Leader Scalise speaks at a House Republican Leadership Press Conference. 9/1/2026

Good to see all of you. Good to be back, and we have a lot of work to do. If you look at the votes today, we're going to start off by bringing the bill to properly fund government through December 10th. Something really important to continue to give certainty while the Senate processes the appropriations bills we've sent them. We want to get a longer term deal, but at a minimum, let's ensure that we can continue to see government properly funded and functioning so we don't have the chaos that Democrats gave us last year with lines at every single airport, with shutdowns where our troops' pay was in question, where you had so much uncertainty that we don't need. So we're bringing that bill today to get that taken care of and sent to President Trump's desk. We're also bringing another bill to address this contrast, and look, I know the speaker's going to talk about it. The whip just talked about it, and so did our conference chair. This November, the American people are facing the clearest contrast they've ever had, a contrast between common-sense conservatives and crazy communists. It's on the ballot. You're seeing these candidates left and right, whether they're DSA, whatever they want to call themselves. It's their platform that we have real concerns about, and frankly, it's their platform, what they stand for, what they would do if they got power that the American people are growingly concerned and alarmed about, and they should be. During this break, I went through a lot of different districts from the West Coast to the East Coast and Middle America, and everywhere you went, people understand this contrast more and more. It's becoming crystallized. I'm sure you're going to hear about it more at the convention next week, a mid-term convention that never happened before. President Trump decided we're going to do something different because President Trump has been shaking up Washington and doing things differently, and one of those differences is we're going to go before the American people next week and start talking about those contrasts, what we've done to make life more affordable for working families. If you look at the things that this Republican majority's done with President Trump, inflation is down from where it was two years ago. Gas prices are down from where they were two years ago, not where we want them to be, but lower than where they were. Interest rates are lower than where they were. You know what's up right now? Wages are actually higher than where they were two years ago. The deficit is down because we cut $1.6 trillion in wasteful spending. Every Democrat opposed that, by the way, because Democrats wanted to see a tax increase on every single working family in America. We stopped that from happening, but if Democrats get back power, that's what will happen, and they've said it. They've said a whole lot of other crazy things, too. They surely want open borders. They want to defund prisons. I don't even know how you could say something as crazy as that. Do they want those prisoners to leave the prison and go into their neighborhoods? No American I've found anywhere I went wants that to come to their neighborhood, but that's what these candidates want on the Democrat side. This is not your father's Democratic party, and so we're going to draw another contrast this week with a vote on the House floor to say not only do we denounce socialism, but also the idea of people that aren't American citizens voting in our elections because that's part of their platform. The DSA platform says they want people that are not Americans to vote in American elections. Again, I've found very few Americans that want that, that don't identify as socialists or communists, and so all of that is on the ballot this November, and by the way, there's a cost to all of this madness that the left of the Democrat party now has embraced because it's been taken over. I call it the Bolshevik Revolution. It's real, but there's a cost. There's been estimates that the cost of all this free stuff will be over 200 trillion dollars, a trillion with a T, and everybody knows that. You go look at any socialist country, you know, Margaret Thatcher said it best. Problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money, and the states where they're trying to do this are running out of other people's money because those people that they're targeting over and over again to pay for all the free stuff are just they're leaving those blue states and going to red states. If they were in America, there's nowhere else to flee, and that's why we're going to stop them from taking over this great country. That's why we're going to hold this majority and keep this great speaker, Mike Johnson, in office.