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Jan. 21, 2026 11:14-11:36 - CSPAN
21:39
House GOP Leaders on Trump's Agenda
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Coming Back Strong 00:11:24
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House Speaker Mike Johnson and other House Republican leaders spoke to reporters on their legislative agenda.
That briefing came after the party's weekly caucus meeting on Capitol Hill.
Tom can put it up later.
Yeah.
Did you see how smooth that went?
Good morning, everybody.
How you doing today?
Hopefully you're all warm, right?
One year ago, President Trump returned to office, and boy, are we living in a different world right now.
Under Biden, 20 million illegal aliens flooded into our country.
Under Trump, it's been eight months since an illegal alien was released by Border Patrol into the United States.
Just think about that.
But it's more than that.
We had 2.6 million illegals actually leave our country.
There are no more caravans barreling through our borders.
And all of that, it's over.
We don't even talk about the border anymore because President Trump fixed it.
It's solved.
It's done.
And we have President Trump to thank for that.
So the border is solved.
Now let's move on to the economy, right?
Under Biden, just some facts, Biden's inflation peaked at 9.1%.
Under the Biden, under Biden, the government was spending your money recklessly.
Turn the page now to President Trump's inflation.
It is down to about 2.7%.
Nine to 2.7%.
Inflation coming down.
Thank you, President Trump.
We're seeing the first overall prices decline since 2020.
The costs of eggs, butter, cereal, and pasta, because I'm Italian for Sunday dinner, are down.
And of course, it isn't just prices that are coming down.
Paychecks are actually going up.
The Working Families Tax Cut was transformational legislation.
No tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security for 88% of seniors.
A tax break when you buy an American car.
A tax break on your mortgage.
A tax break when you grow your family.
Name the life event.
And Republicans delivered a tax break.
And you know what?
And I'll say it again.
Every single Democrat voted against a tax cut.
Every single Democrat voted to raise your taxes.
Every single Democrat voted to raise your taxes because Democrats think that they and the government are better stewards of your money than the American people.
Every single Democrat voted to eliminate taxes on tips, taxes on overtime, and taxes on Social Security.
Every single Democrat voted against the child tax care credit.
And I have to say it because I have to go out there and correct the truth with the other half of the truth.
Every single Democrat voted against giving a 15% tax cut to families who make under $100,000, right?
It's shameful.
I mean, seriously, but I'll tell you this.
Our momentum won't be stopped by their unwillingness to stand up for the American people.
Our momentum won't be stopped by the radical left or their paid protesters.
Our momentum is just beginning.
The golden age of America, folks, we are just getting started.
And with that, I'm going to turn it over to our whip, Tom Emmer.
You could have put this back up.
Oh, look at that.
Somebody WD-40 did.
Somebody earled it.
All right.
Thanks, Lisa.
You're going to hear a theme, I think, today.
The golden age of America begins right now.
That was President Trump's opening statement of his inaugural address just one year ago.
And boy, was he right.
As we stand here 366 days later, it's incredible to think back on the historic wins we have achieved in such a short amount of time.
From passing the largest tax cut in American history to securing the border, to rooting out the worst waste, fraud, and abuse that has plagued our government for way too long, to making America the crypto capital of the world.
President Trump, his all-star cabinet, and Republicans in Congress have worked in tandem to accomplish the impossible.
Our wins haven't come without difficulties.
There's no question we've had challenges.
We've seen what great lengths the Democrats are willing to go to oppose our agenda at every turn.
Look no further than last October, when the Democrats invoked the longest government shutdown in our history, inflicting the maximum amount of pain on the American people just to pick a fight with Donald Trump.
Or look at blue state governors like failing Tim Walz, who would rather let criminal, illegal aliens roam our communities than work with the Trump administration to enforce the rule of law and keep Minnesotans safe.
But in spite of the Democrats' insanity, we continue to overcome the odds and deliver on our promises to the American people.
