Press Releases

Speaker Johnson on Biden Abandoning Israel: “100% Political”

WASHINGTON — This morning, Speaker Johnson joined Squawk Box to discuss President Biden abandoning Israel, antisemitism on college campuses, and the SAVE Act:

Click here to watch to the full interview

On President Biden abandoning Israel:

“What the President is doing here is not only defying the will of Congress, to your point, we just voted on this several days ago. But he's also trying to dictate, I guess, and micromanage the war, the defense effort in Israel, as a condition of supplying the weapons that we all know that they desperately need. I spoke with Prime Minister Netanyahu myself less than 48 hours ago about this situation, because I wanted to hear it directly from him. And what they're withholding is precision weapons that are desperately needed. Here's another irony: the precision weapons are needed to try to protect civilian lives and Rafah. These are the things that they need to do to do the job that must be done to eradicate the threat of Hamas who is still lurking there. And so, for Joe Biden to do this, he is he is going against what he told Congress, what his top officials in the White House specifically told me that they would do, and it's just catastrophic policy.

“I believe it's 100% a political calculation. I think we can all see that. It's the same reason that he's making the political calculation not to call out antisemitism on the campuses, not to call out and speak without equivocation about the good versus evil here, the right versus the wrong. I mean, he has the largest bully pulpit in America. He's the Commander in Chief, he's the top elected official in our country. We desperately need him to look right into the camera and say, to speak with moral clarity to say what is right and what is wrong, and he is unable and unwilling to do that because he doesn't want to offend a big segment of his base now, his party. There's an actual pro-Hamas, pro-Palestinian wing of the Democratic Party.”

On antisemitism on college campuses:

“As you know, last week, we launched the whole of the House, whole of Congress effort. We have six committees of jurisdiction, everything from Ways and Means to the Science, Space and Technology Committee, that are looking at every angle of that. We are deeply concerned about this idea that the Ivy League and these other universities receive billions of dollars of taxpayer funds every year. This is the precious treasure of American taxpayers, and they don't deserve it if they can't uphold the basic constitutional rights and the security and safety of their students. And some of them were unwilling to do that. They have demonstrated that.

“They are kowtowing to the violent protest, and they are ignoring the rights and the civil rights of their students who pay tuition and deserve and have the freedom and the right to go to class unimpeded and unafraid. And so that's the problem. So, Congress is looking at that, we’re looking at the funding streams, we're looking at the generous tax benefits that their endowments enjoy, these big universities. And these foreign student visas. If you come over here and you're an aspiring terrorist, you don't deserve to be on an American campus. You don't deserve to be there threatening your Jewish classmates and peers just because of who they are, and we've got to get down to the bottom of that. I think there's a big appetite on both sides of the aisle here to address that. And I think that's something the American people will stand and applaud.”

On the SAVE Act:

“I mean, this sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it's the only theory that makes sense, that Joe Biden and Mayorkas engineered the wide-open border. They've allowed, by our count and my estimate is about 16 million illegals since Joe Biden walked into the Oval Office three and a half years ago. And they did this because they ultimately, some in that party and some who engineered this, wanted to turn them into voters and they wanted to affect the outcome of the next census by spreading them around the country. We're going to work on both of those issues. But that first one is right. It is a violation of federal law right now, it’s against statutory law for an illegal to vote in an election and in a federal election. But there's no way for the states to ask someone if they check the box and say I'm a citizen, when they do the motor voter registration, if that's actually true. There's no mechanism to prove it, believe it or not. And so, we're going to fix that, we're bringing a bill, The SAVE Act that will solve that problem. I think it's common sense.

“…It will be stunning if [Democrats] vote against that, some will, but they'll have to explain why they're opposing existing federal law and why they want illegals to vote in US elections. Good luck with that one. They can’t say the quiet part out loud. We're about to find out. 76% of the American people understand that's a priority and by some polls 86% of the American people want only US citizens to vote in US elections. What a concept, right? We're trying to advance common sense here. We certainly hope that everybody gets on board with that.”

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