House Speaker Johnson: Motion to Vacate a 'Distraction from Our Mission'

During this week's broadcast of Fox News Channel's “Sunday Night in America,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) dismissed the ouster initiated by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) as a “distraction.”

Johnson said he expected to work out his differences with Greene.

“How does it help the GOP razor-thin 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?” host Trey Gowdy said. “How does this Motion to Vacate help win back the majority or win a bigger majority?”

“I don't think it does, and I think that all of my other Republican colleagues recognize this is a distraction from our mission,” Johnson replied. “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 Greene filed the motion. It's not a privilege motion, so it doesn't move automatically. It's just hanging there. And she is frustrated. She and I exchanged text messages even today. We're going to talk early next week. Marjorie is a friend. She is 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 U.S. history, we're sometimes going to get legislation that we don't like,” he continued. “And 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've 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 the Senate earmarks out of the bill, and we were successful in getting a lot of the terrible stuff out, but if some made it through, and that's what Marjorie is upset about, and I am too, but I want to talk with her about reforming the budget in its spending process going forward. That's what Republicans are for. That's the transformational kind of changes that we can forge if we all stand together.”

Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor

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