House Speaker Mike Johnson on ouster vote: We can't afford to play petty politics here

In a 359 to 43 vote the House shot down efforts by Representative Marjorie Taylor Green to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson. And Speaker Johnson joins us now. We are I don’t know why we we just we’re thrilled to have you all whenever you come on we’re I guess we’re we get intoxicated by power. Speaker Johnson that that might be it. If we can’t have the president or the vice president then we you know Majority Leader or speaker it’s is next in line. Welcome. Thank you. It’s good to have you on. Oh it’s great to be with you as always. Power is so fleeting though isn’t it You’re you’re in there again. I don’t know this is what you said. I appreciate the show of confidence from my colleagues to defeat this misguided effort. Hopefully it’s the end of the personality, politics, frivolous character assassination that has defined the 118th Congress. It’s regrettable. It’s not who we are as Americans. We need to get beyond it. It could happen again at the drop of a hat, right? Is, is that still possible that it can, it can happen at any time. Do you think this makes that less likely? Well, I think it. I think it does. It was an an overwhelming vote. And I I think what everyone here, frankly on both sides of the aisle, we’re trying to demonstrate is that we live in very serious times. This is a dangerous time in history, world history, and certainly here on our own shores. And we cannot afford to be playing petty politics here. We, we, this country needs a function in Congress. And if you remove a Speaker of the House, the House closes down. I mean, it’s a constitutional office. And so you cannot, you cannot open the doors of the House. I mean, it literally is not operable and we cannot afford to do that right now. We have hot wars around the globe. We’ve got massive challenges on our hands. And so everyone here I think on both sides of the aisles recognizes that we’ve just got to move forward and do our job and that’s what I do every day. I’m doing my job. I do what I know to be the right thing. And what I’m trying to do particularly is advance our conservative policies and principles which I believe to be right for the country as far as I can every day up the field in spite of the fact that everyone knows we have the smallest majority in U.S. history. I’m at the one vote margin right now. So not not a lot of room for error but we’ll keep moving ahead and I I guess it only took it wouldn’t have taken. I mean you got you had 10 if I mean that was worse than Speaker McCarthy. I mean he could only lose a couple of that the crazy 8 is is what was there. So there were actually more maybe that that were ready to to throw you under the bus, but the Democrats in this case were decided that it’s better to have you there than to go back into what we would be facing if that happened. But it does, it doesn’t seem like for you to prevent it from happening, you need to play ball with them. And I think that’s what some conservatives would say, that you’re not in a position to buck what the Democrats want. Well let me say this. The the the the handful of people the the 10 people, the Republicans that joined Marjorie Taylor Green in voting against the motion to table I don’t think would have gone the next step and voted to vacate the chair. Several of them told me that. So it was sort of a symbol symbolic sort of show there. But look, we we move forward. I have to lead it it. Newt Gingrich posted an op-ed last week and said Johnson has the most challenging speakership since the civil War over 150 years ago. Maybe it’s true because there’s a lot of interesting factors going on here. But it we are undeterred in our challenge. What we have to do is fight for the the things that we know to be right to fix the country. We have the greatest collection of challenges right now, arguably, and we’ve had collectively maybe since World War 2, maybe the Civil War, and but we’ve got to get through this. And so this is the modern Congress. This is the day of age of social media. Everybody has their own media platform. They can go online every two minutes and say what they’re disgruntled about, but we have to manage that and go forward. And that’s what I do here every day. I think Speaker McCarthy was doing what he thought was right too, and we saw what happened there. You on the other hand were doing what you thought was right and that’s what you always got to do and it worked out for you. Do you see any irony that that what you did for Israel and and and maybe bringing on the wrath of some of your colleagues after going through all that and now President Biden to win Michigan is not sending the the weapons that country needs to do what it needs to do. Is it you see any irony in that? I do see irony ended and and but greater than that I see great danger. I mean what what the president is doing here is not only defying the will of Congress to your point we just voted on this several days ago but but he’s also trying to dictate I guess in micromanage the the the war the defense effort in Israel as a condition of supplying the weapons that we all know that they desperately need. I spoke with Prime Minister Netanyahu myself less than 48 hours ago about this situation because I wanted to hear it directly from him. And what what they’re withholding is precision weapons that are desperately needed. Here’s another irony. The precision weapons are needed to try to protect civilian lives in Rafa. This is these are the things that they need to do the job that must be done to eradicate the threat of Hamas who is still lurking there. And and so for for them to for for Joe Biden to do this, he is he is going against what he told Congress, what his top officials in the White House specifically told me that they would do. And and it’s just catastrophic policy, Speaker, do you think that President Biden’s position is a moral 1, meaning that he doesn’t want to provide these munitions because he’s worried about civilian casualties and believes morally that he doesn’t want that to happen and thinks that he can somehow prevent it? Or do you think fundamentally it’s a political calculus? Joe mentioned Michigan, I believe it’s 100% of political calculation. I I I think we can all see that it’s the same reason that he’s making the political calculation not to call out anti-Semitism on the campuses, not to call out and beat Bespeak without equivocation about the good versus evil here, the right versus the wrong. I mean he has the largest bully pulpit in America. He’s the commander in chief. He’s the top elected official in our country. We desperately need him to look right into the camera and say to to speak with moral clarity, to say what is right and what is wrong. And he is unable and unwilling to do that because he doesn’t want to offend the big segment of his base. Now his party, there’s a, there’s a an actual pro Hamas pro Palestinian wing in the Democratic Party. He’s finally, I was going to say he was I was going to say he’s right. But speaker he did he did condemn anti-Semitism very recently in that Holocaust remembrance speech. Yeah. And it was a little it was too little too late. I was sitting right, you know, 10 feet away from him at that at the Holocaust Memorial and and someone wrote that for him and I’m glad he delivered it as he did. The speech that I gave a few minutes before before he arrived actually at the event was much more clear and much more direct and and look he needs to do that consistently. He needs to do it every day. This, this is a a problem that is growing across the country. It’s not being diminished. And and we’re looking for moral leadership. The country needs moral leadership from both parties and from the top leaders. And he is the top leader in the country. I think he needs to act like it. Mr. Speaker could it could could a bill pass to defund some some of these colleges. I I don’t think that could pass given given well support that the protesters have in certain parts of of Congress. Well, we’re we’re going to find that out because as you know last week, a week and a half ago we we launched a whole of of the House effort, whole of Congress effort. We have 6 committees of jurisdiction everything from the Ways and Means to the Science Space and technology committee that are looking at every angle of that. We are deeply concerned about this idea that the Ivy Leagues and these other universities receive billions of dollars of taxpayer funds every year. This is the the time, the the, the precious treasure of American taxpayers. They don’t deserve it if they can’t uphold the basic constitutional rights and the security and safety of their of their students. And some of them were unwilling to do that. They they have. They have demonstrated that they’re kowtowing to the violent protest and they are ignoring the the rights and the civil rights of of their students who pay tuition and and deserve and have the freedom and the right to go to class unimpeded and unafraid and and so that’s the problem. So Congress is looking at that. We’re looking at the funding streams. We’re looking at the generous tax benefits that their endowments enjoy, these big universities and and also these foreign student visas. If you come over here and you’re an aspiring terrorist, you don’t deserve to be on an American campus. You don’t deserve to be there threatening your Jewish classmates and peers just because of who they are. And and we’ve got to get down to the bottom of that. I think there’s a big appetite on both sides of the aisle here to address that and and I think that’s something the American people will stand in applaud.