House Majority Whip Rep. Tom Emmer, R- Minn., said that he plans to work to implement President-elect Donald Trump’s agenda despite House Republicans’ very slim majority.
“We’re going to get the Trump agenda put in place,” Emmer told ABC News’ “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl. “Donald Trump got a mandate on November 5. The public expects us to deal with the excessive spending, the debt, the deficit that has driven double-digit inflation at the beginning of the Biden term, they’ve asked Donald Trump to seal the southern border, and they want peace and stability around the globe.”
Trump has pushed to achieve his legislative goals in “one big beautiful bill” that would address many of his priorities, including tax cuts and securing the southern border, but a wide-ranging bill could be difficult to sell to fiscal hawks in the Senate and the House. The opposition to that approach caused Trump to backtrack and say he’d be willing to consider multiple bills. Emmer said that he is open to either approach.
“That’s not a concern to me once we make the decision. Is it going to be one? Is it going to be two? Doesn’t matter. The whip’s job is to make sure that we execute once that decision has been made, and I love people who tell us that we can’t do something,” Emmer said. “I mean, when we didn’t have the White House and we didn’t have the Senate, we did things that Republican majorities had never been able to do in the previous 10 to 15 years.”
Asked if Republicans are engaging with Democrats on trying to get their support on dealing with the debt ceiling, which Trump has pushed to raise or even eliminate, Emmer said some GOP hardliners could be brought around “under the right circumstances.”
“The issue that Republicans have had, and I think that Donald Trump has, is the debt ceiling is a false number. The bottom line is, you got to get your spending under control, and you got to have a plan to pay off the debt. So as long as we’re doing that, don’t underestimate what the House Republicans can do,” Emmer said.
President Joe Biden promised that 100% of initial emergency funding for the wildfires in the Los Angeles area would be covered by the federal government and called for Congress to provide California with whatever it needs to recover. