WASHINGTON — This morning, at the weekly House Republican Leadership press conference, Speaker Johnson discussed the Senate budget resolution, Congressional Republicans delivering on the full Trump agenda through budget reconciliation, and House Republicans’ efforts to prevent noncitizens from voting in American elections.
Watch Speaker Johnson’s full remarks here.
On the Senate Budget Resolution:
I want to make four important points about the Senate's amendment to our house resolution: 1) The budget resolution is not the law. All this does is it allows us to continue the process begin drafting the actual legislation. It really counts, and that's the one big, beautiful bill. 2) The Senate amendment makes no changes to the reconciliation instructions that we put into the budget resolution, so our objectives remain intact. 3) Any final reconciliation bill has to include historic spending reductions that we included in our resolution while also safeguarding essential programs. And you've heard a commitment from us over and over that that will happen, and the President has said it himself over and over as well. 4) Reconciliation will be a collaborative process between the House and Senate.
You're going to see the Republican Party in both chambers working together as one team. I know that's a rare occasion, and people don't really know what that looks like, but we're actually going to do it this time. The House is not going to participate in an us versus them charade. We won't do it to secure and accomplish our mission. We’ve got to be working together and rowing in the same direction. And I'm fiercely committed to doing that and so is leader Thune and our members on both sides.
On delivering on the full Trump agenda:
Republicans have a historic, once-in-a-generation opportunity to deliver relief to hard working families and set our country back on the path of prosperity. The American people desperately need us to take this action, and we will. As we wrote in a letter to our conference this weekend, time really is of the essence. There's a lot of pressure points that are outside of our control that are forcing this action.
We're months away from the X date on the debt limit. The border security resources are being diminished. Markets are unsettled, and the largest tax increase in American history is set to hit families and businesses at the end of this year if we do not act. And for all those reasons, we have no luxury of complacency, and we really don't have time to dither on this thing. So, we'll be moving that forward, and you'll see that action this week.
On the SAVE Act:
Polling shows that nearly 90% of the American people believe that proof of citizenship should be required to vote. There are few issues in American politics that enjoy that level of bipartisan support. This should pass with a massive bipartisan margin, but watch, it won't. The Democrats are contorting themselves into a pretzel trying to justify some sort of vote against this. Last year, they argued we were too close to a federal election to make voting changes. And then they said that non-citizens don't actually vote, and then they said the SAVE Act will somehow result in voter suppression. All that was total nonsense.
Now they're claiming that the SAVE Act disenfranchises married women who change their last names. I mean, it's absurd. What they're trying to do is protect the ability of noncitizens to participate in our elections. Plain and simple, that's what this is about. And we know it's a crisis because the last administration, as we all well know, opened the border wide, and we had by some counts 20 million illegal aliens come into the country. There's no mechanism in federal law, in current law, that requires states to prove citizenship. So even though it is currently against the law, only US citizens should decide US elections. There's no way to make sure that's actually happening. The SAVE Act is so critically important, it follows common sense, and the American people are with us. The Democrats, I predict, will not be, and they're going to have to answer for that.
