Scalise: President Trump and Republicans Take Action to Keep Americans Safe
NEW ORLEANS, La.—Today, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) joined ABC News’ This Week to discuss President Trump’s efforts to stop a nuclear Iran and House Republicans’ push to fully fund the Department of Homeland Security amid heightened threats.
Click here or the image above to view Leader Scalise's full interview.
Highlights from Leader Scalise’s interview:
On President Trump’s decisive action to prevent a nuclear Iran:
“If you look at what President Trump has laid out in terms of the objectives, he's been meeting them. He's been very clear about what those objectives are. And I think the whole world knows that a nuclear-armed Iran would have been a danger to the world... And so President Trump's doing something that, frankly, Republican and Democrat presidents before him have thought about contemplating, but President Trump's the one who had the guts to do what needed to be done to keep America and the rest of the world safe. And so we're going to get through this mission. But as you're seeing it being carried out, Epic Fury has been successful in achieving its objectives.
“…You don’t want [Iran] to have a nuclear weapon, because they will absolutely use it when they're chanting death to America and they get a nuclear weapon. And they had, by the way, just slaughtered over 30,000 of their own people. Imagine what they would do to us. When they've already killed hundreds of our soldiers. Remember, Iran declared war on America going back to 1979. They've been killing Americans for decades. So, some president was going to do something about it. Many thought about it. President Trump's finally taking the action that, frankly, all of the free world and the civilized world is applauding right now.”
On House Republicans’ commitment to fully fund DHS:
“Well, we actually read their bill, and frankly, a number of senators have expressed buyer's remorse with what they did at three in the morning. So we looked at it. One of the things that we had real concerns with is it actually defunds over 25% of the baseline operations of the Department of Homeland Security. 25% at a time when we're at a heightened threat level.
“And so we've passed now four bills out of the House to fully fund the department, the one that we sent after the Senate sent over their weak offer. We sent a bill that was short-term. It's not exactly what we want, but at least it allows everybody to get paid, all the agencies, TSA, everybody, while we negotiate our differences. We have very big differences between the House and the Senate. The Senate bill they sent over, by the way, defunds about 7,000 positions at the Department of Homeland Security. And John, keep in mind, we've had three Americans killed just last week by people here illegally. We've had four terrorist attacks on our home soil here in America just in the last month. This is no time to be defunding major operations at the Department of Homeland Security and that's what the Senate bill did.”
On the need for the Senate to pass the House DHS CR:
“The bill is over in the Senate. The Senate's got options. They've got to come back and deal with it. I hope they pass the short-term bill that at least funds everything over to the president. But the bill they sent us, keep in mind, would zero out, defund things like cybersecurity operations, human trafficking investigations.”