| December 12, 2023
For Immediate Release Contact: Taylor Haulsee
WASHINGTON — On Tuesday, Speaker Johnson, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky met in the U.S. Capitol. Speaker Johnson made the following remarks after the meeting: “I just had a good meeting with President Zelensky. I reiterated to him that we stand with him and against Putin’s brutal invasion. The American people stand for freedom and they’reon the right side of this fight. “I have asked the White House since the day that I was handed the gavel as Speaker for clarity. We need a clear articulation of the strategy to allow Ukraine to win, and thus fartheir responses have been insufficient and have not provided us the clarity and the detail that we requested over and over since literally 24 hours after I was handed the gavel as Speaker of the House. What the Biden Administration seems to be asking for is billions of additional dollars with no appropriate oversight, no clear strategy to win, and none of the answers that I think the American people are owed. “I have also made very clear from day one, that our first condition on any national security supplemental spending package is about our own national security first. The border is an absolute catastrophe, and this is because of the policies of this White House and this Administration. We had 12,000 illegal crossings on one day last week alone, on Wednesday. We have almost 280 known terrorists that have been apprehended at the border and none of this counts the ‘gotaways.’ If you add the numbers up, it’s almost 7 million people who have been encountered at the border just since President Biden took office and at least 2 million ‘gotaways.’ This is twice the population of my state of Louisiana. “Fentanyl is the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18-49 in this country, fentanyl poisoning, because it’s allowed over the border. We have human trafficking and all the other terrible things. In the last three months, October, November, December alone, we’ve had more illegal crossings at the border than in any entire year during the during the Obama Administration. The American people see this. They feel it acutely. They see all the terrible societal ills that come from this, and it must be addressed. I’ve made this very clear. “Again, from the very beginning, when I was handed the gavel, we needed clarity on what we’re doing in Ukraine, and how we’ll have proper oversight of the spending of precious taxpayer dollars of the American citizens. And we needed a transformative change at the border. Thus far, we’ve gotten neither. The Senate has been MIA on this. The House passed H.R. 2 more than six months ago. It’s been sitting and collecting dust on Chuck Schumer’sdesk. I have told him personally, I’ve told the National Security Adviser, the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of Defense, that these are our conditions because these are the conditions of the American people, and we are resolute on that. It is not the House’s issue right now. The issue is with the White House and the Senate, and I implore them to do their job because the time is urgent. And we do want to do the right thing here.” ### |
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