This country is stronger, safer, and more prosperous thanks to President Trump's leadership.
And as he said in his inaugural address one year ago, this is only the beginning.
The golden age of America is here, and we're just getting started.
With that, I turn it over to our leader.
Well, thank you, Whip.
Let me just hear.
There we go.
Good to see all of you.
After we celebrated one year, President Trump back in office, it is exciting to say America is coming back.
And you can see the signs all around us.
All of the indicators that for four years under Joe Biden, Democrats seemed to want to quickly forget.
Democrats never talked for a day while four years your gas prices soared.
Democrats never said a word about it when for four years under Joe Biden, inflation skyrocketed.
Democrats never said a word when four years under Joe Biden, you saw interest rates going through the roof where it finally prevented people from even buying a first-time home.
How many families did you hear about that said, I want to move and buy another house, but I can't afford to leave my existing house because I can't afford the new high interest rates on the mortgage because of Joe Biden's rates.
Over and over and over again, you're seeing it all across the spectrum.
And then, of course, the open border, millions of people coming into our country illegally, including violent criminals.
And what did Democrats do?
They looked the other way, never said a word about it.
Lake and Riley Act, we had to tell Joe Biden who Lake and Riley was because he wanted to ignore the fact that real people were dying here in America because illegals who were coming in that were violent, hardened criminals were harming our citizens and they did nothing about it.
And then Donald Trump ran for president.
And Donald Trump said, I will fix these things.
And the American people listened.
Well, the Democrats just wake up every day wanting to resist, wanting to block the Trump agenda, and that's all they care about.
Donald Trump has been delivering on those promises and the American people appreciate it.
Families now today have thousands of dollars more in their pockets because they're paying 50% less for gasoline.
That's right.
When you go to the pump today, you don't have the sticker shock you did under four years of Joe Biden because you're paying dramatically less.
Some people in the twos, $3 a gallon or less, because President Trump opened up American energy.
In fact, lease sales are up 55%.
Joe Biden had shut down American energy production, making us dependent on foreign nations.
Russia, Vladimir Putin, was the biggest beneficiary of Biden's bad energy policies.
Putin was making billions of dollars a month selling his oil to world markets, including our European friends, because they couldn't get it from America.
Iran making billions of dollars a month selling their energy, fueling a war machine that was invoking terror all around the world.
Not only do they not have that money anymore because we've opened up American energy, Iran no longer has the pathway to a nuclear weapon because President Trump is restoring peace around the world.
And we've worked with President Trump to rebuild a strong military to stand up to the bad guys.
Sadly, there are still bad guys around the world.
Go look at China.
Go look at Russia.
Go look at Iran.
Our friends appreciate that.
All of our allies around the world, the president's in Davos right now, making the case for why it's so important for America to finally be back on the world stage where we can protect our allies.
If you look at interest rates finally coming down, we want to keep that progress, by the way.
We say, let's keep going because Biden did so much damage that even though it's down, it's not down to pre-Biden levels, but it's finally heading in the right direction.
Inflation, because we've gotten control over spending, inflation's finally coming down again.
Investment into America.
People actually want to build things and create jobs in America again.
$18 trillion of investment has been announced in the last year of plants, big manufacturing facilities coming back to America.
That's only the first year of President Trump working with a Republican Congress delivering for the American people.
Appropriations On Track 00:10:01
That's what it looks like.
And this week's no different.
We're bringing more bills to continue to get this country back on track.
Four more appropriations bills, which will mean all 12, all 12 of the bills that fund the government and set new priorities.
And oh, by the way, lower spending.
You used to wonder under Biden how much more is government going to spend than they did the year before.
This year we'll actually be spending less than the year before.
So controlling spending while getting the country back on track.
Billions in regulations that add to the cost that everything buys are finally eliminated where red tape in Washington is being cut.
