No one should underestimate the importance of the one vote victory in the house for the budget resolution. The fact is, the House Republicans have a very, very narrow majority. In fact, they can only afford to lose one Republican, and that Republican congressman, Massey of Kentucky, doesn’t listen to anybody. He has a self righteous sense that only his view matters, and even President Trump can’t talk to him or reason with him. So when they lost him, which they knew they would, they could not afford to lose a single member of the House Republican Party. Now I’ve been Speaker of the House for four years, and I know how challenging it is to pull together the party, but I never had a margin that close. And my respect for and admiration for Speaker Mike Johnson, is boundless. He has the patience, the calmness. He listens, he tries to understand every member, and he got almost there by himself. He was within three votes of a majority, and finally, he didn’t see how he was going to get there that night, and so he said, I guess we won’t vote tonight. And people began to leave. And then 10 minutes later, President Trump had intervened. He called the three people who were still out. All three said, All right, we’ll find a way to do it. And they called everyone back, and suddenly they passed the budget. Now it mattered for this reason, the house had stuck with President Trump on one big, beautiful bill, which is President Trump’s description. So everything is in this reconciliation bill, the tax cuts, the spending cuts, the reforms, the energy policy, everything we need for the border, all of it’s in one bill. The Senate Republicans didn’t want to go that route. They wanted to do all the easy stuff first and then come back later and do the really vital economic things, which I think would frankly cripple the Republican Party in the 2026 election. So this, they were confident the house couldn’t pass this, and I suspect it was a huge shock to them when, in fact, between them, President Trump and Speaker Johnson, found the votes and got it through. Now this is the beginning of the process, after you pass a budget resolution, you have to do what’s called reconciliation. That is, you take current law and you reconcile it to the new rules that are set up under the budget. That’s going to take two or three months of very hard work, because they now have to write real, detailed things that will implement the budget resolution, but this was an enormous first step. If they had lost then I think it would have been very hard to pass the tax cuts and the energy bill and the things we need if we’re going to have a strong economy in 2026

and it’s vital for Republicans to have a stronger economy because they can’t keep the house if they have to run for re election with a weak economy. So we’ve had an amazing moment, a remarkable achievement, and I have to say, between them, President Trump and speaker Johnson made one heck of a team.