Introducing The Isabel Brown Show： Inside the Shutdown with Speaker Mike Johnson
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Summary
In this episode, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-NJ) talks about the government shutdown, why it happened, who's really responsible, and what comes next. Isabelle Brown, host of the Daily Wire Plus podcast, The Isabelle Brown Show, joins us to talk about it.
Transcript
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As you know, the Daily Wire added an incredible new talent to our lineup.
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The Isabel Brown Show premiered on Daily Wire Plus on September 8th, and she has been killing it.
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Smart, unapologetic coverage of politics, culture, science, faith, and everything in between.
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Every weekday, Isabel takes on the most interesting issues,
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from real discussions about what it'll take to save Western civilization,
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This is your invitation to watch The Isabel Brown Show live every weekday at 12 p.m. Eastern on Daily Wire Plus,
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or find and follow wherever you listen to podcasts.
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But today, all I need you to do is keep listening right here.
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You are about to hear Isabel Brown with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson on the government shutdown.
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What happened? Who's really responsible? And what comes next?
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Speaker Johnson, thank you so much for taking a few minutes out of your very, very busy schedule.
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For young people today, the media is very much twisting the narrative of what a government shutdown even is
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So for our viewers who might be the average 18-year-old that didn't get the world's best civics education,
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I don't blame anybody for not understanding all that.
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There's a federal law that says the way that Congress is supposed to spend taxpayer dollars is very,
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You're supposed to do 12 separate appropriations bills every year.
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Because if you divide all the federal funding into 12 separate categories,
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then you can accurately debate it and have dialogue and have thoughtful conversation.
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We want to spend it efficiently and effectively, right?
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So you divide all the government into 12 different categories and you do that.
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Congress hasn't done that for a long, long time, okay?
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Because Congress has a tendency to not do its duty and responsibility because it's hard work.
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So what they do instead is they kick the can down the road until the end of the year,
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usually right about Christmastime, and there's a giant omnibus spending bill.
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And that's where they just cram everything in all at once.
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No one's read it, understood it, not debated it.
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And it's massive amounts of money, trillions of dollars all at once.
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So I became Speaker almost two years ago in October of 23.
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And I'm a fiscal conservative, and I'm worried about Congress being irresponsible with taxpayer funds.
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And so I made it a commitment after I became Speaker that I would force the muscle memory back to Congress
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and that is 12 separate appropriations bills going through both chambers and working through it.
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But it's taken a long time to do that because it's like pushing a boulder up a hill
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And this year, the House Appropriations Committee, in a bipartisan fashion,
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using our Republican majority, we got 12 separate appropriations bills done through committee.
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The Senate, for the first time in years, passed three separate bills off the floor on their side.
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The problem is those three bills don't match up exactly.
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So what happens in our process is that if there's a difference between the two chambers,
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then you have a subset of members of both chambers who go to what's called a conference committee
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And it's a big thing, a big achievement to get Congress back to it, but we ran out of time
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because the end of the fiscal year is September 30th, not the end of the calendar year.
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So we said, let's do a short-term stopgap funding measure called a CR.
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We call it a continuing resolution to keep the government open for seven more weeks to
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We just want to have a little more time for the appropriators to finish this process
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Get the bills to President Trump's desk and get them done.
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Chuck Schumer and all the Democrats here have given speeches for decades about how you can't
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shut the government down and you've got to keep it open.
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Leader Thune in the Senate is going to continue to put the House's bill, because we passed
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The rest of them voted to shut the government down.
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We sent it to the Senate, and that's where it sits.
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So at midnight on October 1, you know, today, we shut the government down.
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That's a serious problem because there are real Americans affected by this nonsense.
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The guy's been in Washington, like, longer than you and I, almost longer than I've been
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He said it was dangerous, and we'd be derelict in our duty.
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And how could you crush the American people when suddenly he's doing it?
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Chuck Schumer is running scared of the far-left base of his party.
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He's up for re-election in a couple years, and he's afraid that AOC is going to challenge
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him because the Marxists are taking over the party.
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He's not quite liberal enough for all of them, so he's got to show a fight.
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He's got to show that he's fighting Trump, so he's decided to shut the government down.
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I mean, you're talking about the WIC program, right?
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Women, Infants, and Children Nutrition Supplemental Program.
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It's not funded anymore because we don't have the ability to send the money because they
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You've got soldiers, TSA agents, Border Patrol agents who do have to go to work, but they're
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I mean, if somebody's, let's say there's a young soldier who's deployed overseas right now,
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left his young wife and two small children at home, they're not going to get their monthly
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As we sit here today, there are two hurricanes off the eastern seaboard of the United States.
