House Speaker Mike Johnson talked about how they plan to pass the year’s appropriations bill by the next self-imposed funding deadline during an interview this morning on “Fox News Sunday.”

REP. MIKE JOHNSON (R-LA), SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: The good news is our appropriators in the House and the Senate in bipartisan fashion have been working on appropriations bills, you know, the whole year. So, they’re virtually done. There’s a little disagreement between the Senate and House versions of some of the bills. The topline numbers are a little bit different. We got to resolve that, but we can certainly get that done in the amount of time that’s still on the calendar. Just because we don’t have legislative voting days, it doesn’t mean Congress isn’t working. There’s this idea out there that Congress goes on vacation. Shannon, we haven’t — I haven’t had a day off in two years. I mean, we work around the clock on these things. Our appropriators, in particular, have been working very hard and they’re ready to go. So, I’m very optimistic we can get the rest of the appropriations bills done. And this is the key point. We are returning to regular order — the way this is supposed to work, you know, Congress hasn’t done this for many years. And I’m really proud of this achievement. Having gotten three bills signed into law on Wednesday night, three appropriations bills is a — is a big achievement. And I know that seems like a low bar, but we’re getting Congress back to the way it’s supposed to work so that we can be better stewards of the taxpayers’ dollars. SHANNON BREAM: So, this idea of you haven’t had a day off, but you know, your critics are saying, well, the House hasn’t been here. We hear paid vacation for six, seven, eight weeks that members have not been here. And listen, I’ve heard from Republicans, too. Some of them frustrated that there wasn’t work happening here on issues that could have been handled outside of the shutdown. JOHNSON: There are about three of them that were frustrated. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of House Republicans were united in that. And they will tell you and they have said publicly and privately, they’ve had some of their best work of their careers during the shutdown because they were in their districts with their constituents helping them navigate through the chaos of the shutdown that the Democrats created. Remember, the Democrats in Congress voted 16 times to keep the government closed, to bring on the longest shutdown in U.S. history and to exact all this pain on the people and for what? I mean, millions of American families went without food on their tables over this period. You had millions of Americans stuck in airports and stranded because their flights were canceled. You had troops wondering where their next paycheck was going to come from. And it was all for naught. They got nothing out of it. And I think that’s why you see the backlash against the Democrat leadership because we tried to talk them out of that and we couldn’t. BREAM: Well, talking — speaking of the appropriators, let’s talk about one of them. House Democrat Rosa DeLauro. She’s the ranking member of House Appropriations. Here’s how she describes the situation. She says, “President Trump and Russ Vought’s illegal stealing of funds from American communities has made it difficult to reach any appropriations agreement. Those challenges are compounded by Senate Republicans decision to secretly insert language into the legislative branch bill that would aid what she calls January 6th insurrectionists. We’ll get to that separately, but it does not sound like she’s going to be an easy sell on the remaining nine bills. JOHNSON: Doesn’t sound like she’ll be an easy sell. But we’re going to have to get together in bipartisan fashion and do it. I understand that Democrats are very upset that the White House and this administration have used their rescission power. That’s a power that every president has. It’s part of the system and they have a fiscal responsibility, a stewardship obligation to do that. If you see that funds are being misused or being wasted with fraud, waste, abuse, then the administration is supposed to take action in request of Congress to claw back the funding because that’s not what Congress should ever intend. And that’s what we’ve done here. And Republicans do it better than Democrats. And that’s why some of them are upset about it.

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