Speaker Johnson Delivers Remarks After Vote to Open Government

We stood together to get the job done. Absolutely no question in anybody's mind now that the Democrats were responsible for this. What happened? Millions of American families went without food on their table. You had millions of Americans stranded in airports with their flights canceled and delayed. You had troops and federal employees wondering where their next paycheck would come from. The Democrats openly admitted, they openly admitted, many of them said it in their own words that they use the American people They knew that it would cause that pain to the people and they did it anyway. They did it for their own selfish purposes, their political purposes, and it was a game they played with real people's lives. It's something that is very difficult to forgive. I wanna say that all this was utterly pointless and foolish. This outcome was totally foreseeable. I said that this would be the outcome when all this began back in mid-September. They did it anyway. Democrats admitted that they use the people as leverage and they got nothing for their selfish political stunt here. They didn't achieve anything with this at all. And anyone who studied history would know that shutdowns never yield any positive result. It just hurts people. I said on the House floor a little while ago that we did all this in good faith. From the very beginning, I was insistent about this. Our leadership team was. The Republicans did the right thing. We had a nonpartisan continuing resolution. We didn't have any Republican priorities on it at all. We just said, in good faith, let's keep the lights on. Let's keep this going for another seven weeks so that the Congress can do its work so they can get back to the regular appropriations process the way that it is supposed to be done for the people so that we're good stewards with their money. That hasn't been done here in a long time. And we said, we wanna get back to that. Now, I'm pleased that tonight on the CR, we had three appropriations bills that we've now, we'll send over to the President's desk in just a short amount of time tonight to get signed into law. That's an innovation, too. As you all know, it's been years since Congress actually did separate appropriations bills. I'm proud of that achievement, but I'm really sad that it took us so long to get here. It was so much pain that had to be endured to get to this point. Voters are gonna remember which political party played games with their lives. They're gonna remember that they did this for their own selfish purposes so that they could look tough to the radical elements of their base, and real people suffered because of that game. So now that we've got the lights back on, we've got the government reopened, the President will sign that triumphantly tonight, and Republicans will get right back to the work that we promised the American people that we will do. We're gonna deliver for the American people, as we have been doing. I'll leave you with this thought. There's a split screen in America right now. There's a split screen. On one side of the screen, you have President Trump and the Republican majorities in the Congress and the Senate and the House doing the work for the American people. Look what we've achieved in the first 10 months of this year. You can make an argument that it's the most productive season for a new Congress and a new presidency, a new administration, at least in the modern era, maybe of all time. Just in this short amount of months, we got the border secured. We fulfilled that promise. We are working on the crime crisis around the country. We have new trade agreements. We have a return to American energy dominance. We have cut taxes, the largest tax cut in US history in a literal sense. We're cutting regulations. We're ending fraud, waste, and abuse out of government. We're shoring up the safety net programs like Medicaid so that it's there for the people that desperately need it, and it is not being abused by illegal aliens and by young, able-bodied men who are not eligible to receive that. We are doing all this good work. The president, meanwhile, is using his authority to change the world, literally. He has ended eight wars around the globe. All of this is happening on the Republican side and so much more. That's on one side of the screen, and on the other is the Democrat Party. And what have they done? What do they have to show for the last 10 months of government here? They shut the government down. They voted 15 times to close the government and exact that pain on everyone. We can never forget that. They haven't achieved anything beyond that except pushing ICE officers around and really spurring on political violence. So I wanna say that there's a reason the Democrats are in disarray right now. There's a reason they don't have an identified leader of their party. There's a reason that their favorability, even amongst those in their own party, is at lowest of all time. They don't have a platform, a principle they can defend. They don't have a leader, except for Mondami, who's the new mayor of New York City and leading the party into Marxism and socialism. I think everybody should consider that split screen. I think you should look at it truthfully and honestly and objectively. And I think you can evaluate for yourself which party's working for the people. We're anxious to get that done, to work on healthcare and affordability and all the issues to continue doing what we've done. And we look forward to rolling that out for you in the next several days. Few questions, yes. You said earlier that you would repeal that FBI provision that's in the bill right now. Do you have assurances from Leader Thune that he will bring it up in the Senate? Well, I did call Leader Thune this morning. I want to say that he's a principled leader. I've enjoyed working with him. We've had a great working relationship and a good friendship. He's a trustworthy, honest broker. And that's why I was so surprised when we found out about that provision. It was put in our clean CR at the last moment. I'll just be honest, I'm very transparent with you all. I was very angry about it, I was. And a lot of my members called me and said, did you know about it? We had no idea. That was dropped in at the last minute. And I did not appreciate that, nor did most of the House members. Many of them are very angry about that. So we will be bringing it up. We'll probably pass it on suspension early next week, and we'll send it over to the Senate. I had a conversation with Leader Thune early this morning about it. I think he regretted the way it was done, and we had an honest conversation about that. I didn't ask him for any commitment at that time because I had a lot on my plate today, and I've been busy ever since that conversation we had early this morning. But I'm going to speak as truthfully to him as I am to all of you and tell you that I think that was way out of line. I don't think that was a smart thing to do. I don't think it was the right thing to do, and the House is going to reverse it. We're going to repeal that, and I'm going to expect our colleagues in the Senate to do the same thing. Mr. Speaker, you say that you're for full transparency. So why not just urge all your Republicans to vote for this nasty CONA bill on the Epstein files next week? Put out all the files. Let the American public judge for themselves what these files are all about. Thank you for asking the question. We have been for maximum transparency of the Epstein files from the very beginning. What I was opposed to is the reckless disregard that was used in drafting the discharge petition. And we've been over this many times, but it was not drafted in such a way that it would adequately protect