Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) urged President-elect Donald Trump to listen to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) on Monday after criticizing the president-elect’s efforts to raise the debt ceiling “at the 11th hour and 59th minute.”
During an interview with Bacon on NewsNation’s The Hill, anchor Chris Stirewalt asked, “There are new reports now that the president-elect is unhappy with Speaker Johnson’s performance last week. Does the speaker have your support and do you think he’ll win another term as speaker?”
Bacon declared:
He has my support. He’s a good man, he works hard. You know, he’s trying to get these bills passed with a very small majority, and the fact is, Chris, we have thirty to forty Republicans who refuse to sign on any continuing resolution or any debt ceiling bill, period. So, the speaker’s gonna have to work with Democrats to get 218 votes, and then these thirty or forty people get mad about it. And I would say to the President Trump, to throw this down on the speaker at the 11th hour and 59th minute that he wanted a debt ceiling raise, this is something we had to work on for weeks and weeks in advance, and it was just too late to get that done, and it is something that we can get done in reconciliation, and the speaker has a good plan for how to address the debt ceiling thing. I think the president should take the speaker’s advice on this. He’s got the best path forward.
In the same interview, Bacon also said Republicans would have to learn to work with “bipartisan spirit” in both the House and Senate as a result of their slim majority.
“I think we’ve still got to govern from the center to the right, and not just from the far-right, because the fact is you’re not gonna get those votes in the House or Senate if you try to govern that way,” he argued. “James Madison designed a system that forces consensus building, so you can’t just govern from an extreme position.”
On Thursday, Trump advised Johnson on how to remain in his position as speaker of the House.
“If the speaker acts decisively, and tough, and gets rid of all of the traps being set by the Democrats, which will economically and, in other ways, destroy our country, he will easily remain speaker,” Trump said.
Watch above via NewsNation.
