DALLAS — House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) thinks the challenges Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) will face next Congress from progressives and the Democratic Socialists of America will be different from what he has experienced atop the Republican conference.
Johnson, signaling confidence that Republicans will hold on to their slim House majority in November, told the Washington Examiner during an exclusive interview on Day 1 of the party’s midterm convention that Jeffries is going to have a “rowdy bunch of openly avowed communists in his camp,” referring to the socialist candidates who have won Democratic primaries in deep blue districts nationwide.
“I never had that,” Johnson said. “I mean, we had intense fellowship, as I say, in the Deep South. We had intense fellowship in our conference, on you know how much money we can save, how much government we can cut, how much regulation to bring everybody to that consensus to get it done.”
Johnson’s speakership has been plagued by his own band of rebels, who have repeatedly sunk floor votes or otherwise withheld their support for party-line items until they are given concessions.
But the speaker asserted that members of his conference are “trying to argue for what they believe is the best for our country,” while on the Democratic side, “they have people who want to destroy our country.”
Johnson called the candidates aligned with socialism and their policy positions “antithetical and the opposite of American values and principles and policies.”
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“That’s Hakeem’s challenge,” Johnson said. “I don’t know how you reconcile those two sides. Ours is very different, so we’ll see how he does. Be interesting to see.”
The Washington Examiner has reached out to Jeffries’s team for comment.