SCOOP: Speaker Johnson to Washington Reporter on government unions pressuring Senate Democrats
Speaker Mike Johnson spoke with the Washington Reporter about the latest fissures emerging in the Democratic Party's coalition amidst the Schumer Shutdown.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) explained to the Washington Reporter that he’s not surprised that government unions started publicly pressuring Senate Democrats to reopen the government. Multiple government unions started openly requesting that Democrats vote for the continuing resolution that almost all have voted for on multiple occasions.
In fact, Johnson described the very public hemorrhaging between Democrats and public sector unions as the outgrowth of the “historic” demographic shifts President Donald Trump and the GOP saw in 2024.
“It is not a surprise to me that union workers would come enthusiastically supporting common sense,” Johnson told the Reporter during a House GOP leadership press conference. “What we’re asking for here is common sense. They’re supporting the president, because they know who’s working for the American people and who is not, and who is causing and inflicting pain on the American people.”
Johnson traced that reality back to at least 2024, when the GOP had a “record number of Hispanic and Latino voters who came to the Republican Party, a record number of African-American voters, Jewish voters, union workers, and young people. These are demographics that had not traditionally, in recent years, been with the Republican Party in large numbers, and they came to us, not reluctantly with but with hopeful anticipation. Why? Because they wanted a return to common sense, and they saw what the other party had done to them with their terrible policies and their terrible ideas.”
Those groups, Johnson said, “came to us, and they said, ‘can you do better?’ Well, we did. We have. We passed the One Big, Beautiful Bill, the Working Families Tax Cut, and all of our legislation, and everything the president’s done with executive orders, fulfilling his promises, are codifying those things and doing the rest of our legislative agenda.”
Johnson and his assembled colleagues appeared eager to highlight the difference between the two parties. “The contrast has never been more clear,” Johnson added to the Reporter. “We say all the time that this is not your father’s Democratic Party. I grew up in Louisiana. When I was a kid, I didn’t even know a Republican; literally everybody was Democrat, and they’re Southern Democrats, conservative Democrats down Louisiana. That party doesn’t exist anymore.”
“My grandfather would not not recognize what this party has become,” Johnson said. All of those people he described would “all be Republicans, because Republicans stand on the side of common sense and working families, hardworking, middle class, lower class earners in the country….The policies and ideas of the Republican Party are right for America because they comport with our founding principles and we stand on those principles to defend them. By contrast, and the other side of the screen, they’re going for communism and Marxism.”