We're moving a Congressional Review Act this week, Pete Starber's bill, that finally allows us to develop the critical minerals that are here in the United States so we don't have to get them from China.
So one after another, we're continuing to take steps to make America great again, to bring back that golden age that our Whip was talking about, and leading that effort live from British Parliament, I guess you could say, because he just dazzled the British Parliament.
First Speaker, I think, ever to speak before our dear ally in Europe, Great Britain's Parliament, which is real true honor, something that should also be written about.
But our Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson.
Thank you.
Cheerio, Steve.
Thank you for saying so.
Thank you.
Really great to see you all.
Good morning.
Yesterday was a neat event for us.
We had the profound honor and privilege to be the first American Speaker of the House to address the British Parliament, and it was a good day there.
My counterpart, Speaker Lindsey Hoyle there in the House of Commons, invited me back in the fall to come and do that.
And the idea was that we would sort of launch in an historic manner our American 250 celebration in the cradle of democracy where it all began.
And it was surreal in that regard.
And I noted yesterday the special relationship that really does exist between our two nations and has.
That relationship really grew and flourished and was forged in the great wars of the 20th century.
And we have stood together because we have a common history and heritage, I reminded them, and one that gave rise to the greatest, most free, most successful, most powerful, most benevolent civilization that the world has ever known.
And that is what Western civilization represents.
And I talked with our friends there about the necessity of us standing together to defend the foundations of Western civilization because the West is imperiled today, and those foundations are endangered because there are rising powers like China and Russia.
And that is one of the things we have to keep in mind as we do all of our work.
So that was a little history yesterday, but the real history is being made here this week.
And what do I mean by that?
Well, you've heard referenced that appropriations are on track.
And for the third consecutive week now, House Republicans are going to advance another set, the final set of the FY26 appropriations bills.
This week you'll see Defense, Homeland, Transportation, and Labor HHS.
These bills are going to fund the Trump agenda and Republican efforts to restore peace through strength, to defend our borders, and to deport criminal illegal aliens, to rebuild America's infrastructure, and to make America healthy again.
All laudable goals and things that we promised and things we're delivering on.
This is our final batch of appropriations bills for the fiscal year.
There were a lot of people, and I think many in this room, that argued that this could not be done, that a regular appropriations process is a thing of the past.
And, you know, it's been a couple decades since this has happened.
Critics said our margins were too slim to bring it back, to rebuild that muscle memory that I committed to when I became Speaker.
And they said we had too many bills left to pass and too many disagreements left to reconcile.
But I'm happy to report that all of those prognostications were flat wrong.
And we've gotten it done.
And the most significant sign of progress in these halls in years, House Republicans are restoring regular order.
And it's important to the people that we represent because this is the only way to have good fiscal sanity and responsibility and stewardship over taxpayer dollars is to return to regular order.
We're returning the appropriations process to a committee-led, member-driven approach, as it should be.
We should not have the four corners, the top four leaders in the House and Senate in a back room, making pages and pages of decisions for the country.
That's not the way it was supposed to work.
And I've been doggedly determined to make sure that didn't happen.
And this time it did not.
Together, all 12 individual appropriations bills will provide full-year government funding without unrelated policy provisions.
They will spend less than another continuing resolution, and it will continue to advance our America First agenda.
Once we pass the final batch this week, Republicans will have finally replaced the last of any Biden-era spending levels with Trump-era spending levels.
No more Biden and Pelosi negotiated budgets.
We've turned that page and we are not turning back.
Now, let's talk about the other big thing that will be happening that's on the minds of everyone in the next week or so as tax season begins.
Will Rogers, the famous actor and writer from Oklahoma whose statue stands outside the House chamber where we all meet to do our interviews with you, he once observed this.
He said, quote, the only difference between death and taxes is that death doesn't get any worse every time Congress meets.
For most of our history, his observation held true, which is why everybody kind of laughs at that, but it's not true anymore.
Republicans have simplified the tax code.
