| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| So much for beaming in here and sorry for the technical difficulties everyone. | ||
| Steve, thanks so much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yasha, thank you and thank Politico for having me. | |
| We got a quick word from our sponsors and then my colleague Jonathan Martin will be up on stage here and enjoy everyone. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
House Speaker Mike Johnson here talks about his expectations during President-elect Trump's first 100 days in office. | |
| He highlights disaster aid for the California wildfires, the Republican Party's congressional agenda, and legislation relating to immigration, energy, and taxes. | ||
| It's hosted by Politico Playbook. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Welcome, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| Thanks for taking the time. | ||
| Glad to be here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's a little busy these days. | |
| I'm actually going to start there. | ||
| So you have a quite daunting to-do list this year. | ||
| You've got to extend Trump-era tax cuts that the CBO says could cost about $5 trillion. | ||
| You have conservatives who want you to pay for that. | ||
| You have conservatives who are pushing you to find $2.5 trillion in savings to raise a debt ceiling. | ||
| You've got to pass a border bill. | ||
| And you already have one member, Thomas Massey, who said yesterday that he will not support HR2. | ||
| And you also have no room for error in your margin. | ||
| So just to start off with a little bit of a lighthearted question, how are you sleeping? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, in the three hours that I'm allowed to sleep, I sleep pretty well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Three hours. | |
| Is that right? | ||
| That's about right. | ||
| That's about my average lately. | ||
| There's been a lot going on. | ||
| A lot of big ticket items that we have to accomplish, clearly. | ||
| We have a very aggressive agenda. | ||
| The first 100 days for us is going to be very busy. | ||
| How do I manage all that? | ||
| How do I keep it all calm? | ||
| It really is my worldview. | ||
| I believe very much in the hand of Providence and that I'm not ultimately in charge. | ||
| I believe there's a sovereign and he's the one in charge. | ||
| So we just do our duty. | ||
| John Quincy Adams said, duty is ours, results are God's. | ||
| It's a very liberating way to live. | ||
| Do your very best every single day and then you leave the results to somebody higher than you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you have like a routine that sort of keeps you grounded and sane as you're going through all this chaos? | |
| And if you don't, you better create one pretty fast, my friend. | ||
| No, it's just, look, I genuinely love the colleagues that I work with, every single one of them, even those that get frustrated sometimes, and even with me. | ||
| And because I really value and appreciate all of their contributions and what they bring to the table, their skill sets, their life experiences, all the rest. | ||
| So my job every day is to try to leverage that, to let everybody be of their highest and best use to the cause that we all support and try to keep everybody working together. | ||
| And it's like a big family. | ||
| And sometimes it's messy in the back room, but at the end of the day, we've got to get the job done, and I'm convinced that we will. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I want to start with the debt ceiling, because we've seen some breaking news on that over the past 48 hours. | |
| You laid out a plan before Christmas to raise the debt ceiling in reconciliation. | ||
| The whole point of this was to go around Democrats and the leverage that they would have to raise the debt ceiling, which Trump was very worried about specifically. | ||
| And yet there has been some pushback in the past 48 hours. | ||
| Majority Leader John Thune told my colleague last night that he has no expectations or plans to put the debt ceiling in instructions for a budget for reconciliation. | ||
| And then you have some of your own moderates who are pushing back on this, saying you should do it on a bipartisan basis. | ||
| So is your plan from Christmas, before Christmas, dead on this issue? | ||
| Well, it was meant to be a point of discussion. | ||
| We had to begin somewhere, and this is a thoughtful dialogue that happens between the two chambers and then internally inside each chamber. | ||
| These are very difficult things to do and very complicated. | ||
| And so Leader Thune and I talk about this all the time. | ||
| And he was in my office right before we left for the holiday. | ||
| And we talked about that very thing. | ||
