LIVE: Speaker Johnson and Reps. Scalise, Emmer, and Moore Hold Post-Meeting Press Conference

Good morning everyone. Thank you for being here. I hope you and your families had a wonderful Thanksgiving. House Republicans are back for another week, working hard to set the stage for unified Republican government next year. First when we go through our swearing-in and then the inauguration. Americans can expect significant results from a pro-growth and pro-family policy. That's going to be the focus that we have. We've had that focus at every stage of the last several years, and we've seen from the work that we did in 2017 that has been extremely successful for those two concepts, to have a pro-growth and pro-family policy set in place. Implementing critical immigration reform, addressing wasteful government spending, and looking out for our Main Street businesses to crafting tax policies that we know work better for hard-working families and Americans from coast to coast. I'm excited about the work that we are accomplishing at the end of the 118th Congress and what we will achieve when we work with President Trump and the Senate to hit the ground running on the 119th. With that, I'll hand it over to our Majority Whip, Mr. Tom Emmer. Thanks, Blake. Many of us are counting down to January 20th because it marks President Trump's triumphant return to the White House. But I'm also counting down because it's the day that SEC Chairman Gary Gensler will finally meet the American people's demands and resign. Chairman Gensler's tenure at the SEC has been marred by regulatory hypocrisy, crippling American competitiveness. His approach to our capital markets was lawless, self-interested, and objectively destructive. He has been an incompetent cop on the beat, pushing American firms into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party, and will undoubtedly go down as the worst SEC chair in the history of this country. Under his leadership, the SEC abandoned its core mission to protect the opportunities of every American who wants to participate in the greatest capital markets in the world. He wasted a large part of the SEC's resources to wage war on the crypto industry, a strategy that has proven unsuccessful for him as the SEC continues to lose again and again in the courts. Corruption under Gary Gensler ran so deep that a federal judge took the unprecedented step of imposing sanctions on the SEC for misrepresenting key facts in the debt box case, ultimately costing taxpayers $2 million in legal fees. In 47 days, America will no longer be embarrassed by the mockery Chairman Gensler has made of the SEC. President Trump will fulfill his mandate for change. With our first pro-crypto commander-in-chief, the SEC will work for the American people again, not against them. A new day is coming, and I look forward to working with President Trump and his new SEC chair to deliver on our America First agenda for the digital asset community. With that, I turn it over to the Regent Cajun, our leader, Steve Scalise. Thank you, Whip. Well, a new day is coming indeed. I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving. Good to see you all here. And we had a really, really good meeting with our members and members-elect upstairs. And you see, you know, with the 31 members coming in, a lot of energy, a lot of excitement about what's ahead, what we can do to get this country back on track. This morning, I also unveiled the schedule for next year and laid out the new calendar. And you see in that calendar a very ambitious agenda, the ability for us to get a lot of things done for the American people that we talked about during the campaign. We're already working very closely, the Speaker, our whole leadership team, with the Trump transition team so that we can all hit the ground running and be on the same page, focused on delivering lower energy costs for families who are struggling, border security that so many people are counting on, the ability for us to stabilize our tax code so we can prevent a multi-trillion dollar tax increase on families all across this country, getting rules and regulations under control so that the massive alphabet soup of federal agencies up here don't wake up every day trying to figure out how to shut down American manufacturers, but in fact, how they can go and help enforce the rules fairly so that America can be dominant again in job creation against our competitors around the world. That's what this Republican agenda is going to look like to deliver relief to those hardworking families who've been struggling for way too long. And we cannot wait to get to work working on and delivering on those promises with President Trump. And again, that work has already begun. Those meetings are already taking place between our leadership, House and Senate, as well as President Trump's transition team. They're not waiting until Inauguration Day. We are already working on those things now so we can hit the ground running day one, and we have a calendar built out so that we have the opportunity to deliver for those families who are counting on us and who delivered this mandate to the American people so that we can actually go and get those things done. The man who's leading our effort is the Speaker of the House, Mr. Mike Johnson. Thank you, Leader Scalise and the whole team here. We