January 9, 2024
For Immediate Release
Contact: Taylor Haulsee
“Chuck Schumer is going to spin it as best he can, but this is not what they wanted to do. In fact, this amounts to a $30 billion cut to what the Senate had written”
WASHINGTON — Speaker Johnson joined Fox Business’ Evening Edit with Liz MacDonald to discuss the topline spending agreement and Biden’s border crisis.
Below are excerpts from the interview.
Click here to watch the Speaker’s full interview
On the spending deal:
“I am a House conservative. For my entire career, I’ve voted for spending cuts and much smaller budgets and all the rest, but of course, I inherited this situation. You know, last year there was a negotiation among all the parties, and they came up with a spending agreement. $1.59 trillion was the amount that was written into the, the FRA, the statutory law. We know that’s the spending limit. Now, there were some side deals negotiated on that last summer. What I came into as Speaker was that situation. And so, we went into the room, and we significantly cut those side deals. In fact, we converted that into about $16 billion in real savings to the American taxpayers. So, it’s a step in the right direction. We cut out the gimmicks out of that budget. We cut out the spending and, Liz, it actually amounts to the first reduction in non-defense spending in many years. So, this is a step forward. It’s not what we want. It’s not everything we want, but remember, we have a one to two vote margin in just one chamber of the legislative branch. I mean, this is the best we could do right now.”
On criticism of the deal:
“Listen, Chuck Schumer is going to spin it as best he can, but this is not what they wanted to do. In fact, this amounts to a $30 billion cut to what the Senate had written, what they wanted to spend in the appropriations process. So, this is significant. By the way, we clawed back unspent COVID funds, that’s $6.1 billion. Part of this $10 billion more from that IRS fund that they had set aside. So, that’s $20 billion out of that. In total, this is significant savings for the people. Again, not everything we wanted. Now, Marjorie’s not wrong. The border is on fire. You know, Liz, I took 64 members down on a trip down there last week, and what we saw was heartbreaking and infuriating. We are willing to die on that hill. The appropriations process is to keep the government funded, to make sure our troops are paid, that, that the federal government operates. And in the middle of all that, we’re having a serious fight about securing that border. And we are insistent upon that. We have been since the day I got the gavel, and none of that has changed.”
On Biden’s border crisis:
“It’s an absolute catastrophe, a humanitarian catastrophe, a national security catastrophe. We saw it with our own eyes. In fact, we were having the press conference with all of our members and people were crossing the river behind us, coming into the country illegally like an open border. And that’s what it is. The Biden administration did this intentionally. These are policy choices that got us there. And our list of the 64 events that, that he’s engaged in, from the first day that he took the Oval Office by Executive Orders, is what has led us into this situation. It is not sustainable. We’ve had over 7.1 million encounters at the border since he took office. And we estimate the number of people actually in the country illegally is probably close to 14 or 15 million. That’s what the experts say. This is a serious problem.
“Over 300 suspects on the terrorism watch list have been stopped at the border. Liz, we have no idea how many of them came through and evaded capture, we saw the cartels down there. They estimate the, the drug cartels in Mexico are not really in, in the drug business so much anymore. It’s human trafficking. They’re making $32 million a week in the, in that sector alone. The, that, that sector of Texas, where we were, that’s $1.6 billion a year that the administration is allowing to go to transnational violent criminal organizations. Because we have opened the border, it must stop. And we need accountability right now.”
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