| He thought it might be a heavy lift to do it on reconciliation in the Senate. | ||
| Certainly wouldn't be easy in the House either. | ||
| But we're looking at all options. | ||
| I'm not wed to any of them. | ||
| We've got to do it by consensus. | ||
| When you have the smallest margin in history, the smallest margin imaginable, which is what we'll have for a big chunk of the first hundred days, you have to build the momentum for everything. | ||
| And it's got to be member-driven to a certain extent. | ||
| So this won't be a decision that the Speaker makes in a back office and hoists upon the membership and makes them just, you know, jams it down everyone's throat. | ||
| It's quite the opposite. | ||
| It's member-driven, organic, from the bottom up. | ||
| I mean, I have the vision of where we're going. | ||
| I know what ultimately we must succeed to do. | ||
| And you all, many of you heard me talking about over the last year on the campaign trail, our proverbial playbook. | ||
| I use football metaphors a lot because I'm from Louisiana. | ||
| Footballs and hurricane metaphors are very useful for us. | ||
| But we talked about the playbook, and it's well designed, and we have all the plays in the playbook. | ||
| What we're determining right now is the sequence of the plays. | ||
| And I have to do that in coordination with the new head coach in that metaphor, which is Donald Trump, and with all my teammates, because everybody's got to know what position they play on the field and how they're going to relate to that. | ||
| So we're in that process. | ||
| I mean, this is not going to be perfect, and the initial ideas are often not the ones that are ultimately adopted, but it is not a threat overall to that agenda. | ||
| We're going to get it done. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I want to stay on the debt ceiling, though, a little bit longer, because when you came up with this idea to put the debt ceiling on reconciliation, you suggested you would find $2.5 trillion in offsets for conservatives to sort of get on board. | |
| And yet, you have a lot of members who have never voted for a debt ceiling increase. | ||
| Did they tell you at the time that if you stick to that promise, $2.5 trillion, that they will vote for this? | ||
| Or are you finding now that, okay, they're not going to be there, so let's just abandon that strategy? | ||
| No, I have two members in particular who've never voted for a debt ceiling and had said it was the red line for them. | ||
| Both of those members are indicating now, if the conditions are right and if the terms of the legislation are acceptable and there are legitimate cuts to the size and scope of government, which we're all committed to, that they would be open to doing that. | ||
| So no one has completely foreclosed the possibility. | ||
| So now the challenge for leadership and for me is to make sure that we fine-tune this. | ||
| We kind of meet equilibrium across the Republican conference to make sure everyone is satisfied. | ||
| I will tell you, and I've told all of them as recently as this morning, no one is going to be completely delighted with every provision of a large bill like that. | ||
| You have to, every single person has to give up on their personal preferences because we're in a deliberative body and we have 434 colleagues, each of us. | ||
| But I'm never going to ask any of them to compromise their core principles. | ||
| So somewhere between those two fixed points in the horizon, so to speak, we're going to find the right combination of things that will get this job done. | ||
| No one wants to fail. | ||
| The stakes are too high. | ||
| The president made very firm commitments on the campaign trail and we did as well. | ||
| And we're going to deliver on that America First Agenda. | ||
| We will get it done. | ||
|
unidentified
|
One last debt ceiling question and then we're going to go to the broader reconciliation bill. | |
| I know you want to talk about that. | ||
| But there's this new idea emerging about pairing the debt ceiling increase with disaster aid for wildfires in California. | ||
| Yesterday you were asked about this. | ||
| You said basically we'll see. | ||
| Give us a little more. | ||
| I mean what do you think of this? | ||
| Is this a way to get Democrats to vote for a debt ceiling increase without giving them something else that could be more painful for Republicans? | ||
| Well I just left the leadership press conference and I was very clear that we don't play politics with disaster aid. | ||
| I mean I'm from a disaster prone state, Louisiana. | ||
| We have hurricanes and tornadoes and floods all the time. | ||
| So we're very sympathetic to the people who are really suffering and it is a huge disaster in LA and Southern California. | ||
| The concern that a lot of people have is how much is human culpability involved in that. | ||