had a great meeting this morning. I want to welcome you all back. Hope you had a blessed Thanksgiving with your families, and we're now entering the Christmas season, and there's a great spirit on Capitol Hill. We lit the Capitol Christmas tree last night, and it's all lit up and everybody's fired up. We had a great meeting with all the House Republicans this morning. There is a great energy, as Leader Scalise mentioned, that people are excited about what we were able to achieve in electing another Republican House majority, keeping the majority, and ensuring that we had the majority in the Senate and now President Trump returning to the White House. So unified Republican government gives us an extraordinary opportunity to save this country and turn things around. So our members are excited about that, excited about the work that we have yet to complete in this Congress, and then all the things that we'll be doing early beginning January. We're looking forward to that. President Trump still has 47 more days before he returns to the Oval Office, but he is already making dramatic change, and he's bringing that change that we knew and expected if he got elected would happen. The stock market is surging. Iran called off a retaliatory attack on Israel. Foreign leaders are making their way to Mar-a-Lago to sit down with the new president and get on his good side, and Mexico has pledged to take immediate action to stop the flow of illegal immigration and human trafficking and fentanyl into our borders. Those are all good starts. There's much more good news ahead, and this is just the beginning. The era of promises made and promises kept will return in January. Let me say a word about Hunter Biden. A lot has been said and written about the pardon. President Biden is letting his son off the hook for the federal crimes that he committed. This weekend, of course, he pardoned Hunter. It's important to point out, and everyone has, and even many Democrats are now expressing their great disappointment and their dismay, because the president promised us over and over and over, repeatedly, unequivocally, he told the American people that he would not issue a pardon for his son, and then he did it. It was more than 10 occasions. We have the receipts. It's all on video. They made formal, official declarations to that point. The White House said he wouldn't do it, but he did. So, he misled the American people, and a lot has been recounted over the last couple of days, since that happened, that it's just like when he said the border was secure. It's just like when he said that Bidenomics was working great for the American people. It's just like when he denied or tried to cover up his obvious mental acuity and decline, and it's just like when he insisted that the catastrophic Afghanistan withdrawal was somehow a success. This pardon is a perversion of justice, and it is a utter disregard for the rule of law, and it undermines, further undermines, the people's faith in our system of justice. So, we have reform on the way, and it cannot happen soon enough, and you've heard us say many times, you've heard me say many times as a former constitutional law attorney litigator, that this is one of the greatest concerns I have, the people believe that there are two tiers of justice, and the current occupant of the White House emphasizes that point. It makes it very difficult. They have done, in my view, the Biden family, almost irreparable damage to our system of justice. So, we have a lot to repair, but I am encouraged and excited that we have that opportunity beginning early next year. We need real reform, and this is why President Trump is appointing nominees who will shake up and get us back to the fundamentals, and I think that's really important. Let me just make a word about something that has happened overseas that should be getting all of our attention. Just a point of personal privilege. Last Friday was a sad and shameful day for the English-speaking world. Why? That's because the UK Parliament voted to legalize euthanasia in their whole nation. It's an ancient truth that medicine should always heal and never harm. The UK just joined Canada in twisting that definition of medicine and codifying the Orwellian language of assisted death into law. I just want to say this. America has always stood out as a beacon, as a shining city on a hill. We've stood out in this regard. Our declaration makes the bold proclamation, the acknowledgment, that life is a gift from our Creator. Our founders called it a self-evident truth, that all of us are made equally by our Creator, and that He's the one that gives us our rights. Any society that rejects that truth about life as a gift from our Creator and adopts a culture of death is a society that is in the process of crumbling. So-called assisted death endangers the weak and marginalized in a society, and it corrupts medicine, and it erodes our obligations to family. I hope and pray that the people of the United Kingdom will work through democratic means and reverse that legislation. As Speaker of this House in the U.S., I want to say that House Republicans are committed to rejecting socialized medicine and the nanny state, and we will promote and respect every life, no matter how old or sick or weak those persons may be. Last thing, the bomb threats. I just want to address