innocent victims. We have a responsibility to do that. There's as many as 1,000 women, by some estimates, of people who have been victimized because of the sex trafficking in Epstein and all these horrendous, heinous crimes, and we can't have them subjected to any further harm. So we wanted to make sure that they were properly, those names were properly redacted out of the files. But the discharge petition is not only reckless, it is also a totally moot point. The Oversight Committee has been working, as you all know, around the clock, working on this. And you have some of the toughest members of Congress on the Republican and Democrat side who are working in bipartisan fashion to go through and release those files. As we stand here tonight, I think we're up to over 50,000 pages of records that are out in the open. You can go online tonight if you're at home and go through it yourself. And the Epstein estate files thus far has been the biggest tranche of important information. We found that outside of the scope of the discharge petition because it was never even anticipated or included in the discharge. The Oversight Committee, well, let me finish, let me finish. The Oversight Committee has been digging into that, and some of the most valuable information was in the estate files. It includes Jeffrey Epstein's own personal logs, his travel logs, his financial ledgers, his daily calendar, all this is now out in the public and more is to come. Chairman Comer of the Oversight Committee has done an extraordinary job. You have, again, some of the most notable members in Congress working on that around the clock and they will continue to have full disclosure. I wanna say this tonight, and I think this is a shame to a lot of the Hill Press Corps, I'm not gonna name any of you by name, but I haven't seen many stories written yet about the fact that we put the discharge up for unanimous consent on the floor tonight. The Republicans, I, the Speaker, and the Republicans asked for unanimous consent to just go ahead and pass the discharge, because I think it's a moot point. The Democrats objected to the unanimous consent. Nobody's written a story about that. That's stunning to me. How can you miss that? If it was about transparency, if it was about full disclosure, there's two questions you should ask every Democrat in the House and Senate. Why didn't you bring this up during the four years of the Biden administration when the Biden DOJ had all these records the entire time? Nobody ever said a word about it. They didn't care. Now it's the biggest thing in the world. Didn't matter at all when Joe Biden had the files. And secondly, if they're for transparency, and they really want all this to be out, and there's such this urgency, then why did they vote down the unanimous consent to pass the discharge petition tonight? I can't answer that question, but they should, and every one of you should ask them about it. Yes. Thank you. There are several members of your own conference that support at least a one-year extension of AC subsidies. Others have alternative plans. Now that you're beyond this and it's January 30th, deadline looms, are you willing to put any one of those measures potentially on the floor? I've been asked a hundred times whether I'll commit to putting any ACA extension on the floor. What I have said from the very beginning, and we were consistent about this, and you all know from day one, the first order of business was to get the government open and working for the people again. It's the most basic responsibility, and we finally got that done tonight. And I said, as soon as the government was open, we would turn our attention to healthcare and all the other issues that are out there. We are willing to work and have always been willing to work in good faith with anybody in this building who wants to bring down the cost of healthcare. The Unaffordable Care Act, the ACA, did exactly the opposite of what they promised it. When the Democrats passed their healthcare law back in 2010, you all remember, the average American would have their premiums reduced by $2,500. They swore to you, and that was not true. And I think the people that drew it up knew it was not true in the very beginning. It was a lie. The people that were the architects of Obamacare, of the ACA, wanted single payer. They designed a system that they knew they had to know, because they're really intelligent folks, was going to implode on itself. They knew that it was not sustainable. And what has happened since that time, and we're going to be going through this in great detail next week, get ready. We're going to take you through a timeline of who destroyed American healthcare. And I'll give you a hint. It didn't have anything to do with the Republican Party. It was the Democrats. They're the ones that gave you the Unaffordable Care Act. They're the ones that have been trying to subsidize it and prop it up and add to it ever since. We're the ones that have been trying to fix it. The Republican Party has. What has happened since the Democrats wrecked American healthcare, is that your premiums have gone up, by some cases 60%, in some cases more. And it's going to go up further. So their solution is right now, they want to subsidize it further. They want to subsidize insurance companies. They want the COVID era extension that was created by the Democrats themselves. They created the subsidy. They are the ones that put the expiration date of December 31 of 2025 on that. They knew it wasn't going to be permanent because it was a boondoggle. And now they're trying to claim it's Republicans' fault? The Democrats created it. The Democrats broke it. The Democrats are driving your cost up. Who are you going to trust to fix healthcare? It's the Republican Party, because we have volumes of ideas on how to do this, on how to fix it, on how to drive costs down and how to increase access to care and quality of care. And you're going to see all that vigorous debate. So the answer to your question is, am I going to guarantee a vote on ACA, unreformed COVID era subsidies that is just a boondoggle to insurance companies and robs the taxpayer? We got a lot of work to do on that. The Republicans would demand a lot of reforms before anything like that was ever possible. And we have to go through that deliberative process. We have 435, well, currently 433 members of the House of Representatives. There's a lot of opinions in this building and on our side, certainly a lot of opinions on how to fix healthcare and make it more affordable. I have to allow that process to play out. I'll leave you with this. The biggest objection that I had to Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, who were playing political games with people's lives when they shut the government down, was Chuck Schumer came out and said the quiet part out loud. I don't even think he realized, he has no self-awareness, but he came and cried to all of you that I would not agree to go into a back room and make a four corners agreement on these issues. That just he and I and Hakeem Jeffries and Leader Thune would go in a room and make this decision for the entire population of America and block out all of our colleagues as if they had no voice in it. That is why Washington is broken. That's why Congress hasn't worked well for people. That's why they don't have a lot of faith in what goes on here. And I'm committed to trying to restore that faith. And one way we do that is we get back to regular order. We allow all the duly elected members of this body to have their voices heard. I'm not playing games and Chuck Schumer, I'm not going in a back room with you and making a four corners deal on anything. And I hope you understand that. Thank y'all. We got the government open, let's celebrate tonight.