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If your flood insurance lapses, or if you buy a new home and you need a new insurance
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policy, you can't get that right now because FEMA just got shut down for those services.
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We run the suicide prevention programs every day through this.
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People get harmed, and it's totally unnecessary, and Chuck Schumer's doing it for politics.
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This idea of gravitating towards Marxism, what specifically are some of these initiatives
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Well, when we say big government liberals, I mean, these guys are taking it to the next
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Marxism, of course, you know, communism and socialism are sort of branches of that underlying philosophy,
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And socialism is you just want the government to take over everything, basically, and all
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means of production and control and everything.
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So instead of the simple seven-week stopgap funding measure, a clean continuing resolution,
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clean, we said we didn't add any of our Republican or conservative priorities to it.
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We just status quo for seven more weeks, really just buying time.
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And instead of just voting on that, which he always has through his whole career, and
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they did 13 times during the Biden administration, okay, over the last previous four years, Chuck
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He wants to add $1.5 trillion, with a T, dollars in new spending on a seven-week stopgap funding
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And included in that, they want to make sure they would give health care to illegal aliens
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And they want to claw back $50 billion that we put into a rural hospital fund to prop those
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up, because many of them are in real financial straits.
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A lot of those rural counties and areas are in red states.
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I mean, you have to wonder what kind of thought went into this.
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Right before I walked into here, I've been on the phone with the president for the last
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He said, Mike, I can't believe how crazy this is.
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There's nothing for us to negotiate, because the president likes to make a deal, right?
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Mr. President, there's nothing to make a deal with it.
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There's nothing I can take back to sweeten the deal.
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That's the part that I think is so fascinating to me, is I keep trying to ask myself and
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give the benefit of the doubt here to the left on any sort of political legitimacy to
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And yet, I don't think they're aware of where the average American, particularly young Americans,
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are at right now, especially critical of big government policies.
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You know, I'm a very close friend of Charlie Kirk, and the last few weeks has been incredibly
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But so stirring to see how young people are responding to this and becoming more generally
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And yet, they seem completely unaware of that from the left side of the aisle here.
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You know, they just, they can't, they can't countenance him at everything he says or does.
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They're instinctively for the opposite, no matter how crazy, right?
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And then you had the woke progressive left that effectively took over the party a few
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And they're driving that party right off a cliff.
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This is not your grandfather's Democratic Party, right?
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This is a far different, they actually are Marxists.
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In fact, they're literally going to elect a Marxist as the mayor of America's largest
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And I think I spoke at four vigils for him over the last couple of weeks.
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I was speaking at the Kennedy Center, which is the one we did here in DC for him.
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And there and at all the vigils I spoke at, and of course, at the event in Arizona, I
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The numbers of people that turned out and the numbers of young people who are both so
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broken because they feel so close to Charlie, you know, this voice is ubiquitous and his
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image, they're all involved in Turning Point and many more want to be now.
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So they're mourning that, but at the same time, they feel like there's this sort of
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burning desire to just get engaged and get involved, right?
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The Charlie Kirk effect, we're calling it, and it's real.
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And what I said, I summarized in all the comments that I made, I said, you know, if we're going
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to honor the life and legacy of Charlie, the best thing we can do is live like Charlie
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And two things, you advance his principles and you adopt his approach.
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He's trying to win over hearts and minds and he was never hateful.
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Mike Huckabee said one time, he's running for governor of Arkansas many years ago, he
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said, you know, I'm a conservative, but I'm not mad at anybody.
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We're going to be winsome warriors, but you have to be prepared to give an answer for those
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that you have, as scripture says, and be ready for those debates.
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And Charlie was, but he never hated anybody on the other side of the table.
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That kind of message, the hopeful message, the things that he articulated, faith, family,
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freedom, patriotism, American exceptionalism, people respond to that.
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And it's in one sense, in my view, it's a response to the woke progressive nihilism that
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just leads to emptiness and despair and hopelessness.
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It's an offer of hope and eternity and real truth.
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And that's what people are yearning for, you know?
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But if we present that in a political context and we show how those things connect, which
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Charlie was an expert at doing, now you're really good.
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We're starting to see that generational shift and the Charlie Kirk effect here on the Hill.
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I know there's one Turning Point USA alum who's a member of Congress, Representative Luna,
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And we go way back to see her journey has been absolutely incredible.
