WASHINGTON — This afternoon, Speaker Johnson appeared as the inaugural guest of first episode of The Scott Jennings Show on Salem Radio Network. They discussed how Republicans were able to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill and how Republicans will counter endless Democrat falsehoods about the legislation.
Watch the full interview here
On passing the One Big Beautiful Bill:
I told my colleagues back in February or March of 2024, I said, ‘guys, this is what’s going to happen this fall. We’re going to have unified government. We got to plan accordingly. We’re going to do reconciliation, but let’s do it in a bigger way than has ever been done before.’ We usually use two committees of jurisdiction to draft the bill, but let’s go with 11. Let’s do 11 committees. Let’s go big, you know, let’s really make a landmark piece of legislation and have a big beautiful bill. And that’s how it all began. So, all the work and all the months and all the deliberation, countless hours of work, discussion, and debate internally. Working with the president when he was a candidate, and after he was reelected, to fashion this bill and prepare it for prime time and get it over the line. We just implemented the playbook that we designed. So, there was a lot of work that went into achieving that.
On countering Democrat lies about Medicaid:
What’s unpopular is the false narrative that has been said and written about the bill. If everything they said was true , it would be unpopular, but it’s not true. Their whole premise is built upon this idea that we are ‘ripping healthcare away from people. We’re gonna slash Medicaid’ and all this other nonsense. None of it is true. The people that are saying it didn’t read the bill. They’re parroting false messages. Here’s the thing, we didn’t cut Medicaid. There are no cuts to Medicaid in the bill. In fact, Medicaid spending goes up on a trajectory over the next 10 years. What we did is strengthen the program for the American citizens who desperately need and deserve it.
How do we do that? By eliminating fraud, waste, and abuse by reintroducing work requirements for Medicaid. See, the problem is the resources have been drained in the program. It has an outrageous amount of fraud and abuse in the program. Every year, tens of billions of dollars are just wasted because after they expanded Obamacare, they basically allowed everybody who wanted to be on Medicaid in so many states. But you have young able-bodied men, for example, with no dependents who were literally at home playing video games instead of working, right? There are actual studies on this.
On the Republican agenda after One Big Beautiful Bill being signed into law:
We got this landmark achievement done with a big, beautiful bill, but we cannot rest on our laurels because the job is still ahead. We’re going to continue the process of what we’ve begun here. We have appropriations bills that are now forthcoming. We’re going to write the legislation at lower numbers and spend less and less of the people’s treasury because we have to be good stewards of that. We have additional rescissions bills coming forward, that’s clawing back fraud, waste, and abuse that was misspent for money that was already previously appropriated by Congress in conjunction with the White House. We’re doing that.
We have additional reconciliation bills, Scott, we have one planned for this fall, one hopefully for next spring. So we can attach one to each upcoming fiscal year. We can do three of those bills in a one, two year cycle of Congress. We’re going to do that and we’re codifying all the Trump executive orders and actions, continuing to roll back Biden regulations. Just a lot of things to do. We codified, by the way, 28 executive orders in the One Big Beautiful Bill. That’s now law. That’s a big thing, you know, this, can’t be changed by the next administration. Heaven forbid if we get another Democrat president sometime in the near future, they won’t be able to revert to the old policies because now it’s in the law. So these are very deliberate actions. It takes a lot of planning and implementation, but we’re getting it done and we’ll continue to get it done for the people.
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