Good evening, and thank you for joining us. I'm Trey Gowdy, and it's Sunday Night in America. How would you like a job where you shoulder the responsibility but have little control, where you're expected to swallow the blame but share the success, where you don't hire your coworkers and have little means to reward or punish or discipline, a job where you spend most of your spare time raising money for colleagues, some of whom have short memories. The speaker of the House is third in line for the President's easy, but first in line for the blame. Even in divided government, when you only have one-half of one-third of the control, congressman Mike Johnson was content working on the issues that mattered most to him and the people of Louisiana. But when Kevin McCarthy was ousted by eight Republicans, congressman Mike Johnson became speaker Mike Johnson. You will not find a colleague with a negative word to say about him personally. But he presides over a razor-thin majority, getting smaller by the day in a political environment that rewards Fame over work and volume over depth. Already, he's faced colleagues who voted to keep Republican bills off the floor, and now one colleague filed a motion to vacate the chair yet again.

So what are realistic expectations for a speaker with a bare majority and divided government immersed in a political world that craves drama over incremental progress? Let's find out. The speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, the great state of Louisiana, joins us now. Happy Easter. Welcome to you, Mr. Speaker. It's great to see you again. Realistic expectations. What are realistic expectations when you only have one-half of one-third of government, and that includes GOP members from districts where Joe Biden actually won?

Yeah, you defined it pretty well. You just described the modern Congress, and that's the environment in which we have to perform. Happy Easter, Trey. Thanks for having me on. There are a lot of things that we really wish more of the American people understood. This is not an easy job right now, as you noted, but we will get it done. Look, we have the smallest majority, literally right now in US history. We have a one vote margin. You saw the numbers there that are divided. But when you do the math to get a majority vote, I can only lose one. So we're not going to get the legislation that we all desire and prefer. If we had the Senate and we had the White House, if Republicans in charge as we were several years ago. But we wouldn't be doing the things we want to do. But right now, oftentimes, we have to play defense. We got to stop the Biden agenda. And by God's grace, we've been able to do that. I mean, that's what our majority is used for. But there's three things we need to do right now, Trey. And this is...

I'm trying to be an ambassador of hope on Easter Sunday, right? Look, we can do this job and we can grow the majority, and we have to do that to save the Republic. That's clear. In the November elections, we can do it. But what we have to do is three simple things. We have to show the American people what we're for, not just what we're against. We have to be able to stand for those core principles and explain and show the contrast between us and the radical leftists that are destroying every metric of public policy. Number two, we have to unite. We have to stand together because when we do that, especially with a razor-thin majority as we have, we'll have better negotiation in the back room. We'll be able to have greater standing when we argue with the Democrats about it. Third, look, we've got to drive our conservative agenda and get the incremental wins that are still possible right now. We are for securing the border, standing up to China, unleashing American energy, saving American jobs, doing the things that the American people want us to do. But we got to realize I can't throw a Hall Mary pounce on every single play.

It's three yards in a cloud of dust. We got to get the next first down, keep moving, and we'll do that, and we can show the American people what we're for.

You've always been a person of hope and faith, which is why I enjoy talking to you while we were colleagues, because I'm a hopeless cynic, and you actually are hopeful. Let's go to one issue. There are members who want to provide aid or loan to Ukraine and others who do not. So as the speaker of the House, how do you decide what to put on the floor, how much of the majority is enough, and when to put it on the floor?

Yeah, great question. Look, what we have to do in an era of divided government, historically as we are, is you got to build consensus. If we want to move a partisan measure, I got to have every single member, literally. And some things need to be bipartisan. Now, we're talking about the supplemental everybody's heard so much about, which is the thing that the President presented several months ago. He called it the National Security Supplemental, and he included Ukraine, Israel, the Taiwan, and the Pacific region, and also the border. And we said, Thank you, Mr. President, because we've all said, if we're going to talk about national security, it begins at our own border. And so we've been trying to use that as the only leverage we have to force change on the border. We're still trying to force the President to use his executive authority, and most the American people know that he has that authority, but he's not using it because they open the border intentionally. But when it comes to this supplemental, we've been working to build that consensus. We've been talking to all the members, especially now over the district work period. When we return after this work period, we'll be moving a product.

But it's going to, I think, have some important innovations. The Repo Act. If we could use the seized assets of Russian oligarchs to allow the Ukrainians to fight them, that's just pure poetry. Even President Trump has talked about the loan concept where we set up, we're not just giving foreign aid, we're We're setting it up in a relationship where they can provide it back to us when the time is right. Then we want to unleash American energy. We want to have natural gas exports that will help unfund Vladimir Putin's war effort there. There's a lot of things that we should do that make more sense and that I think we'll have consensus around. We're putting that product together and we'll be moving it right after the district work period.

Speaker, there is a pending motion to vacate from a member from Georgia, which illustrates where we are politically. We lost two Senate seats in Georgia. Republicans did. Two eminently winnable Senate seats. I would think members' time would be better spent looking to reclaim those two GOP those two Senate seats in Georgia, as opposed to hanging the Damocles over your head. But you're on Easter recess right now. How does it help the GOP grow the majority to be talking about a motion to vacate instead of talking about the border or inflation or other issues that are better for the GOP. How does this motion to vacate help win back the majority or win a bigger majority?

I don't think it does. I think all of my other Republican colleagues recognize this as a distraction from our mission. Again, the mission is to save the Republic. And the only way we can do that is if we grow the House majority, win the Senate and win the White House. So we don't need any dissension right now. Look, Marjorie Taylor-Green filed the motion. It's not a privileged motion, so it doesn't move automatically. It's just hanging there. And she's frustrated. She and I exchange text messages even today. We're going to talk early next week. Marjorie is a friend. She's very frustrated about, for example, the last appropriations bills. Guess what? So am I. As we discussed, Trey, these are not the perfect pieces of legislation that you and I and Marjorie would draft if we had the ability to do it differently. But with the smallest margin in US history, we're sometimes going to get legislation that we don't like. The Democrats know that when we don't all stand together, with our razor-thin majority, then they have a better negotiation position. And that's why we got some of the things we didn't like. Now, we fought like warrior poets to keep some of those Senate appropriations or some of those Senate earmarks out of the bill.

And we were successful in getting a lot of the terrible stuff out. But a few of them made it through, and that's what Marge is upset about, and I am, too. But I want to talk with her about reforming the budgeting and spending process going forward. That's what Republicans are for. That's the transformational changes that we can forge if we all stand together.

I would just remind people that congressman Mike Johnson did not run for speaker the first time, the second time, the third time. I mean, he was drafted. So he was truly a reluctant leader. If there is such a thing left anymore, that's what you are. You have an impossibly difficult job. Happy Easter to you and your family. Thank you for joining us on Easter Sunday.

Thanks, brother. Be blessed.

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