America's Talking - New Speaker Lays Out Legislative Agenda, Receives Broad Support From Party

Episode Date: October 27, 2023

U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has laid out his vision for the House and legislative goals, but he faces the daunting task of reuniting a divided party in a slim majority and funding the government before the partial shutdown deadline in the middle of November. Before the vote to elect Johnson as speaker on Wednesday, Johnson sent a memo to his fellow Republicans asking for their support and promising an “ambitious” legislative agenda. Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/america-in-focus/support Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Greetings and welcome to America in Focus, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAulb, executive editor of the Center Square Newswire Service. Joining me again today is the Center Square's Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief Casey Harper. We are recording this on Friday, October 27th, and the U.S. House Speaker watches over, Casey. Republicans in Congress finally came to an agreement and voted to appoint the relatively little-known Mike Johnson of Louisiana to the House's top post. First, Casey, tell us what you know about Mike Johnson. Who? No. I'm just kidding. That is, Mike, I mean, I'm kind of joking because that's, I think, how most Americans feel about Mike Johnson. I think most Americans are kind of relieved to have a new speaker. Polling shows that they were pretty fed up with the drama, as you said, more than three weeks without a speaker, without any legislation being passed. And now Mike Johnson has somehow seemed to do the impossible. What many members outright told reporters, was not possible. I believe one said that even Jesus could not get 217 votes. That's how divided

the Republican Party was. But Mike Johnson has managed to emerge from the rubble of this very divided party. Now, the party is still very divided, but he did get unanimous support. So, you know, who is he? He's a Louisiana Republican. He was in the state legislature before coming to the House of Representatives. He, I think he raised about, you know, five and a half minutes. million dollars for, you know, in campaign donations, which is relevant because McCarthy, who is just ousted by Kevin McCarthy, former speaker, who was ousted by Matt Gates and a, you know, a handful of other House Republicans. For whatever flaws they may have found in him, he was a prolific fundraiser for the Republican Party. He was actually the most, I believe the most prolific

fundraiser, fundraising speaker of the party has ever had. And so that loss is definitely going to be felt, and there's a big question, or whether someone like Mike Johnson, who doesn't have that name recognition is going to be able to raise the same amount of money or even raise enough money to keep Republicans competitive in their slim majority, because that is a big role of those who are in Republican leadership. And honestly, that's how one of the main ways that people normally get into congressional leadership is their good fundraiser. It's not always, but it's definitely a big factor. So, you know, that's one thing to look at. He is known as a pretty conservative Republican, especially on social issues. He's already taking some fire for some of his stances on, you know,

on abortion, on being against gay marriage. So that's, you know, that's one angle to him. He did, I believe, questioned the 2020 election results, which for some Republicans, that was sort of a test of how conservative you really are. Where did you really stand with Trump? at least raise questions when we, you know, when we didn't know how legitimate all those claims were. For some moderate Republicans and, of course, Democrats, that was a red line that no one should be able to pass. But for other Republicans, it was seen as a positive. So, you know, there's different ways to evaluate him. I think he's seen as really a policy guy. He reminds me a little bit of a more conservative Paul Ryan in the sense that he, he's not going to necessarily be

out there going viral on Fox News, but he has to be. has a clear policy vision. I think Paul Ryan ended up being a big disappointment for a lot of Republicans. We'll see how Mike Johnson does. But he has a clear legislative agenda that we can get into. And I think he just wants to get roll up his sleeves and do the policy. But I think he's also going to learn that as speaker, you have to also lead the party and raise money while doing policy and negotiate with the president. So he's got a big task ahead of him. Briefly on the raising money part, the fundraising part, heading into the 2024 presidential election. of course, it's not just president that will be on the ballot.

The entire House of Representatives, every single seat will be up for re-election. Republicans, of course, have the slimmest of majorities right now, and they're going to want to obviously hold on to the House. So fundraising is going to be vital over the course of the next year. We're almost at the year mark until the next November's election. So we'll have to see if Republicans can figure that part out. Let's talk about policy a little bit because in his first several weeks as the speaker, Johnson has a lot of things he's got to get done in the house. What are among the top priorities over the next month or two?

