House Speaker Mike Johnson discusses efforts to pass the “SAVE America” Act and the likelihood of sending an additional reconciliation bill to the Senate on “Fox News Sunday.” <\/p>\n
SHANNON BREAM, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: Well, you’ve got your own GOP stuff to deal with. Politico puts it this way: Intra-party fights, tight margins, election year pressures with an indifferent president have grounded the pre-midterm legislative plans of GOP leaders on the Hill, just a handful of days, they say, to get anything done. House leaders in particular, they say, appear to have lost control of their chamber. You had to send folks home. I mean, the House floor was brought to a stop, not by Democrats, but by some Republicans. How are you dealing with their concerns? REP. MIKE JOHNSON (R-LA), SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: Well, the Hill press corps has been writing this for the last two and a half years. Okay? We have the smallest margin in U.S. history. I functionally have a one-vote margin on most days. And so, we work through everybody’s preferences on legislation. And this week, a handful of Republicans took down the rule, the procedural rule to advance legislation. I just decided it was best to send everybody home to go celebrate July 4th in their districts. We’ll come back, gather everybody together. The big urgency is to get SAVE America passed. The president has that as a top priority, and so do I. We passed it three times in the House. We’re going to try one more time on a budget reconciliation bill, and I think that will be the way to get it through the Senate, and finally, to the president’s desk. So, that’s forthcoming. BREAM: Okay, I want to talk about reconciliation, but before that, you talk about what the House has passed. So, the SAVE America Act on your side is about voter ID and proof of citizenship. What’s come together in the Senate is different. The president wants some additional things about mail-in ballots, trans treatment, trans — for minors and trans athletes. Will he accept the House version? You’ve had conversations with him. Is he willing to accept that version, or does he want everything else what’s packed into the Senate version? JOHNSON: I think our version is the main, sort of, the backbone of that. BREAM: The House version? JOHNSON: Yes. He would like to add the prohibition of mail-in balloting, except for exceptions like if somebody’s deployed overseas or they’re ill or can’t get to the polling place. But he understands that one is a — is a bigger reach. If we can get proof of citizenship and photo ID to vote, that eliminates so much of the problem, all the fraud and everything that everybody’s concerned about in our elections, particularly, frankly, in these blue states. Look at California. They’re still counting ballots from an election that happened a month ago. It’s crazy, and everybody understands that. BREAM: So one of the folks who’s leading this conversation is Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, and when the House rule got shut down, you sent everybody home because you couldn’t move forward. She tweeted, I don’t care who hates me in the chamber for it. She clearly has a point to make about SAVE America. She says this on X, We should be doing everything to pass SAVE America. Add it to reconciliation, which you’ve talked about. Add it to the NDAA. Add it to FISA. Add it to every must-pass bill. Our frontline members promised this to their voters. Let’s deliver. Now, she apparently felt the conversation about adding it to the defense bill was not adequate, that it would be done in a way that would allow potentially the Senate to strip it back out. So have you had that conversation with her? JOHNSON: I’ve had the conversation with her many times, and with our Senate colleagues as well. What she was saying just, frankly, isn’t true. What we did was a MIRV, and that’s a technical term to say we merged the NDAA, the National Defense Authorization Act, with the SAVE America Act that we passed back in February, unanimously with all Republican votes. That is — puts it in the base tax. It merges the two bills into one, and it transmitted to the Senate that way. So what she was saying just simply isn’t accurate. I tried to explain that to her on the floor. Nobody’s mad at Anna. We all want the same thing. She’s a team player. She’s a dear friend of mine. We’re going to get this done. And I reminded her, and she said herself, you know, we have done this in the House now three times already. We’re going to do it again. And I’m going to put it in a reconciliation bill so that we can get it through the Senate. The problem is there’s only 53 Republicans in the Senate, and to do substantive legislation, you need 60 votes. There is zero chance, Shannon, that seven Democrats are going to help us on election integrity because, as the president rightfully says all the time, they count on this. I think some of them allow for some cheating in elections because they can’t win on their policies. BREAM: Well, and you can’t always count on all the Republicans in the Senate to stick together on critical issues either. So, talking about reconciliation, just a few weeks ago, it came up in a Senate Appropriations hearing. Senator Mitch McConnell said then, I think it’s safe to conclude there will not be another reconciliation bill, so it’s really not an option. Senator Susan Collins was sitting right next to him, and she followed that up saying, I agree with that assessment. So what do you say to your House members who say, we can’t count on reconciliation because the Senate may not do it? JOHNSON: Well, I’ve spoken to Leader Thune about this quite a bit, individual senators. I think some of that — that lack of belief there is based upon what they think may be in it. What we’re planning to do is send over a bill that will be irresistible for any Republican. Really incredible piece of legislation that will get the job done, meaning that we will continue to increase affordability, we will reduce fraud, waste, and abuse in government, and we’ll secure elections. Every Republican would vote for that if packaged correctly, and that’s what we’re planning to do right now. BREAM: All right, so that’s where SAVE America Act is going to move to the Senate, is probably through that plan. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n