WASHINGTON — This evening, Speaker Johnson joined Bret Baier on Fox News’ Special Report to address House Republicans’ plan to keep the government open with a clean, short-term continuing resolution and to call out Congressional Democrats for attempting to inject $1.5 trillion in unrelated, partisan provisions into the government funding process.
“Republicans are going to do the responsible thing; we will pass a CR here tomorrow out of the House. I suspect and it sounds like we won’t have many Democrats to assist in that,” Speaker Johnson said.
Watch Speaker Johnson’s full interview here.
On Republican efforts to keep the government open:
We’ve been working hard to get the House back to the regular appropriations order and we’ve achieved that in the House in a bipartisan fashion. They passed all 12 appropriations bills through the committee, three of them off the floor. The Senate passed three bills. Remember the old videos on Saturday mornings about how a bill becomes a law? If the House and the Senate disagree on an appropriation spending bill, they go to a conference committee to work it out. We voted to do that. All this is working well, but we’re coming up on the end of the fiscal year, September 30, so we need a few more weeks to finish this good work.
So, what we did in a responsible manner as Republicans in charge, is we offered a totally clean short-term CR to get that job done. Chuck Schumer saw that, and he returned a counteroffer that is filled with partisan wish lists and poison pills and demands. It includes, for example Bret, what Chuck Schumer is arguing for, he wants to reinstate free health care for illegal aliens. He wants to add $500 million to prop up liberal media outlets, and he wants to add a massive $1.4 trillion spending hike to what should be a simple seven week stop-gap funding measure. We can’t do that. We’re not going to do it.
On private companies and the freedom of speech:
My background is in the courts. I was a federal court litigator, I literally defended free speech as a career for about 20 years, religious freedom and the freedom of speech and our fundamental rights. We have to jealously guard that, and I think we are. ABC is a private company. You’ve heard a lot of consternation about private companies firing or reprimanding employees for going online and glorifying the tragic death of a young father and young husband, and it’s detestable.
So, in the private employer space, you have all the right in the world to have standards for your company, standards for your broadcast brand, and you know they get to make that decision. And I don’t think that’s violation of the First Amendment. You don’t have a First Amendment right to stay employed if you’re going to engage in that kind of crazy action online, and in many cases, it really is inciting further violence. It’s a serious problem.
On upholding the security of Members of Congress:
Look, I always want to be quick to say members of Congress are safe. They do have substantial security measures in their residence and on their person. But when you have a big event like we had with the tragic shooting of our friend Charlie Kirk, it draws attention to it, and we’re in a constant process of improvement, making sure that we have the latest and greatest technology and resources available. So that’s the process we’ve been going through. We’re adding additional funding and measures to ensure that everybody is safe and that they can do their job representing the people from back home. I think this also has an element of awareness too. So we’re doing training with members and offering every resource we possibly can to ensure that we can keep this system going.
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