Tag Archives: Speaker of the House Mike Johnson

What Happens Next

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The Senate has voted to end the government shutdown. CNBC posted an article on Monday (updated Tuesday) explaining what happens next.

The article reports:

  • The Senate passed a bill to end the U.S. government shutdown.
  • House Speaker Mike Johnson called for House members to travel to Washington, D.C., so that they can vote as soon as possible on the deal.
  • To end the shutdown, the House needs to pass the Senate bill, and then President Donald Trump must sign it into law.

There are some grumblings among more liberal Democrats that they will try to stop the bill in the House, but I don’t think they will succeed.

The article notes:

House members were told that votes on the deal could begin by 4 p.m. ET on Wednesday.

Before the Senate vote, Johnson refused to commit to the deal’s key guarantee to Democrats: that Congress will hold a separate vote in December on potentially extending enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies. That vote would be on a bill of the Democrats’ choosing, according to the Senate agreement.

“I’m not committing to it or not committing to it,” Johnson, R-La., said Monday on CNN.

Those subsidies, which are due to expire at the end of December, help reduce the cost of individual health insurance plans for more than 20 million Americans.

What the article fails to mention is that the subsidies go to the insurance companies rather than to the people buying the insurance. The insurance companies have no incentive to lower premiums or cut costs. The impact of the subsidies going to the insurance companies on the price of insurance is similar to what happened to college tuition when the government got involved in the student loan program. When you take away incentive to lower prices, prices do not get lowered.

The article concludes:

The Senate deal would fund the government through the end of January; reverse all shutdown-related layoffs of federal employees; and guarantee that all federal workers will be paid their normal salaries during the shutdown.

The deal also includes provisions for a bipartisan budget process and prevents the White House from using continuing resolutions to fund the government.

CRs have been repeatedly used to avoid government shutdowns, but are controversial because they frequently avoid lawmakers having to make decisions about long-term funding of the government that a normal budget would resolve.

The deal would also fund, through September, the SNAP program, which helps feed 42 million Americans through food stamps.

Under a federal law passed in 2019, government employees who are furloughed during a shutdown must be paid for the time they were out of work at their standard rate of pay “at the earliest date possible, regardless of scheduled pay dates.”

Extortion Or Negotiation?

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On Friday, The Daily Caller posted an article about the ongoing budget negotiations in Congress. The House of Representatives has passed a Continuing Resolution (CR) which represents a ‘clean bill’ which generally continues things as they are rather than adding additional items. Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer of New York is demanding some major Democrat additions to the CR that represent Democrat priorities in order to pass the CR (which needs 60 votes in the Senate). If the CR does not pass, the government shuts down.

The Daily Caller reports:

House Speaker Mike Johnson rejected Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York’s demand that Congress allocate $500 million for certain media outlets Friday, saying, “We’re not doing that.”

The House of Representatives passed both a short-term funding measure and a resolution honoring assassinated Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk on Friday. Democrats have demanded that the stopgap funding measure add over $1 trillion in funding for various priorities, including reversing the rescission of funds for public broadcasting.

…“He (Senator Schumer) also wants to make sure, he wants to reinstate health care to be provided free by American taxpayers for illegal aliens. We’re not going to do that either,” Johnson continued. “He also wants to add $500 million to prop up left-leaning media organizations. We’re not doing that either.”

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has identified $206 billion in savings since President Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20, despite drawing fire from Democrats over various cuts it identified, including the closure of the United States Agency for International Development.

A CR is not really the answer to America’s financial problem. We need to get back to the legal budget process. The Congressional Budget Process is supposed to involve individual budget requests for each area of the government. Those requests are to be passed individually. We have not correctly followed that procedure since 2008. It is time to get back to the way the law is written.

It’s Time To Make The Cuts

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The amount of fraud and waste discovered by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is amazing. It’s time to see the waste they discovered removed. If you found termites in your basement, you would call an exterminator. Somehow not all of Congress wants to deal with the termites!

On Monday, The Daily Caller reported:

Speaker Mike Johnson is putting pressure on Senate Republicans to pass President Donald Trump’s rescissions package.

Johnson told reporters Monday that clawing back just $9 billion in funding for public broadcasting and foreign aid should be an easy vote for Republican senators. The speaker’s remarks come as several GOP senators have said they oppose some of the proposed cuts and signaled they will vote against the rescissions request if the package is not amended.

If the Congress wants to remain in Republican hands, they need to respect the wishes of the voters and cut!

The article concludes:

Collins and other GOP senators, including Lisa Murkowski of Alsaka and Mike Rounds of South Dakota, have expressed concerns about the potential impact of cuts to public broadcasting programs for rural areas in the respective states.