Yeah, I mean, one of the top priorities has to be funding the government, right? We have a partial government shutdown coming in the middle of November. And as you know that- Wait, didn't we just go through this like a month ago? It's a recurring nightmare for the American people. It's one of those nightmares you just keep having over and over the government's about to shut down. And at the last moment, they either prevent it with some kind of massive spinning bill or the government actually shuts down. But this is that, you know, if for those following it, you'll know that this is what got McCarthy, the last speaker, kicked out of his position.

Basically, he cut a deal with, you know, he cut a more moderate spending deal. I guess you could say when he couldn't get conservative Republicans to co his way in time on a spending resolution. And then because of that, they voted to kick him off. So, you know, what the conservative Republicans want is they want to pass all 12 appropriations bills to fund the government, you know, quote unquote, the right way, to go through the legislative process, to have a lot of members weigh in, to put in amendments, to have those amendments voted up or down, and to create these, you know, these spending bills that actually address different niche needs and can, you know, it can be discussed more if we have the money

to pay for it versus what we've been doing most of the time, which is, you know, the leaders of the party kind of get together and they just get some top line numbers and they pass a spending resolution to kick the can down the road another year or another six months. So Johnson said a letter, so that's the big question before Johnson. Now he sent a letter to his fellow Republicans before his election, a speaker. And he basically laid out his plan. And he said that he was just up front with him and saying that we're probably not going to, good chance we're not going to be able to get all these bills passed in time. Maybe we will. But if we can't, if we need to extend it, then he said I would propose a measure that expires on January 15th or April 15th.

So one thing that lawmakers kind of hate is for some reason, they often will just say until the end of the year. And so then all these lawmakers end up having to be in D.C. doing some kind of like terrible Christmas, Christmas time, omnibus spending package for, you know, two trillion dollars or something. So they don't want, they want to avoid that. So he said, we'll wait to January 15th or April 15th. And then he laid out, you know, we're going to do past energy and water this week, which they actually did. They succeeded on that. Then they're going to do, you know, interior environment bills. They're going to do, going into middle November, labor, health, HHS, agriculture.

And so he laid out a pretty ambitious legislative agenda, but I think he was playing to his strengths there of being like, I'm all in on policy, I'm going to get the house running again. We're going to get these appropriations bills passed. And if we can't do it by the deadline, this time around because of all the chaos, we'll kick it down the can just a few months, not a year or anything, and then get back on track with this kind of funding. Certainly not anywhere near on par with keeping the government operating. spending these or passing these spending bills. He has a pretty immediate task that he has to take

care of. And that has to do with a censorship resolution against another member of the house. You wrote about this at the center square.com. Just briefly tell us what that's about. Like I said, the rubble of the Republican Party does, it extends across both parties, really. There's a lot of division. And, you know, one issue, of course, is Israel's war with Hamas, the terrorist group that earlier this month basically did a sneak attack and killed over 1,400 people, took a lot of hostages, some of whom were American and other nations like Italy. And so, you know, that of course has been top of the news for several weeks since. But Rashida Talib, Minnesota Democrat, who has been accused even by her own party of making

anti-Semitic remarks. She has made comments that were perceived as being very sympathetic to these terrorists. groups and of course very anti-Israel. She's not alone in that. The squad is kind of known for that. There are other Democrats who have been really critical of Israel. But then after her comments, some anti-Israel protesters basically took over the house office building where these house office buildings, if you haven't been to D.C. are basically across the street from the Capitol. It's where lawmakers have their offices. They are, you know, they're heavily secured as the Capitol is. You have to go the metal detector and all that. And these guys took it over as

protesters and some of them, I think three of them were arrested. Marjorie Taylor Green, a very kind of fiery, controversial Republican, filed a motion to censure to leave. Just one more notch in the chaos of what's going on in Capitol Hill. Well, Casey, we look forward to your coverage of Johnson's first few weeks, first few months as Speaker of the U.S. House. Listeners can keep up with our coverage with Casey's coverage at thecentersquare.com, but we are out of time. For Casey Harper, I'm Dan McAulb. Thank you for listening.