House GOP Leadership Media Availability Following Conference Elections

Well, thank you all for being here. Sure, it's been a long, productive day, but we're excited we leave tonight united as a conference. We have had an extraordinary leadership team elected. I'm delighted and honored by my colleagues to have been re-selected as the speaker, as our nominee, and we'll head into January 3rd to make all that happen. In the meantime, there was lots of discussion about the rules package, which is our conference rules, which governs our internal affairs effectively, and we had two of the leaders, two of the chairs of our most important, most active caucuses in the Republican Conference, the Main Street Caucus with Chairman Dusty Johnson, and of course, the House Freedom Caucus, which is chaired by Dr. Andy Harris. They worked together collaboratively to work with members across the conference with very different ideas and perspectives and come to an agreement about what all that would entail, and so I wanted to give you all an opportunity to hear from them, and I'm really grateful for their time and their expertise and their investment in making all this work very well today for everybody. So I'm gonna give it to Dr. Harris, go ahead. Thank you very much, thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. Look, the president came down and started the day by coming down and asking for unity, asking for making sure that we deliver for the American public what they asked for last week. And obviously, we know that now we know what the leadership's gonna be like in the Senate, we know who our speaker-designate is right now, and we've been able to work across the conference to eliminate the controversial issues that could have divided us and move forward together to deliver on the president's agenda. That's it, that's what the American people expect us to do, and the first steps were taken today, very concrete steps. And look, we're behind the president, and I wanna thank Dusty Johnson for working to make us unified to go together to deliver for the American people with Mr. Trump as the president. And with that, Dusty? First, I wanna say thank you to Speaker Johnson who has cultivated an environment where members know that they can try to work together to move the ball down the field, and I wanna thank Andy Harris. This started because Dr. Harris reached out this morning, he said, listen, we gotta cut a deal, we need to come together, unity's important. We sat down, we began to negotiate, we spent more than an hour together, we made good progress, we understood that we had an opportunity to set the motion to vacate at a higher than number one, that motion to vacate will be set at nine, in return for getting rid of some amendments that probably would have divided this conference. Andy did a good job of explaining to Main Street leadership why those amendments would have divided the Republican conference, so where are we at today? We are, just as Dr. Harris said, because of this agreement, we are in a better position to move forward the Republican agenda, to make sure that Speaker Johnson, South Dakota Senate Leader John Thune, and our President Donald Trump have an opportunity to go forward and do good things for America. This is exactly how we're supposed to come together. I wanna thank these gentlemen again, we're gonna have a press conference here in just a few moments with all the new elected leadership, and we'll answer questions there, but wanted you to hear that straight from these chairmen. Thank you both so much for all your hard work, and we'll be right back with you, okay?