Where the House GOP needs to go from here

Now that we have a new speaker of the House, Republicans have our work cut out for us. The challenges we’re dealing with are more pressing now than they were a month ago. We are looking at more debt, more inflation, a more unstable geopolitical situation, and a worsening border crisis.

The immediate task before us as Republicans is to get back to work with our new speaker, my friend and fellow conservative Mike Johnson (R-La.), and again unite behind a bold, conservative agenda that will confront these crises and deliver on our promises to the American people.

As a fiscal conservative, Johnson knows our current spending trajectory is dangerously unsustainable. The federal deficit hit $2 trillion in fiscal year 2023 — double what it was the previous year — fueling the inflation that has imposed a nearly 20% across-the-board tax on American families. Now, the Biden administration wants to pour kerosene on this fire with $106 billion in unpaid-for supplemental funding for Ukraine, border processing, Israel, and other matters.

House Republicans must immediately return our focus to cutting spending through the appropriations process while ensuring that Israel has the support it needs. We have already started moving individual appropriations bills and must see the process through to ensure that the House passes all 12.

But simply passing individual spending bills is not enough. Rather, we need to come back together as a conference — moderates and conservatives — and work to cut spending, preferably by returning to pre-COVID levels for non-defense, non-veteran bureaucracy. After that, Republicans will need to dig in and win negotiations with the Senate to lock in these spending levels.

But we cannot afford to stop at reforming regular spending. All supplemental spending bills for issues like Ukraine or Israel should be considered and debated separately — on their own merits — and fully paid for.

The speaker has already demonstrated leadership in this area by advancing a $14.3 billion Israel aid package that is fully offset by rescinding funding for Biden’s army of IRS bureaucrats. Meanwhile, any funding request for Ukraine should be met with extreme scrutiny. If the House is going to go down the likely but unadvisable route of throwing more money at this proxy war, simply paying for it is not enough. We will need to limit the dollar amount to the greatest extent possible and enact strong transparency requirements.

Most importantly, we should not spend a red cent on Ukraine’s borders until ours are secure.

The crisis at the southern border is worse than it has ever been, which is why border security must be House Republicans’ top policy priority. The gravity of the situation is emphasized by the fact that Border Patrol tallied a record 2.47 million border crossings in FY 2023 — and that doesn’t even account for the 1,000 known migrants evading Border Patrol every day.

Worse still, in the wake of Hamas’ barbaric terrorist attack on Israel, the Border Patrol caught a record 169 people on the terrorist watch list and is warning agents that members of Islamic terror groups may be crossing as well. As a former fellow member of the House Judiciary Committee, Johnson knows this all too well, and he knows what we must do about it.

House Republicans already united to pass our solution to this crisis earlier this year. H.R. 2, the House-passed Secure the Border Act, is the strongest border security measure to ever pass a body of Congress, and we must leverage every moving legislative vehicle to get this bill through the Senate and signed into law. Republicans in both chambers will need to exhibit the courage to hold fast and leverage every opportunity we are given to get H.R. 2 across the finish line. The House must also make clear that any border measure short of the policy changes in H.R. 2 is a non-starter, which includes any legislation that tries to throw money at the problem or short-term fixes.

At the same time, the federal government has a duty to pay back border states like Texas that have undertaken border security efforts of their own and to ensure that Border Patrol is properly compensated for the overtime work agents have put in throughout this preventable crisis.

Still, the threats coming across the southern border are not the only ones we face. The speaker’s seat on the House Armed Services Committee gave him an in-depth look at how the woke cancer within the Pentagon is undermining recruiting, morale, and warfighting capabilities and how our enemies abroad are emboldened thanks to Joe Biden’s weakness, incompetence, and failures.

As we start negotiations with the Senate, it is critical that House Republicans remain committed to the reforms included in the House-passed National Defense Authorization Act.This includes stopping the Pentagon’s abortion travel fund, ending diversity offices, preventing taxpayer funding of gender transition surgeries, and ending the department’s climate programs, while ensuring our military has the assets it needs to win.

Congress also must ensure that the United States is not entangled in perpetual wars by reasserting its constitutional duty to declare war. We can do this by maintaining previous commitments to repeal the outdated 1991 and 2002 Authorizations for Use of Military Force against Iraq while updating the post-9/11 AUMF to ensure that we can properly respond to and engage long-standing and emerging global threats.

Republicans will also need to leverage upcoming expirations of the Farm Bill and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to implement critical reforms. Importantly, the Farm Bill should ensure that the U.S. food supply is not at risk from foreign threats by including a prohibition on the Chinese Communist Party — and other adversaries — from owning U.S. farmland and other food assets. Further, we cannot reauthorize FISA until the necessary reforms are made to ensure that it is not weaponized against Americans and political opponents, as we have seen in the past.

Finally, the House must complete its important oversight work. This includes investigations into the corrupt dealings of President Biden and his family members, associates, and administration. It is also imperative that we ensure a full and robust accounting of the tyranny waged against Americans in the name of combatting COVID, the weaponization of federal agencies like the Department of Justice against political opponents, and the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal.

In January, 19 of my colleagues and I set out to fight the status quo and fundamentally change how the House operates. In doing so, we fought to give conservatives a seat at the table and opened up the legislative process, which put us on a path to cut spending and enabled us to pass generational border legislation and pass a strong, conservative defense reauthorization. Throughout the recent debate surrounding the speaker election, my priority was simple: building upon and cementing these wins for conservatives and for the American people.

Time is short, but the American people still expect us to deliver on our promises to them. Speaker Johnson has already demonstrated a commitment to advancing an ambitious conservative agenda in the remainder of the 118th Congress. I intend to work closely with him to help enact it, because the American people deserve to win again.