House Speaker Mike Johnson, who was re-elected by a narrow margin on Friday, appeared on FNC’s Sunday Morning Futures and outlined Congressional Republicans’ plans to introduce one “big, beautiful bill” that would combine key elements of President Trump’s agenda. The bill is set to be passed using the budget reconciliation process within the first 100 days of the next presidency.
After host Maria Bartiromo asked how quickly the House GOP would get started on implementing Trump’s agenda, the Louisiana Republican said, “Beginning immediately. As you said, we gathered all the House Republicans together yesterday and had a full day of work. We went to Fort McNair, which is a short drive in Maryland. And everyone was enclosed together for eight or nine hours straight talking about our reconciliation agenda and the America first agenda.
“We’re 15 days out from the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump for his second term. And we want to make sure that we’re jump-starting the agenda now over the next two weeks, so that he’s prepared and ready on day one. We have a lot to do, as you know. And we have been putting all the plays together and figuring out the sequence of how we’re going to run those plays. And we’re really excited about it,” Johnson added.
Bartiromo then asked, “Have you spoken with President Trump about what he prefers? Does he want one large reconciliation package to include border security deportations, as well as tax extensions, or does he want two, as Senator Lindsey Graham has been working on?”
“Yes, he and I have talked about this quite a bit, as you might imagine, over the last few months, determining the pros and cons of the two different strategies,” Johnson explained. “I respect Lindsey Graham and all my friends who kind of prefer a two-step strategy. The idea would be get something done on the border and maybe defense spending right out of the blocks very quickly in what we would call a skinny reconciliation bill, and then do the rest of it in a larger chunk later.
“But I think, at the end of the day, President Trump is going to prefer, as he likes to say, one big, beautiful bill. And there’s a lot of merit to that, because we can put it all together, one big up-or-down vote, which can save the country, quite literally, because there are so many elements to it,” Johnson continued. “And it’ll give us a little bit more time to negotiate that and get it right. That doesn’t mean that we won’t come right out of the gates full-fledged right out of the beginning of the Congress. And so we will be addressing border. We have got a number of bills just over the next two weeks, Maria, that we’re going to address the low-hanging fruit, so to speak.”
He noted further: “I think that there’s — there’s some things that are so commonsense that we have got a fix on the border, we might even be able to get some Democrat votes on some of that legislation. But we will pass it out of the House and send it over to the Senate and get it ready for when President Trump takes office on January 20. We have a lot to do and a short amount of time to do it in.”
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