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How do you think that's going to impact the future of the party here on the Hill?
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I know generationally, young people are all about big government sucks and socialism sucks.
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So you're seeing that tug of war happen even on the right side of the political aisle today.
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How do you think that impacts the shutdown and your agenda moving forward?
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There's an old saying, if the people will lead, the leaders will follow, right?
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And so what you'll see is, and you've already seen it, it inspires more backbone and confidence
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in people who actually believe those things or were reluctant to talk about it.
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Well, I did my floor speech and I did an interview with Hannity and we'd just go live
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And I mean, this is unrehearsed and unprepared because I wasn't expecting to get the job.
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And he says, people don't know anything about Mike Johnson.
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He said, what could you say, how could you summarize, you know, what you believe, your
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And I said, I didn't think, I just, I didn't have talking points over here.
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And I said, well, Sean, I don't know, it's pretty simple for me.
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If you want to know what I think about anything, go dust off the Bible on your shelf.
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That's pretty, you know, I'm a Bible-believing Christian.
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I, you know, I had no idea what a landmine that was.
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Um, and, and they came after me with sharp knives, you know, but, uh, some of us have
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We've been trying to bring back those principles.
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Charlie, Charlie was about, what I loved about our friend was he, he liked the temporal policy
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He was about the temporal things, but he was much more about the eternal things, the permanent
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things, you know, and I try to, and I have always tried to weave that into everything
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And now more and more people are seeing it that way.
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And you've heard people as high ranked as the vice president say in the last few days,
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I've spoken more about my faith in Christ for over the last two weeks than I had, you
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So it's so refreshing to us because we're walking around like, wow, we're not the freaks
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And more, more people are more, uh, I think, you know, open about what they really believe.
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And what is the, what is the core foundational principle behind the policies that we're
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And that, and we have a real opportunity to do that now.
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If you're giving a message to the next generation for what to expect out of this shutdown and
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in general, what to expect out of this Congress, what can we expect to see in the next few
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Well, you can make an argument really objectively.
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The first six months of this Congress was the most productive success of any in memory,
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So we had President Trump in the White House and you have Republicans in charge of the
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Senate and the House because we got a mandate in the election in 24 and we acted on that.
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So we did the big, beautiful bill and this, you know, marquee legislative achievements with
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I had a one vote margin for 90 of the first hundred days.
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You know, we have defied expectation because the Republicans stayed unified.
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And my message to all my colleagues is as long as we can do that, we are unlimited in
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So we're planning more of those big marquee pieces of legislation.
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The big, beautiful bill, the Working Families Tax Cuts Bill, we call it, was a reconciliation
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You don't need 60 votes in the Senate, which is the normal case.
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So we're planning reconciliation 2.0 right now for the fall.
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I'd like to do a third one in the spring before we're done with this Congress.
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And then we have some other marquee things that we're doing in addition to all the things
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the president's done with executive orders that we're codifying, putting into written
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So regulatory reform, tax cuts, and pro-growth policies for the economy, but then also changing
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the size and shape and scope of government all at once.
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I mean, this is something that many of us have been working on for our whole lives, you
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know, and we have marquee achievements for all these things, but there's more to come.
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And then we go into an election year, the midterm election next year.
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I just literally got off the phone with the president and he said, Mike, I can't
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It's only twice in 90 years, you know, the president's picked up seats in the fifth
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There's way more House Democrats sitting right now, as we're talking, in districts that
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President Trump won than that Harris won, the Republicans in Harris seats.
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And the fourth factor that none of us saw coming is the aftermath of Charlie's passing.
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And the energy that that puts in the hearts and minds of people, young people who want
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And we're presenting to them an opportunity to do that.
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And I think that has a big effect in the midterms that nobody saw coming.
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God has a way of working all things together for good.
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Charlie used to preach that, and he believed it, and we do.
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His passing was so untimely and tragic and unspeakable.
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To me, in some ways, it still doesn't seem real.
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And Charlie is watching all this, and he knows.
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Well, as you know, we've been the apologists over here on our show for the fact that Gen
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And we are incredibly excited to keep cheering you on and supporting everything you're doing
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Thank you for your service to our country and for bringing back home the message that
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Thank you again to Speaker Johnson for taking the time to join us.
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And make sure you guys are subscribed to the channel to get tomorrow's episode and every
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We can't wait to be spending some more time here on Capitol Hill to unveil all of the great
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plans to serve the American people the best way our lefted officials know how.