We have reduced the tax burden on families.
We've advanced a policy agenda that puts working families first.
And the proof is in the pudding, as we say.
Next Monday, January 26th, tax season officially begins in America.
And for many people, it's a dreaded time.
It's a moment that they don't celebrate.
But this year, there's going to be lots of happy surprises.
Thanks to our Working Families Tax Cut, tens of millions of American families are going to see bigger paychecks.
They're going to see bigger tax refunds.
And let me give you a couple of numbers real quick.
$4,000.
That's the value of the average tax refund for Americans this year.
$100 billion.
That's the estimated total of 2025 tax refunds for families.
$10,000, the average increase in annual take-home pay for working families.
Think of it: $10,000 is the average across the country.
15%, the average tax cut for families earning between $15,000 and $80,000 annually.
How did we do that?
We reduced federal taxes.
We made permanent the doubled standard deduction.
We instituted a $6,000 deduction for seniors, which will affect more than 50 million of them.
We included no tax on tips, no tax on overtime.
We boosted the child tax credit.
We made permanent the paid leave tax credit.
We expanded FSAs.
We increased the adoption tax credit.
And those just provisions for families.
For business and industry, the tax season will be a boost to their bottom lines and their ability to grow and add more jobs and expand facilities, et cetera.
Our agenda supports Main Street over Wall Street.
And we did that by making a 20% small business deduction permanent, doubling small business expensing to $2.5 million, providing child care tax credits to businesses, reducing paperwork burdens by increasing the 1099 reporting threshold, expanded opportunity zones with more than $100 billion in new investments in rural distressed areas, and we raised the death tax exemption for family farms.
That's a lot of great policy, pro-growth policy that the American people are going to see the great benefit of.
We also included full expensing for new factories and domestic manufacturing improvements, full expensing for domestic research and development, 100% expensing for new capital investments in the U.S., no taxes on car loan interest for U.S. assembled vehicles, and the elimination of the de minimis exception for low-value commercial imports.
Great policies, some things that we had been needing to do for a long time.
And we got all that in the one big, beautiful bill, the Working Families Tax Code.
We wrote that legislation for small business owners, the job creators in this country, and we wrote it and geared it for lower and middle-class families.
You know how the Democrats always say, oh, the Republicans only favor the billionaires.
It's a joke.
Go look at the facts.
Everybody's going to see that.
This was written for lower and middle-class hardworking families in America.
And they're going to benefit from that.
And they're going to know who did it.
As our chair reminded you about five times this morning, the Democrats voted against every bit of this.
They voted to raise taxes.
And they voted against all this great policy.
The very people who suffered the most during the Biden years were lower and middle class families.
And we are going to correct that.
And all boats are going to rise.
And that's why we're so excited about the year ahead, not just because of celebration of the two and a half century mark for the country, and not just because we have a faithful election season, what we are very bullish about because of the record we're going to run on, but because everybody is going to be feeling the positive effects of that.
And man, do the American people need it.
I've just scratched the surface here on what our families, working families' tax cuts will achieve.
So over the weeks and months ahead, House Republicans will continue to promote the transformational opportunities and conservative victories that this legislation delivers for everybody.
And we're really excited about that.
With that, I'll take a few questions.
Mr. Speaker, because you just returned from Europe, the President has threatened tariffs on European allies who are opposing his plans in Denmark and Greenland.
Bad Timing On My Part 00:00:35
Do you think that's a fair strategy?
And when does Congress have to get involved here?
Let's talk about Greenland.
I know the President, I think he may still be speaking there.
I didn't see any of that because we were in the Republican conference meeting during the timing of his speech.
It was bad timing on my part.
So I look forward to seeing it.
My staff was handing me little notes about some of the things he was saying.
I know that he has said that we will not have troops involved in Greenland.
And as I had been saying for the- We take you live now to Davo, Switzerland, for remarks from President Trump.
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