| I mean natural disasters occur but there are policy decisions that were made in California at the state and local level by all appearances that made this exponentially worse. | ||
| And so those are things that have to be factored in with regard to the level of aid and whether there are conditions upon that or safeguards, you might say. | ||
| We have to be good stewards of the public fisc. | ||
| So it's a brand new situation. | ||
| It is a brand new idea to combine that in some way with the funding decisions we have to make. | ||
| We're far away from a decision on it, but it is something that's being discussed, not for political purposes, but so that we can properly balance the interests of the American people and our financial condition right now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, and it's interesting you bring this up because there are some Republicans who are pushing back already. | |
| People like Tom Tillis, North Carolina, obviously had the hurricane disaster there. | ||
| Rick Scott of Florida, who has seen a lot of this disaster aid help his state there too. | ||
| Let's move on to the bigger reconciliation package. | ||
| President Trump has said he wants one big, beautiful bill. | ||
| Sounds like he reiterated that to you this morning in a phone call. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| That's his statedist preference. | ||
| And the reason for that is because he wants to ensure that we just get the job done. | ||
| He says that all the time. | ||
| President Trump, as you know, is a visionary, a big picture guy. | ||
| He's not so much caught up in the details of the procedural stuff that we all wrestle with. | ||
| He just wants to make sure we check those boxes. | ||
| And I do as well. | ||
| He has seen the one big package as the best, the highest probability of success, and I have as well. | ||
| And that's why we've been sort of settled on that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And yet, yet, despite him endorsing this sort of bill with tax, border, energy, all the things, Senator Lindsey Graham, budget chair, says, or he indicated last week that he was going to forge ahead, as planned, writing instructions for a budget that is more narrow, specifically, you know, border and defense focused. | |
| And as you know, you can't have reconciliation at all if the Senate and the House are passing different budgets. | ||
| So what are you going to do about this? | ||
| I mean, you and Thun have talked. | ||
| You're still on different pages. | ||
| We'll get on the same page. | ||
| I mean, Lindsey Graham is a good friend, as is Ted Cruz, who's been a big advocate of the two-bill strategy in the Senate. | ||
| They have very different factors to consider than we do in the House. | ||
| As I remind them, I have more than 150 more personalities to deal with. | ||
| We have a much more diverse caucus in the House than they do in the Senate. | ||
| For example, on the SALT issue, which you all know for people, my colleagues from New Jersey and New York and California, it's one of their biggest priorities. | ||
| It's not even a thought really in the Senate because Republican senators come from red states and salt is just not a thing for them. | ||
| So I have a much more complex decision matrix than the Senate has. | ||
| And sometimes I feel like that may be underappreciated by some of our colleagues in the other chamber. | ||
| But at the end of the day, we intend for the House to be the leader on this because that's the way it's designed to work. | ||
| And we're working on a feverish, very aggressive calendar to get that job done, send it to the Senate, and have us working together. | ||
| So all the palace intrigue about the supposed division between the chambers and the personalities, it's not. | ||
| People are having very thoughtful discussions about what is the best path forward. | ||
| And Lindsay and Ted and my other colleagues and friends who have favored a two-bill solution are, they say that in good faith. | ||
| The idea is that you put points on the board, back to my football metaphor, put points on the board early in the first quarter so that you have momentum as you go through the game. | ||
| But there's a risk to doing that. | ||
| If it diminishes the probability of success in the end, and if there's a prospect that you might lose the actual game, and this is the national championship, then if you forego putting points on the board early, if that's the game strategy, it makes sense. | ||
| So we're working through all that. | ||
| We'll get it done. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, that's why I asked, because it's not just a palace intrigue story. | |
| It really does impact the agenda. | ||
| And I mean, you have laid out a timeline this morning in conference wanting to have final passage of both budgets by the end of February. | ||
