House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) warned against President Donald Trump’s push for the Senate to invoke the “nuclear option” to end the government shutdown.
“Look, I’ll just say this in general, as I’ve said many times about the filibuster, it’s not my call. I don’t have a say in this. It’s a Senate chamber issue,” Johnson said during a press conference. “But the filibuster has traditionally been viewed as a very important safeguard. If the shoe was on the other foot, I don’t think our team would like it.”
“The Democrats, look, they’ve said what they would do. They would pack the Supreme Court. They would make Puerto Rico and D.C. states. They would ban firearms. They would do all sorts of things that would be very harmful for the country, and the safeguard in the Senate has always been the filibuster,” he explained. “But again, not my issue, not something I get to even weigh in on.”
Johnson’s comments come in response to President Trump declaring on Truth Social that it is “now time for the Republicans to play their ‘TRUMP CARD,’ and go for what is called the Nuclear Option — Get rid of the Filibuster, and get rid of it, NOW!”
“Just a short while ago, the Democrats, while in power, fought for three years to do this, but were unable to pull it off because of Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona,” Trump wrote. “Never have the Democrats fought so hard to do something because they knew the tremendous strength that terminating the Filibuster would give them.”
