Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) spoke to reporters on Wednesday after House Republicans voted for him to be the next speaker. He thanked his Republican colleagues for the designation and said, “We still have work to do, we are going to have to go upstairs on the House floor.” Mr. Scalise defeated the other candidate—House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio)—113–98, but he needs to win 217 votes on the House floor to ultimately become speaker of the House.
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First, I want to thank my House Republican colleagues
for just designating me as the Speaker.
Obviously, we still have work to do.
We're going to have to go upstairs on the House floor
and resolve this and then get the House opened again.
We have a lot of work to do, not just in the House
for the people of this country, but we see how
dangerous of a world it is and how things can change
so quickly.
We need to make sure we're sending a message to
people all throughout the world that the House is
open and doing the people's business, making sure
that we're unequivocally standing in our first
resolution that we pass under Speaker Steve
Scalise.
We'll be to make it clear that we stand with Israel.
The McCaul-Meeks resolution will be our
first order of business.
But obviously, there's a lot more work to do.
The conversations we've been having with my
colleagues over the last few days leading up to
this show that there's a resolve that we need to
get back to work.
There's a lot of business to take care of.
Families are struggling across this country.
You know, we passed a lot of legislation to help
families get back on track, to address our
border crisis, to get our economy moving again, to
address the spending in Washington that's driving
inflation, high energy costs.
All of those bills that we've passed and that
we're going to continue to pass that are sitting
over in the Senate need to be taken up.
We've passed over 70 percent of the bills to
fund the government, dealing with
appropriations and setting the priorities of this
nation's spending, and the Senate has taken up zero.
The Senate has to start doing their work.
And by the way, in that legislation, including the
State and Foreign Ops Bill, the Defense
Appropriations Bill, includes funding for
Israel, things like Iron Dome, precision-guided
missiles, things that could be used today to
help them in this war.
So there is a lot to do.
I'm also going to be calling on President
Biden to sit down and talk about the crisis at the
border.
As we have an open southern border, and we've
seen millions come in in the last few years,
including people on the terrorist watch list from
all over the world.
If he doesn't know now after what happened, we
cannot have an unsecure border.
We've got to secure America's border.
We've passed legislation to do that.
It's time we sit down and have a conversation about
how to secure America's border.
And it's not a Republican or a Democrat issue.
There are Democrat mayors all over the country who
have been calling on the President to do this, too.
That's a conversation we need to have today.
There is a lot of busy work to do, a lot of
important work to do on behalf of people who are
struggling not only here in America, but who are
concerned all around the world.
And we're going to provide that vision.
We have a lot of work to do.
Obviously, we've got some more conversations to do.