this. Last week's threats against multiple members of this body, it is outrageous that even happened on Thanksgiving Day. Of all days, we had members of Congress facing bomb threats in their homes and their districts. Republican or Democrat, I am personally committed to the safety of all members of this body and working with Capitol Police to keep everyone safe. This is a dangerous and insane behavior that we're seeing across the country, and it has no place in our country, and everyone needs to understand this. We need to state the obvious. Your political opponents are not your enemies, okay? We are all fellow Americans. So whoever's doing this, you will be found out. You will be punished. You will be imprisoned, and we're going to see to that. We have to treat one another with dignity and respect. We have to treat one another as fellow Americans because we are, and I think that's an appropriate message here at the holidays as every day throughout the year. So take your questions if you have a few. Yes, ma'am. Well, just like we do every day here, we've developed an expertise in that. We know how to work with a small majority. That's our custom now. Look, the final number, when it comes out, there's still some recounts taking place, but it looks like the final number will be 220 Republicans, 215 Democrats. And when three of our colleagues depart in the early part of the year, joining the administration, or one resign, it'll be 217 to 215. So yes, do the math. We have nothing to spare. But all of our members know that. We talked about that today, as we do constantly, that this is a team effort, that we've got to all row in the same direction. I spent time yesterday with the Senate Republicans at their working lunch and the session they had, and talked with them, frankly, about that. In unified government, we're all on the exact same team. This isn't varsity, junior varsity. This is everybody on the varsity team together. I mean, Senate Republicans, House Republicans. And we have to think that way and operate that way. And so you're going to see that. You'll see great cooperation, bicameral cooperation between the two bodies. And we'll deal with a one-seat majority, just like we will when we fill those other seats, three or four, whatever the final number is. We'll get those filled by, I think, late spring. And we will proceed. The first hundred days agenda is going to be very aggressive. We have a lot to fix. And as we've been saying all along, we could be the most consequential Congress of the modern era, because we've got to fix everything. We're working very closely with President Trump and his new team that he's assembled for policy and legislation. And we're excited about the days ahead. So I can tell you, every Republican in the room is excited about that. Everybody wants to be a part of the great reform that we're going to bring to the country. And we can't wait to get started in January. So we're looking forward to that. Yes. I'm not planning to do that. There are developments by the hour in Ukraine. I think, as we predicted, and as I said to all of you weeks before the election, if Donald Trump is elected, it will change the dynamic of the Russia war on Ukraine. And we're seeing that happen. So it is not the place of Joe Biden to make that decision now. We have a newly elected president, and we're going to wait and take the new commander-in-chief's direction on all of that. So I don't expect any Ukraine funding to come up now. Yeah. Yeah, like we do on everything, the disaster supplemental, everybody understands the necessity. Helene and Milton were historic storms. The scope of the disaster went across at least six states, and the swath and the path of that storm was massive. I saw that myself. I went to Florida, where the Queen made landfall and saw the disaster there, all the way inland into Florida, and then it was in Western North Carolina, where it looks like a bomb went off. I mean, it's serious, serious damage. But the initial request was $116.5 billion. And what we're doing right now is the important methodical job that the House has to go through really line by line and assess those requests and make sure that they all are actually tied to disaster and not superfluous items and issues that are included. That's what the discussion with Freedom Caucus was about and with other members, because we have to be good stewards of the resources. We have a huge national debt, and we have obligations to take care of, but we have to do that in a fiscally responsible manner. So that's the discussion going on right now. I don't know what the final package looks like, but we have to make those decisions here pretty quick, and those discussions will continue. Well, I can tell you that the action in the UK brings it to the forefront, and it's something we've been watching the developments for years. I suspect we'll have conversations about that, but we don't have any legislation planned at the moment that I know of, but it's going to have to be part of the dialogue going forward, because as that trend continues, I think we need to stand out for the respect for life. And that's an important thing to me and I think a lot of my colleagues will see what happens. Thank you all so much for being here, and wish you a blessed holiday season. We'll talk again before we leave. Thank you.