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House Speaker Mike Johnson has responded to the massive outcry from conservatives over the looming spending bill.
During an interview on Fox & Friends, Johnson discussed the disagreement over the House spending bill and argued that it would only fund the government until March. Then, he argued, Republicans could decide on fiscal year 2025 spending when President-elect Donald Trump is in the White House and Republicans control the U.S. Senate.
Fox host Brian Kilmeade asked: “House Speaker Mike Johnson joins us now. Mr. Speaker, you expected some blowback when you were putting this together as you try to get across the finish line and have the government pay for itself up until March. What could you tell us about this bill and does it disturb you? Some Republicans seem to be very critical of it.”
“”No, look, there’s three of my great friends you just quoted there. They’re not wrong about the government debt and deficits. It bothers us all. We’ve got it in our central focus. And when we start the new Congress in January, when Republicans are in control and DOGE is on working on all six cylinders, we’re going to be able to scale back the size and scope of government. But before we get to that point, remember, right now we only control one half of one third of the federal government. Remember, Democrats are still in charge of the Senate and the White House,” Johnson began.
“So what we’ve done is the conservative play call here, my friends that you just interviewed there or that those clips were played were part of this decision, we decided even though we don’t normally like short-term stopgap funding measures, it made sense here. Instead of doing, you know, Chuck Schumer-Biden spending for 2025 we pushed this decision into March. It’ll be March 14th. So the feature there is that we’ll have Republican controlled Congress, Trump back in the White House and we get to decide spending for 2025,” Johnson added.
Co-host Lawrence Jones jumped in and asked: “But Mr. Speaker, I think the confusing part is because typically when there is objection to bills like that, here’s Freedom Caucus, which you heard Chip Roy, but you even have moderate members who are in big races. You got Mike Lawler, who is not, you know, an extreme, you know, fiscal conservative. But he’s saying the same thing. So how did you use — lose the Freedom Caucus and the moderate members?”
“This is the sausage making process, OK? Here’s — here’s what this bill entails. It’s a short-term funding extension until March 14. And that would have been an easy thing relatively to pass. But here’s what happened. We also had to add due to circumstances outside of any of our control emergency funding. We have two major emergencies. We had a record historic hurricane season that we all know, Helene and Milton and the rest that destroyed a big swath of the country,” Johnson began.
“We have to have funding for that. That’s a hundred billion dollars to rebuild six states. And then on top of that, we have our farmers, our small farmers and ranchers, our food producers in this country are in jeopardy of going under permanently. They’ve had three lost years in a row, primarily because of ‘’Bidenomics’’ and inflation and lots of other factors outside their control,” he added.
“So for the first time since I’ve been in Congress, guys, in 8 years, it’s not just farmers and ranchers urgently needing the help. We now have the creditors, the lenders, the banks who give them those loans who are saying we have to have a stopgap measure. So when you add those things in, here’s the other thing to remember. Our Democrat colleagues who have to vote on all this, they don’t prioritize agriculture. They don’t — they don’t really care that much about farmers and ranchers because they’re in rural red districts, right?” Johnson continued.
Johnson concluded: “But that’s our food supply. If we crush domestic food supply, that is a direct threat to national security. We need all those small farmers and ranchers. And that’s included in the bill as well.”
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