during shutdowns, and Democrats blocked it.
His characterization of Iran as a documented state sponsor of terrorism with American blood on its hands through proxy forces is well-supported by historical records.
According to a February 2026 Congressional Research Service report on Iranian nuclear programs, Iran had, by the time of the 2026 strikes, been found to have stockpiles of enriched uranium at levels approaching weapons-grade, which is a real and documented nuclear threat, even if one that U.S. policy helped create.
His observation that beef producers are currently profiting from record-high cattle prices is accurate according to USDA data, at the same time those same prices are straining household budgets.
