Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is doing a victory lap after the GOP-led House narrowly passed a stopgap bill to prevent a partial government ...
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is doing a victory lap after the GOP-led House narrowly passed a stopgap bill to prevent a partial government shutdown at the end of this week.
Joining the “The Ben Shapiro Show,” Johnson’s talk of a largely unified GOP offered a stark contrast to how the Democrats are turning on each other after Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) announced that he would not vote to block the counting resolution (CR) ahead of a midnight deadline at the end of Friday.
“It’s a team effort. It really is. We do a lot of work to keep everybody on the same page and it pays off when we do that. This is another example of that — when the Republican Party sticks together, we can get big things done, and this is a big thing,” Johnson told Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro.
“It’s a relatively clean CR except that it has a couple of innovations,” the speaker said. “We plussed up defense spending and we reduced non-defense spending in small amounts, but it was important. That’s exactly what the Trump administration needed to give them flexibility to do what they need to do. We are freezing funding — this is a year-over-year decrease in funding, Ben, and that’s the first time anybody can remember that that’s happened.”
The GOP-led House passed the 99-page continuing resolution, which provides funds to various federal agencies and programs through September 30, via a 217-213 vote on Tuesday. It was only months ago, in December, that lawmakers resorted to the last continuing resolution that extended funding through mid-March.
All but one Republican and a single Democrat — Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME) — supported the latest measure. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), who suggested the bill extended the “fraud and abuse” found by the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) overseen by Elon Musk, joined the rest of the Democrats in opposing the funding patch.
Johnson said that he keeps making the same analogy when explaining why the continuing resolution is critical for the GOP’s overall strategy to rein in government spending and get back to passing individual appropriations bills in the next fiscal year (FY).
“We have an aircraft carrier — that’s what the federal budget is, right? — and it’s taken decades to get into the situation we’re in. We’re going to turn it but you don’t turn an aircraft carrier on a dime. It takes miles of open ocean, so this is an important turn and then when we get to the next FY 26, the next fiscal year budget, which we’re about to immediately after FY 25 is done, then it gets real because then the DOGE cuts are included, the new revenue streams that the president and the administration are bringing about become a part of that, and we’re going to be in a totally different situation,” Johnson said.
“So we’re excited,” he added. “It’s a good day for America and I certainly hope the Senate does the right thing here.”