| But it sounds like you guys are going to write your own budget. | ||
| The Senate's going to write their own budget. | ||
| I don't see, when I'm looking at your schedule here, a week for negotiation with the Senate to come up with a plan. | ||
| Are you guys just going to do your own thing until the last second and then make a decision? | ||
| It may not surprise you there's a more detailed calendar than the one you got this morning. | ||
| Oh, no, it's not personal. | ||
| No, as I laid out to my colleagues this morning, I had a big slide with lots of numbers and a small font on it. | ||
| But there is a week at the end where if there is a difference between the Senate and the House, then we will reconcile those two. | ||
| And I'm having, look, I sent a long text message yesterday morning to Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz, who are both good friends of mine, and said, look, these are the factors and the things that we're dealing with in the House. | ||
| Let's have a thoughtful discussion about that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did they respond? | |
| I haven't even checked. | ||
| I've been so busy, Rachel. | ||
| I don't even know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, that's right. | |
| I heard in conference one time recently you told your members you had more than 100 text messages on your phone from them that you had a television. | ||
| This morning, because I have to apologize to my colleagues all the time because people think that I'm ignoring them. | ||
| This morning, on my phone right now, two hours ago was 387 text messages. | ||
| I'm behind. | ||
| And that's my new phone number. | ||
| So it's a bit of a problem. | ||
| And I have just great staff, and they're trying to help me manage all the incoming, but it's an ongoing problem. | ||
| So if I don't respond to your text soon, it's not because I don't like you. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This actually brings, I wasn't going to bring this up in this interview, but I've heard from other senior Republicans that you, in particular, have a hard time with delegating, that you like to be having conversations with members yourself. | |
| You know, you're not going to rely on another member to talk to another member, to talk to another member about how to vote or how to get them to support things. | ||
| Do you really think that you're going to be able to do this given all the things you have to do, all the members you have to talk to? | ||
| Or is that necessary for keeping close to these members when you have no margin of error? | ||
| Yeah, some of this is by necessity. | ||
| I mean, I would like to delegate a lot more, but the way the modern speakership has evolved, and especially in a time when you have the smallest margins in history, sometimes I've learned the hard way that if you delegate too much, it creates even more problems and more that you have to go unwind to do. | ||
| So I'm trying to be as directly involved as I can as much as I'm able to. | ||
| That's why I only get three hours of sleep at night. | ||
| Because that's really important. | ||
| The relationship part of this is very important. | ||
| In the old days, I mean, Newt Gingrich has done a couple of op-eds the last several months and said, you know, poor Speaker Johnson has the most challenging speakership since the Civil War. | ||
| And it's because of the margin, it's because of social media, because of all the new factors that we deal with right now that previous generations didn't. | ||
| But the speaker right now has to have a direct relationship of trust with every single member because I do not have the luxury of telling 20 people to go pound sand. | ||
| I mean, it's not how this works. | ||
| I've got to have every single person. | ||
| So sometimes people, it's important for them to have a direct conversation with the speaker. | ||
| That said, we have delegated, I mean, a huge amount of this. | ||
| We have listening sessions. | ||
| The WIP, Tom Emmer, is doing an extraordinary job hosting a lot of the listening sessions with a broad cross-section of members. | ||
| Leader Scalise is holding listening sessions in his conference room. | ||
| I'm doing it myself. | ||
| We're all combining all that together, and at the end of the day, it'll come together seamlessly, just watch and wait. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You want to come back in 100 days? | |
| We're having another event. | ||
| We're going to give you a group of people. | ||
| I'm going to be busy right here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm going to give you a grade on how you've done on the first 100 days. | |
| I want to go back to Thune because, you know, last time I interviewed you, we talked a lot about your relationship with President Trump. | ||
| I don't know a lot about your relationship with Thune. | ||
