| January 10, 2024
For Immediate Release Contact: Taylor Haulsee
WASHINGTON — Speaker Johnson joined Hugh Hewitt this morning to discuss the topline spending agreement and Biden’s border crisis.
Below are excerpts from the interview.
Click here to listen to the Speaker’s interview
On the spending deal:
“This is actually a good deal. It’s not the deal that you and I would construct right from the beginning, but everybody has to remember, we will literally have this month, the smallest majority in the history of the U.S. Congress. I think there was one Congress, the 65th Congress in 1917, a hundred seven years ago, that had a smaller margin. We’ll be down to a one vote margin Hugh. So, we have to deal in the realm of reality. We only control one half of one third of the federal government, right? One chamber of Congress. So, under those circumstances, we got a really good deal here. It’s the first cut to non-defense spending in many years. It significantly cuts the side agreements that were negotiated last year under the Fiscal Responsibility Act, the FRA, and replaces that with $16 billion in real spending cuts. We took $10 billion more out of the IRS flush fund that the Biden Administration fought so hard for. We took $16 billion total, but $6.1 of that comes from the Covid-era slush fund. We got a lot of money for the taxpayers saved here, and at the end of the day, we got more for defense, and we cut non-defense discretionary spending. That’s always been a priority of ours. And that’s what we, that’s what we are handed here.”
On fixing Biden’s border crisis:
“We passed H.R. 2 almost eight months ago, and that was our signature piece of legislation that secured the border, because we restored the remain in Mexico policy that worked so effectively under the Trump administration. We ended the catch and release program. You know, Secretary Mayorkas has admitted over the last week that 85% of the people that are coming across that border illegally are just released into the country. And I took 64 House Republicans down to Eagle Pass at the epicenter just last week and saw it with our own two eyes. It is an absolute catastrophe. So we’ve got to restore those policies that work. We do need to rebuild the wall, and we need to make sense of the asylum process and the and the parole process that are broken. And that’s what our bill did. It’s been sitting on Chuck Schumer’s desk for that many months collecting dust. Right now, there’s a negotiation in the Senate, between the White House and the Senate, on some sort of proposal that would solve this. But we have yet to see the text of it. And I’ll just say I’m cautiously optimistic here. We’ll have to see what develops.”
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