Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) praised House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) for the way he’s handled his role as top Republican in the House, which just narrowly averted a government shutdown following a days-long rollercoaster.
“Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House, is doing an extraordinary job. I tell everybody, I was a pretty effective speaker. I could never do his job. He has no margins. Any two or three members can rebel at any moment,” Gingrich told John Catsimatidis on his show “Cats Roundtable” on WABC 770 AM.
Leaders in the House cycled through multiple plans until finally passing the continuing resolution to avoid a government shutdown just hours before the deadline.
The near-shutdown leaves serious questions about how the Speaker will lead lawmakers in the lower chamber under President-elect Trump — and whether he can keep his gavel.
Gingrich applauded Johnson’s efforts to avoid a government shutdown and urged the GOP to become more unified.
“They need a Republican unity program for the next two years. These guys who wake up every morning and say, ‘I’m going to vote no. What’s the issue?’ are totally destructive and hand the House over to the Democrats,” Gingrich warned.
“So they need to start this year with a pledge that every Republican is going to stick together. We’re going to be a single team,” he added.
Amid the shutdown chaos, Gingrich suggested Trump would be “better off” letting the government shut down in an interview with Fox News last week.
“I think that President Trump would be much better off to let the government close to let Biden sit there as a totally incompetent president presiding over a mess, and to go to the country and say to the country, ‘I am not going to be a president who sells you out. I need your help to convince the Congress to pass a good bill,’” Gingrich said at the time.
His comment during the Fox News interview came as a bipartisan 1,500-page continuing resolution to keep the government funded into the new year went down in flames after it came under criticism from Trump allies, including Elon Musk, and eventually Trump himself. The backlash led to Johnson’s plan B deal, which ultimately failed in the House.