| I mean, is this like a lot of, very quickly, you're doing a lot of speed dating with him as you're trying to pass an agenda. | ||
| Tell us a little bit about your relationship, because you guys have been on a collision course on a couple of things so far. | ||
| No, it's not a collegiate. | ||
| I have a very high opinion of Leader Thune. | ||
| I think he's a great, great man, great individual. | ||
| He's principled. | ||
| He has a lot of experience. | ||
| He's been on the Hill for, what, over 25, 28 years, I think. | ||
| And he came from the House, so he knows the reality that I've got to deal with. | ||
| He had a very different environment back then than I do now, but he appreciates that, and I'm grateful that he does. | ||
| We were acquaintances prior to both of us being elevated, him being elevated to this position, and I've had a delightful time getting to know him much better over the last several weeks. | ||
| He and our wives together have had dinner, and so we've had a little private time as well. | ||
| He's an honest broker, and he has great reverence for the institution, and he's operating in good faith all the time. | ||
| And I think that what we appreciate about one another, he knows that what I tell him is going to be the truth and vice versa. | ||
| And that's a really critical thing. | ||
| It has always been surprising to me that the two chambers did not coordinate better. | ||
| I mean, it's an elemental, fundamental thing to me that Republicans in the Senate and the House should be coordinating because, especially in a moment of unified government, that's really important. | ||
| So I think he understands that as well. | ||
| And we've been in constant contact and communication, and it's gone very well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I do have to ask about your relationship with Donald Trump, too, since we're talking about those. | |
| You have proved pretty deft in navigating landmines that I would say might blow up some other relationships with Donald Trump. | ||
| You passed Ukraine aid when MAGA was sort of against it. | ||
| You did not shut the government down over the SAVE Act or over the debt ceiling right before Christmas, even though President Trump was obviously very interested in that. | ||
| You've convinced him to do one reconciliation bill after Thun had seemingly convinced him to do two. | ||
| You got him to change his mind. | ||
| What is your secret? | ||
| It's trust. | ||
| It's the same thing that is the basis of all these relationships. | ||
| I mean, when I tell the president something, he knows that I'm operating in good faith. | ||
| He doesn't agree with my assessment all the time. | ||
| But we have thoughtful discussion about that. | ||
| And this relationship has developed over eight years because I came to Washington as a new freshman in Congress the same time he came to Washington in 2017. | ||
| And it was new to both of us. | ||
| And I was a backbench junior member of Congress at the time. | ||
| But I got, through a series of circumstances, I got pretty close to the orbit. | ||
| And I was telling him things that I really thought that he should hear. | ||
| And I think he's come to value that. | ||
| And he knows that when I tell him something, I have no agenda other than what's best for the country and what's best for him. | ||
| Because if he's successful as president, then it's great for the country. | ||
| And so I've really gotten to enjoy it. | ||
| We've become good friends and in a great working relationship. | ||
| We talk almost constantly. | ||
| I think that's really important. | ||
| And I give him credit for being a fully engaged president. | ||
| It is not the norm to have a president who's so deeply and personally engaged with members and especially the leadership. | ||
| And I think it's going to be very important for the country going forward. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, Kevin McCarthy famously buttered up Trump with pink and red starbursts, which were Trump's favorite candy. | |
| You don't have something like this. | ||
| You know, I don't butter anybody up, and I don't make backroom deals. | ||
| I mean, look, I'm very transparent, and maybe that's not the best thing to do in Washington, but at the end of the day, right now, it turns out to be really important. | ||
| I'm not going to take an individual or a subset of members into a room and make a deal with them that I wouldn't put on their front page in the newspaper. | ||
| I don't do that. | ||
| And so it's upsetting people along the way because that's, you know, Washington is supposed to be about dealmaking. | ||
| But it's the only way to do this job right now. | ||
| You have to be a completely transparent and honest broker among your colleagues. | ||
| Because if you have a breach of that trust, then the whole thing collapses. | ||
