House Speaker Mike Johnson tried to blame Senate Democrats for the need to resort to another continuing resolution to fund the government, rather than pass the poison pill voter suppression SAVE Act they tried to insert in their budget legislation.
Here’s Johnson on this weekend’s Fox News Sunday making excuses for his refusal to bring the House back in session to pass more funding for FEMA even though there’s another storm about to hit Florida, and blaming Senate Democrats for the failure to pass legislation to fund the government, even though that legislation has to originate in the House, and ignoring the fact that they all knew full well no Democrat was going to go along with their attempt to steal another election by making it harder to vote.
BREAM: Well, and we’ve got now the storm, Milton, that’s being tracked in the Florida Gulf. May land there is a category three later this week. So DHS Secretary Mayorkas has said they don’t have money to get through what they need for the rest of this hurricane season.
We’ve heard similar statements from the Secretary of Transportation. President Biden has said more money is needed. He actually sent a letter to congressional leaders that the Small Business Administration is in real trouble. Here’s what he says.
“I warned the Congress of this potential shortfall even before hurricane Helene landed on America’s shores. I requested more funding for SBA multiple times over the past several months, and most recently, my administration underscored that request as you prepared a continuing resolution to fund the government.”
Will you call Congress back before the election? Do you need to?
JOHNSON: Look, we’ll be back in session immediately after the election. That’s 30 days from now. The thing about these hurricanes and disasters of this magnitude is it takes a while to calculate the actual damages and the states are going to need some time to do that.
I’m from Louisiana. We’re a hurricane prone state. We’re experts at disaster recovery. We’ve done this. You don’t just send estimates to the federal government. You send specific needs and requests based upon the actual damages. And that takes some time, especially with storms of this magnitude.
So Congress will do its job. Remember that before we left Washington, the day before Helene hit, by the way, made landfall, Congress appropriated 20 billion additional dollars to FEMA so that they would have the immediate dollars they need to address the immediate needs.
Then after that, Congress always takes the due approach of providing what is necessary. Congress will provide, we will help the people in these disaster prone areas. It’s an appropriate role for the federal government and you’ll have bipartisan support for that. And it’ll all happen in due time and we’ll get that job done. There shouldn’t be any concern about that at all.
BREAM: But there is with some of these agencies. So is the conflict or confusion about the fact that we’re not doing things in regular order? There are continuous continuing resolutions. This is going to land December 20th, right before the holidays, and there are a number of agencies that are all fighting for a piece of the pie who say they can’t have stability and count on what they need because this is the way we’re funding the government piecemeal.
JOHNSON: Yeah, continuing resolutions are no way to fund the government, and I sure wish that we didn’t have to do that, but they need to call Chuck Schumer in the Senate. The Democrat-led Senate literally did not pass one appropriations bill this cycle. They didn’t put one bill on the floor. They didn’t even try.
So Chuck Schumer put us in the position. The House did. We passed appropriations bills. We got all of ours through committee, over 72 percent of the federal funding done from the floor, and then the process stopped because the Senate wasn’t engaging.
You can’t have two chambers negotiate the final spending bills if one chamber is not engaging at all, and that’s the problem. So we were put in the CR situation once again, but we will meet our obligations, Congress will do it, and I trust when we get back, both chambers will work in earnest to get that job done.
Republicans are incapable of governing. They’ll continue to stall while they attack the other side for the chaos they’re creating.
