When you ask Speaker Mike Johnson about his future agenda for this upcoming Congress — a Congress that Republicans expect to have unified control over, with Donald Trump sitting in the Oval Office — the Louisiana Republican brings up some regrets about the past.
Johnson entered the House of Representatives at the start of 2017, just as Trump was entering the presidency. And at the time, the congressman expected Republicans to make some big moves in Trump’s first 100 days.
“I came in as a bright-eyed freshman and went up to Speaker Ryan and said, ‘Oh, we’re going to repeal and replace Obamacare? Where’s the bill?’” Johnson told NOTUS on Thursday during a sit-down interview at the Republican National Convention.
The answer Johnson got was that Republicans were working on it. “So we really squandered probably the first two and a half months of the 115th Congress,” Johnson said Thursday.
As the GOP readies itself to take over Washington once again, the speaker said he has no intention of squandering this opportunity for Republicans this time around.
But there’s a funny thing about expectations and reality, about the difference between being a rank-and-file Republican and leading the GOP conference; if you ask Johnson about some of the specific bills he wants to pass, the speaker has some answers not far off from what Paul Ryan told him almost eight years ago.
“I don’t know that repeal and replace is on the agenda,” Johnson told NOTUS when asked about Obamacare. “I think that we need dramatic changes to health care, and there are lots of ideas on how to do that.”
He brought up the GOP’s “Doctors Caucus” coming up with some ideas on how to address health care, and he discussed some of the proposals he championed as the former leader of the conservative Republican Study Committee. But — just like last time — even though Trump has said he would renew efforts to repeal Obamacare, it was clear Republicans wouldn’t be walking into the majority with a bill ready to go.
In short, Republicans are working on it.
When asked about immigration policies — like Trump’s long-held goal of building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border or, as stated in the GOP’s platform this year, enacting “the largest deportation ever in American history” — Johnson didn’t have a clear answer on how Congress could approve substantial funding for a wall or help Trump deport millions of immigrants who entered the country illegally.
“H.R. 2 is our road map,” Johnson said, referring to a hard-line border security bill that got no Democratic support in the House and hasn’t received a vote in the Senate. (No Democratic senator is expected to support that bill, and unless Republicans emerge from Election Day with 60 votes in the Senate — or intend to kill the filibuster — H.R. 2 is dead on arrival in the upper chamber.)
Johnson did mention that a border wall is a “component” of the GOP’s immigration and border security plans, and he said Republicans were “looking into” the prospect of somehow using budget reconciliation to bypass the Senate’s 60-vote threshold. But again, he laid out no clear plan.
On deportations, Johnson was even vaguer.
“It’s a great question,” Johnson said when asked how he would get Congress to supply funding for a massive increase in deportations, yet another thing Democrats would adamantly oppose. “There hasn’t been a lot of discussion yet on exactly how that will be implemented, but there certainly is a great need.”
Johnson added that the Department of Homeland Security had essentially “allowed people to just disappear into the country.”
“Most or many of these people will be, probably, nearly impossible to track,” he said. “So it will be a real challenge.”
On whether Congress should pass a national abortion ban, Johnson noted that he, personally, is staunchly “pro-life.”
“It’s part of my faith,” Johnson said. “I’m the product of a teen pregnancy. My mom was 17 when I was born, you know? So it’s a very important issue.”
But actually passing a bill in Congress?
“I have 434 colleagues in the House, and we got a 60-vote threshold in the Senate,” he said.
He continued that every lawmaker comes to Congress with their own convictions and that politics is downstream from culture. “So before you can have political consensus on an issue like that on a federal level, you have to have cultural consensus,” he said. “So I think there’s a challenge right now to truly build a culture of life.”
Perhaps the greatest challenge to Johnson’s speakership this year has been Ukraine aid. The speaker took the bold stand that he would put a Ukraine aid bill on the floor, against the wishes of the majority of the House GOP conference. In short order, he faced a Republican motion to remove him from the speakership, which only failed because some Democrats voted to keep Johnson.
With Trump selecting JD Vance to be his vice president this week — a senator who was one of the most forceful opponents of Ukraine funding — it was yet another indication of Trump’s foreign policy preferences. (Trump said at the time of the Ukraine vote that he opposed more funding.)
Asked if he’d be willing to put Ukraine funding on the floor once again, Johnson said he didn’t anticipate a need for that.
“What I believe will happen is that when Donald Trump comes into elected office, he’ll be a strong enough leader and commander in chief that he’ll be able to help broker a peace in that conflict,” Johnson said.
Trump has dubiously maintained that he can solve the Ukraine-Russia war in one day, though his solution has sounded a lot like Ukraine capitulating to Russia, at least with some Ukrainian territory.
Just like in 2017, the one item on Trump’s agenda that Republicans may most easily be able to pass is tax cuts. Many of the tax cuts that Trump and Republicans passed in Trump’s first year in office are actually expiring in 2025, and Congress is expected to renew at least some of those policies.
But the former president has also gone way beyond proposing just an extension of the tax cuts. Trump has suggested eliminating taxes on tips — potentially opening a massive loophole — and cutting the corporate tax rate all the way down to 15%.
Asked if he’d need to see spending cuts paired with these tax cuts — which didn’t happen last time — Johnson suggested he would.
“We need to do both,” he said. “We have a nearly $35 trillion federal debt. But I think the tax proposals he’s talking about excite a lot of people.”
Johnson mentioned that he used to wait tables, and he said most people go through “that season of life” where no taxes on tips would be “a big help.” He also said lowering the corporate tax rate in 2017 from 35% to 21% was the reason the United States achieved “the greatest economy in the history of the world.”
As the election nears, the GOP’s agenda has become an increasingly hot topic, particularly as The Heritage Foundation continues to push its own agenda: Project 2025.
Johnson told NOTUS he hasn’t had five minutes to read the Project 2025 plan, but he did note that “a lot of my very close friends and trusted people have contributed to it in one way or another.”
Johnson said he thought “over 100 conservative groups” were contributing to the Project 2025 agenda and that “those are all my friends and former colleagues, many of them.”
“So I think there’s, as with any document that’s 900 pages long, there’ll be lots of things in there that I think are very productive,” he said.
Johnson refused to play prognosticator by predicting how many seats Republicans might pick up in the House — “everybody wants me to handicap that, put a number on it” — but he said the GOP was “very bullish.”
“I’ve been working with a one-vote margin for most of my speakership. I mean, anything’s a dramatic improvement on that,” he said.
Whether Johnson can hang on to the speakership is its own question. If Republicans maintain the majority, he will face another vote at the beginning of the year, when Democrats would be less inclined to help him. But his strong relationship with Trump, as well as a big year for Republicans at the ballot box, could keep him in the position.
As much as Johnson didn’t want to handicap the election, he clearly is expecting a good night for the GOP. In fact, he told NOTUS he doesn’t think a single incumbent Republican will lose.
“I believe we’ll reelect every single one of them,” he said.