During this week’s broadcast of FNC’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) touted the passage of the budget, referred to as the “big beautiful bill” last week before Congress adjourned for the Easter recess.
He called it “the most consequential piece of legislation that Congress has dealt with in many decades, and arguably one of the most in all of its history.”
Partial transcript as follows:
BARTIROMO: Mr. Speaker, walk us through the passing of that budget on Friday, before you all left for the Easter recess. Where does that put you now? What is the work to happen once you come back?
JOHNSON: Well, thanks so much. It was a big milestone.
We have had a number of those. As you noted, this is our 100th day of the 119th Congress, and we have been very busy delivering on the promises we made to the American people to help President Trump make America stronger and safer and more prosperous again.
And passing that budget resolution was a big milestone. It really was, Maria, because what that does is, it allows us to move one step closer to the one big, beautiful bill that the president and all of us keep talking about.
In this bill, we are going to cement so many of the promises we made on the campaign trail and check so many of the boxes of the America first agenda. I mean, it will be everything, as you know, from securing the border and making sure we have the resources necessary to do that in permanent fashion.
We’re going to revive the economy again by bringing about American energy dominance once more. Of course, we will have lots of regulatory reform and the cutting of the red tape, and not the least of which the big priority is to ensure the American people don’t experience the biggest tax increase in their lives at the end of this year, which is what would happen by default if we didn’t accomplish this mission.
BARTIROMO: Now, two Republicans voted against the legislation, and they voted with Democrats because they felt that there weren’t enough spending cuts in this legislation.
JOHNSON: Yes, there’s been a lot of deliberate negotiation, a lot of hard work done for more than a year, Maria, to get to this point.
We started this process in March of last year. We expected and believed that we would have unified government, we would come to this moment of really incredible opportunity, and that is that we would have alignment. We would win the White House, the Senate, and the House, and we would be able to engage in this process.
The beauty of the reconciliation process is because it’s the one mechanism that allows you to get around the necessity of 60 votes in the Senate, and that’s what’s so important, because we only have 53 Republicans there.
But we have to get the Senate Republicans and the House Republicans, virtually every single one of them aligned to make sure that, while we extend the tax cuts, to your point, we also pay for them, because we all know that the national debt is probably the greatest single threat to our national security right now.
BARTIROMO: So knowing that 76 percent of the spending goes toward mandatory spending, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, where are the offsets?
JOHNSON: Well, here’s the key to all of it.
The president has made absolutely clear many times, as we have as well, that we’re going to protect Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid for people who are legally beneficiaries of those programs. There are a lot of Americans who rely upon those programs, and we have got to ensure that they’re safeguarded. That’s a big priority of the White House and the Republicans in Congress.
At the same time, we have to root out fraud, waste, and abuse. We have to eliminate people on — for example, on Medicaid, who are not actually eligible to be there, able-bodied workers, for example, young men who are – – who should never be on the program at all.
And when they — when you have people on the program that are draining the resources, it takes it away from the people that are actually needing it the most and are intended to receive it. You’re talking about young single mothers down on their fortunes at the moment, the people with the real disabilities, the elderly.
And we have got to protect and preserve that program. So we’re going to preserve the integrity of it in this process. We have lots of categories of areas where the government is too large, it does too many things. And the DOGE efforts and others have highlighted that for the American people.
So, in this process, you’re going to see in 11 different committees of jurisdiction across the House work — members working hand in hand with their sleeves rolled up, working to carve out those inefficiencies. We’re going to make government work better for the people in this legislation, in addition to checking all those boxes I mentioned earlier.
BARTIROMO: OK.
JOHNSON: So it could be the most consequential piece of legislation that Congress has dealt with in many decades, and arguably one of the most in all of its history.
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