SCOOP: Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise talk shutdown and more on RSC's latest podcast
The current and former Republican Study Committee Chairman walk into a recording studio. Here's the result...
Rep. August Pfluger (R., Texas) took the Republican Study Committee’s (RSC) podcast to new heights in its latest episode, obtained by the Washington Reporter; in the episode, Pfluger — the Chairman of the RSC — brought in big guns as his guests: Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) and Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R., La.).
Both Johnson and Scalise are former RSC chairs, and the conservative trio spoke about how they got to Congress and how they want to navigate the ongoing Schumer Shutdown.
Johnson explained that he and Scalise are “a lot less jovial right now” because they are both “really so frustrated, and we’re just angry, about the fact that Democrats are playing games right now.”
“We must have Democrats to reopen the government,” Johnson explained. “And they keep saying breathlessly that ‘it’s the Republicans. They’re in control of the government.’ Everybody knows from civics, and if you follow government, you have to have 60 votes in the Senate. We only have 53 Republicans. And so it is the Democrats who now voted 13 times to close the government.”
While a handful of Senate Democrats are needed to reopen the government, Johnson noted that the demands coming from some of them are simply unrealistic. “What they’re demanding is $1.5 trillion in new spending. They want $200 billion to be returned for healthcare to illegal aliens, maybe more, in taxpayer dollars. They want to get half a billion dollars back to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. They want to spend money all over the world on these wasteful foreign social programs to increase LGBTQ awareness in the Horn of Africa and all kinds of crazy stuff. They put that on paper. They’re demanding that as a ransom to reopen the government, and we’re not going to do that.”
Johnson speculated as to the reasons behind what he described as the Democrats’ ransom demands. “Democrats in Congress are more afraid of the rising Marxist far left in their party than they are about taking food out of the mouths of honoring Americans. I mean, that’s just a fact, and everybody can see it…We all know that Marxism is all the rage in New York. Zohran Mandani is about to be elected mayor America’s largest city. He’ll ruin it in short order…There’s no other explanation. We have a clean nonpartisan CR. We didn’t load it up with anything, we wanted it as clean as a whistle, and they rejected it. The first time in history any party’s had the audacity to close the government down on a clean CR and it is a 100 percent selfish decision on their part.”
Scalise described the Democrats’ tactics as “really sad.” Democrats, he noted, are “talking openly now that they know they’re causing suffering, real suffering, on families, and they don’t care because they want to exert leverage, and for what? They can’t even articulate why. They are scared to death of their socialist Marxist base, the most extreme elements of their party…They’re doing this shutdown because they’re afraid of their own voters.”
Scalise’s message to Democrats is simple: “don’t hold the American people hostage.” And yet, he noted, “the Democrats are saying, ‘no.’ They don’t care. They literally want to hold the American people hostage and cause that suffering. And it’s real people. It’s food, literally, that’s not going to be on the table. 42 million people’s tables. It’s insane.”
Both Johnson and Scalise, along with many of their colleagues, eagerly used Rep. Katherine Clark’s (D., Mass.) remark about using the shutdown as “leverage” against their colleagues from across the aisle.
Johnson laid out the stakes in simple terms: “We are for the hard working American families,” he said. “We are delivering for them. And the Democratic Party has taken advantage of them. We see them as America’s greatest value. They see they see them as ‘leverage.’ That’s their own words.”
While Johnson and Scalise are now at the highest levels of House Republican politics, they weren’t planning to find themselves in these roles. When the duo first got into politics, Louisiana was one of the bluest states in America. Now, it’s as blood-red as can be, because they — and others fought to take it back. While both Louisianans told Pfluger that they had no interest in running for office, Johnson kept receiving phone calls from Louisiana state lawmakers and then federal lawmakers who pressed him to run, and Scalise explained that his college roommate helped cajole him into his first run for office.
Upon their election to Congress, the two rose quickly — and helped author some of the GOP’s signature legislative accomplishments, many of which have the RSC’s fingerprints all over them.
During Johnson’s time as RSC Chairman, for example, he laid out how the committee rolled out policy papers to show Americans what Republicans were for, not just what they were against. He assumed that role right after the 2018 blue wave sent House Republicans back into the minority, but he crafted many of the policies that he said went on to become the Working Families Tax Cut.
While Scalise helmed the committee, it churned out what became one of the GOP’s signature replacements for Obamacare, the American Health Care Reform Act.
“You had members of Congress who weren’t even in the RSC who were actually cosponsors of the bill,” Scalise explained, “because it was the only alternative to Obamacare that was out there…when we put the bill out there, we ended up with over 120 cosponsors, including non-RSC members. And never once was the media or the Democrat Party able to attack anything in the bill, because it’s really good policy. And some of those have now become law, and more of those need to become law, because, frankly, that’s what’s going to lower premiums for families, but it’s being able to turn really good ideas from smart people in our city into law that benefits families in America.”
The latest RSC podcast episode, and all of its predecessors, can be listened to here.