“I hope you feel the urgency that I’m trying to express on behalf of the people in rural Alaska and I think in many parts of rural America where this is their lifeline,” Murkowski told White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russ Vought during an appropriations hearing in June.

The White House and congressional leadership have countered that the proposed cuts are necessary to begin making headway on the country’s $37 trillion national debt.

“This is supposed to be the lower hanging fruit,” Johnson continued. “As usual, I asked them [the Senate] not to modify our work.”

Trump has said that he will not take kindly to the Senate weakening cuts to public broadcasting within the rescissions package.

“It is very important that all Republicans adhere to my Rescissions Bill,” Trump wrote Thursday on the social media platform Truth Social. “Any Republican that votes to allow this monstrosity to continue broadcasting will not have my support or Endorsement.”

If Public Broadcasting were an unbiased network supplying unbiased news and programming to Americans, it might be worth funding. But that is not what it is. Also, it is time we got back to funding the things that the Constitution tells the federal government to fund and defunding everything else. That would surely balance the federal budget quickly!

The Big Beautiful Bill Advances Slowly

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On May 19th, NewsMax posted an article about the passage through the House Budget Committee last night on its way to the House Rules Committee. All of the members of Congress need to remember that if this bill is not passed, almost all Americans will see a major income tax increase next year.

The article reports:

House Speaker Mike Johnson took a “historical” active role in seeing that legislation passed the chamber’s Budget Committee, Rep. Jack Bergman, R-Mich., told Newsmax on Monday.

Johnson, Bergman, and other members of the committee worked late Sunday night to advance the chamber’s massive tax cut and border security package.

“I think as a as a historical note, I believe that the attendance of the speaker of the House at pre-meeting, last-minute, backroom negotiations was a first for a current speaker of the House to be attending a budget committee markup,” Bergman said on “Wake Up America.” “So that’s one historical data point.”

Bergman credited Johnson and committee Chair Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, with agreeing to “some compromises.”

“This is all about moving a logical, if not perfect … remember, we’re trying to create a more perfect union here, not a perfect union with our with our form of government … but to move that big bill forward, to get it into rules, make the necessary changes and … to get it voted on the House floor sooner rather than later to meet those timelines that we’ve agreed to get President [Donald] Trump’s agenda, especially one of the first fiscal base parts of that agenda in play here by around the 4th of July,” Bergman said.

The article concludes:

Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) said he voted “present” for the bill to advance “out of respect for the Republican Conference and the President,” conceding that it needs improvements. In a statement on X, he also objected to the bill’s provisions around green energy tax credits and Medicaid.

“Tonight, after a great deal of work and engagement over the weekend, the Budget Committee advanced a reconciliation bill that lays the foundation for much needed tax relief, border security, and important spending reductions and reforms,” he wrote. “Importantly the bill now will move Medicaid work requirements forward and reduces the availability of future subsidies under the green new scam.”

“But, the bill does not yet meet the moment – leaving almost half of the green new scam subsidies continuing. More, it fails to end the Medicaid money laundering scam and perverse funding structure that provides seven times more federal dollars for each dollar of state spending for the able-bodied relative to the vulnerable,” he added. “This all ultimately increases the likelihood of continuing deficits and non-Obamacare-expansion states like Texas expanding in the future. We can and must do better before we pass the final product.”

I met Representative Bergman when he was a Marine Corps General stationed in New Orleans. I am thrilled that he is a Congressman. He represents the integrity, ability, and intelligence that our Founding Fathers hoped would be found in our elected officials.

The Lies Told In The Quest For Clean Energy

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On Tuesday, The Daily Caller posted an article about a study of the carbon footprint of liquefied natural gas (LNG).

The article reports:

The Biden administration deliberately buried a final draft version of a study that would have undermined its January 2024 decision to pause approvals for liquefied natural gas (LNG) export projects, according to four Department of Energy (DOE) sources.

Former Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and former President Joe Biden announced the LNG freeze in January 2024, stating that it would remain in place until the DOE could conduct a fresh study of the climate and economic impacts of LNG export growth. The Biden DOE finalized a draft of the study in 2023 and subsequently buried it because the initial version’s findings would have contradicted the administration’s rationale for the LNG freeze, according to four sources inside the Trump DOE granted anonymity by the Daily Caller News Foundation to freely discuss a sensitive matter.

“The Energy Department has learned that former Secretary Granholm and the Biden White House intentionally buried a lot of data and released a skewed study to discredit the benefits of American LNG,” one DOE source told the DCNF. “They were prioritizing their own political ambitions over the interests of the American people, and the administration intentionally deceived the American public to advance an agenda that harmed American energy security, the environment and American lives.”