| So that's how I deal with everybody from the president on down. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Last Trump relationship question. | |
| After the CR fight, I reported, and it was my understanding that Trump, obviously he was angry he didn't get his debt ceiling increased, right? | ||
| And he was sort of thinking, do I want Johnson as speaker again? | ||
| Yet, you fast forward a week later, he not only endorses you again, he leans in, helps you get the gavel. | ||
| We just had Steve Bannon, not exactly your biggest fan, on a panel a few hours ago, and he admitted he's not a big fan of yours, but he said Trump trusts you. | ||
| I guess I'm wondering what happened between mid-December to that speakership vote. | ||
| Well, look, when you have a relationship of trust, I mean, I'm honored and humbled to have the president's, you know, full endorsement, and that's been key to the success of all this. | ||
| But when you have a relationship of trust, you can have disagreements about issues or play calls or legislation, but it doesn't disrupt that relationship, and that's what's so important. | ||
| That's the common thread that goes through it. | ||
| I don't agree with my wife 100% of the time. | ||
| I mean, you know, do you agree with your spouse 100% of the time? | ||
| No, but. | ||
|
unidentified
|
She's always right, though. | |
| She's always right. | ||
| Always right for the record. | ||
| And we have, as we say in the deep south, intense fellowship sometimes. | ||
| But at the end of the day, it works out because, you know, we have that great relationship that undergirds it. | ||
| So the same thing with the president. | ||
| I mean, we can disagree about particular decisions at the time, but it doesn't change our relationship. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So while reconciliation is sort of being ironed out, you know, the budget, what's going to be in it, et cetera, you've laid out a slew of Republican bills that are going to be passed in the next few weeks, sort of a roadmap of your priorities. | |
| What is the message you guys are trying to send with these bills? | ||
| You've got the Lake and Riley bill that cracks down on undocumented immigrants who committed crimes, protection of women and girls in sports this week, violence against women by illegal aliens act, no bailouts for sanctuary cities. | ||
| What are you trying to tell the country? | ||
| And energy policy and some other big priorities. | ||
| What we're trying to tell the country is that the common theme here is common sense. | ||
| I mean, we're trying to restore common sense. | ||
| Not having men compete in women's sports is about, I don't know, what, 80, 90 percent issue across the country because it follows common sense. | ||
| Deporting violent, illegal aliens who are committing crimes on women and children is common sense. | ||
| We should have done this already. | ||
| We did. | ||
| These bills all passed with Republican votes in the last Congress, but they died a slow death on Chuck Schumer's desk. | ||
| Now we have unified government. | ||
| So our intention is to pass that again and to see how many Democrats come along. | ||
| I was heartened to see a number of Democrats join us on the Lake and Riley Act last week. | ||
| And we'll see this week how they do on women's sports. | ||
| We're not doing this for political purposes. | ||
| We're doing it to deliver on the promises we've made to the American people and to restore common sense in Washington because that is the demand. | ||
| That is what America First policies and agenda are all about. | ||
| And we're going to continue to do that throughout the Congress. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Last question for you. | |
| You just announced this morning that Virginia Fox is going to be your rules chair, who, by the way, she is terrifying if you're a reporter. | ||
| That's why she's a good person. | ||
|
unidentified
|
In the member-only elevator, she will yell at you. | |
| She's terrifying. | ||
| But I'm actually more interested in what you're going to do with the other three conservatives on the panel. | ||
| Tom Massey, Chip Roy, Ralph Norman, all have been a pain in your side. | ||
| Are you going to take them off the committee? | ||
| No, I'll tell you what happened. | ||
| We announced it about an hour ago. | ||
| So Thomas Massey called me a couple months back and said he wanted to rotate off of the Rules Committee. | ||
| It's a lot of extra work and he does a lot of other things. | ||
| He wanted to put his focus elsewhere and I said that makes sense, Thomas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Lucky for you. | |
| Lucky for you. | ||
| No, I mean he made the decision really himself and so I didn't have to address that. | ||
| Chip Roy will be back on the Rules Committee as will Ralph Norman because they contribute well there. |