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April 10, 2024 For Immediate Release Contact: Taylor Haulsee
WASHINGTON — Today, at the House Republican Leadership Stakeout, Speaker Johnson addressed Biden’s border catastrophe, Democrats’ alarming anti-Israel rhetoric, and the need for Congress to swiftly reform and reauthorize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
“We’re enacting sweeping changes – 50 reforms, 56 to be exact – to the program that are in the base text that will stop the abuse of politicized FBI queries and prevent another Russia hoax debacle, among many other important reforms,” Speaker Johnson said. “No more Steele dossier, no more of the intelligence community relying on fake news reports to order a FISA order, no more collusion.”
Below are Speaker Johnson’s remarks as delivered:
Today, the House is going to be voted on this resolution to denounce Biden administration’s immigration policies. Every American should be paying attention to how the representative votes on that.
We’ve been talking about this ad nauseam in this room and everywhere at every press conference and every media appearance that we’ve had for the last many months – for the last three years for that matter, because since Joe Biden went into the Oval Office beginning on day one, they began to open that border wide.
The people in this room know very well, we’ve documented 64 specific executive actions and agency actions that he and Secretary Mayorkas and others took intentionally, deliberately to open the border wide and send the welcome message to everybody around the globe, including violent criminals and terrorists and foreign nationals who are coming here to do us harm.
The official number is about 9 million people that have been encountered at that southern border just in the last three years and a few months. But we all know, and I think intuitively, we understand the numbers much higher than that because we don’t have we don’t have any idea how many people actually have come across totally undetected.
The ‘gotaways’ number, I don’t know, close to 3 million now I think is the official number. But look, I think I say this often. I think the number is probably somewhere close to 16 million people by now that have gotten into this country illegally.
Where are they? What are they plotting? What are they doing? We would suspect that there are terrorist cells set up now and in some of these known terrorists, the 340 plus that had been apprehended at the border that were were suspected terrorists on the terrorist watch list, we got those, but we don’t know how many of them came in on detected and we know that 70% of Americans disapprove of Biden’s decision to open that border.
That’s the official number again, but I think anecdotally, I’ve been out in 23 states now in the last few months on the campaign trail and doing events around the country. I’m telling you, the sentiment out there is almost universal that people know this is a disastrous situation.
It’s a catastrophe that was caused by intentional policy choices. It also means conversely, that policy choices can get us out of this. And that’s why this election cycle is so important, but that’s another subject for another day.
This is an opportunity for Democrats today to distance themselves from Joe Biden’s broken border. And if they stand with him, it’ll be yet another sign to the American people that Democrats don’t want border security. Good luck with that argument.
With regard to Israel, it’s not just the border. Democrats are weak on Israel as well. And it’s, it’s their support for Israel. It’s rather stunning to us. There’s a dramatic shift. Hamas is holding more than 130 hostages as you know, including Americans and these people are languishing at the hands of barbaric terrorist and Joe Biden is meanwhile giving ultimatums to Israel, not Hamas.
And shamefully since October 7 Joe Biden has transformed into an anti Israel President, there’s really no other way to characterize it. He’s more concerned seemingly with placating the antisemitism in his in his base, then standing with our historic and vitally important ally. And it’s not just the White House.
No one has forgotten, of course, that Chuck Schumer did the unthinkable by opining on and meddling in Israel’s elected leadership. I mean, it’s just, these are unthinkable developments. And it’s shocking to us, but it continues. Just days ago, over 50 House Democrats called for Biden to withhold arms transfers to Israel. It’s wrong and it’s dangerous, and it shows the Democrats are losing their moral clarity on the issue.
This week, we’ll be reauthorizing FISA, and we’re going to do a big reform on the intelligence program. We’re enacting sweeping changes – 50 reforms, 56 to be exact – to the program that are in the base text that will stop the abuse of politicized FBI queries and prevent another Russia hoax debacle, among many other important reforms.
No more Steele dossier, no more of the intelligence community relying on fake news reports to order a FISA order, no more collusion. These changes will make sure that that doesn’t happen. And Congress is stepping down because the FBI is has frankly failed to adequately police its own agents and the agency is in need of dramatic cultural change.
This is an important first step in that and the real culture change will come we know after the election cycle when Republicans are in charge again in the White House and the Senate in the House and we’ll be able to really do the dramatic reforms that are necessary.
It’s critical we address these abuses because we don’t want to be able to lose section 702 of FISA. It’s a critically important piece of our intelligence and law enforcement in this country.
Because it allows us to continue killing Hamas terrorists, you have to stop the terrorists before they kill Americans. It allows us to track shipments of the least illicit chemicals used to make fentanyl. It allows us to protect US warships from attacks by Houthi rebels. It allows us to stop China from stealing American intellectual property and it prevents ransomware attacks against American companies.
That’s all the things that are empowered and allowed by this this set of laws, the statute, and we can’t allow that to expire or lapse. Our bill provides that and for all these things, and our colleagues I think will support it.
We can protect the Fourth Amendment rights of Americans, clearly. And we can protect them in their person as well. We have to strike the balance, government always does, you have to protect and jealously guard the fundamental liberty of the American people, which I made a career doing before I came to Congress as a religious liberty defense lawyer and a constitutional defense lawyer in the courts.
So you protect the liberty but at the same time you get to protect your security and we can’t allow a critical tool like this to just expire and go out of use. So we think the House will take the right steps.
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