The article notes:

While the September 2023 and December 2024 versions of the paper bear the same name, the final version released to the public did not include a specific type of analysis of LNG exports known as the consideration of market effects, Trump DOE sources told the DCNF. That particular analysis — included in the buried September 2023 version of the study, but not the final product — found that U.S. LNG exports would bring down global emissions by displacing more polluting sources of energy abroad, and its absence from the December 2024 version allowed the Biden DOE to skew the final report’s findings against increasing LNG exports.

This report is interesting considering the fact that according to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, President Biden was unaware that he had shut down LNG exports (article here). According to Speaker Johnson, the President was only aware that he had ordered a study. It is becoming obvious that in recent years, our government has lied to us about a number of things.

A Disturbing, But Not Surprising, Story

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On Saturday, Red State posted an article about the workings of the Biden administration, including some comments by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.

The article includes the following story:

JOHNSON: They wouldn’t let me meet with him, and his staff kept giving me excuses. This went on for like eight or nine weeks, “I’m sorry Mr. Speaker, he doesn’t have time.” What are you talking about? I’m second in line to the presidency, he has time. I need to talk to him. We had, I can’t say the classified parts, but we had some big national concerns at the time that I was losing sleep over. Finally, I just went to the whole press corps and said the president is not being allowed to meet with the speaker so they start putting pressure on him. 

Long story short, they finally relented, they invited me to the White House, I show up and I realize it’s actually an ambush because it’s not just me and the president. It’s actually Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem, the CIA Director, and everybody, and then so I walk into the Oval, and I say, “Ah, I know what this is. They’re going to hotbox the Speaker on Ukraine funding.” That’s what it was. 

This is probably the third week of January. We sit down, we’re in the midst of it and I’m saying, “We don’t need to have this conversation.” The president reaches over, just like this, we were sitting right next to the fireplace in the Oval, and he says, “The Speaker and I just need a couple minutes together. We y’all just leave us alone?” And I looked up on the faces of some of staff standing around the wall, and they were like, “No, he did it.” 

He called it, he’s the commander in chief, so everybody leaves, and he and I are standing awkwardly in the middle of the Oval Office right over the rug by that coffee table, and I said, “Mr. President, thanks for the moments, you know, this is very important, I’ve got some big national security things I need to talk to you about that I’ve heard, and I think you know, but first, real quickly, Mr. President, can I ask you a question?”

“I can’t answer this for my constituents in Louisiana. Sir, why did you pause LNG exports? Liquified natural gas is in great demand by our allies, why would you do that? Cause you understand, we just talked about Ukraine, you understand you’re fueling Putin’s war machine?”  And he looked at me, stunned, and he said, “I didn’t do that.” And I said, “Mr. President, yes you did, it was an executive order like three weeks ago.” He said, “No, I didn’t do that,” he was arguing with me. 

The story continues:

That’s where things get even crazier. Biden went on to admit he signed an executive order, but he told Johnson that believed he had only authorized a study on the effects of LNG. 

JOHNSON: I said, “No you’re not sir, you paused it, I have the terminal, the export terminal in our state, I talked to those people this morning. This is doing massive damage to our economy, to our national security.”

I thought, “We are in serious trouble.” Who’s running the country?” I don’t know who put the paper in front of him, but he didn’t know.

In other words, someone had used subterfuge to get the President of the United States to sign an executive order he didn’t even know he was signing. Those around him were weaponizing his senility to push through their far-left agenda, and Biden wasn’t even sentient enough to notice. That is the very definition of shocking. 

There are four major points to note in this story:

1. President Biden’s staff was reluctant to have him meet with Speaker Johnson.

2. President Biden’s staff did not want him to meet with Speaker Johnson alone.

3. What President Biden signed was not what he was told he was signing.

4. Why did Speaker Johnson wait until now to tell this story?

When Being Interviewed, Always Make Your Own Copy Of The Interview

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On Tuesday, The Conservative Treehouse posted an article about a recent CBS interview with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. Thankfully, Speaker Johnson (unbeknownst to CBS) had his staff also recording the interview while it was taking place.

The article reports:

One of the most blatant examples of media manipulation was recently discovered when CBS 60-Minutes deceptively edited a response from Kamala Harris, replacing her ‘word salad’ answer with a completely different answer to an entirely different question. [SEE HERE]

This past Sunday, House Speaker Mike Johnson appeared on CBS Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan and the editing and manufacturing was done again before broadcast.  Unbeknownst to CBS, Speaker Johnson’s staff were recording the interview from his side of the camera.  Johnson released a series of video segments today (via Twitter) showing how CBS intentionally took out the important elements of his responses.

Please follow the link to The Conservative Treehouse to watch the videos of what was actually said and what was shown to the viewers. If you are still relying on the mainstream media for your news, you are not only misinformed, you are also uninformed.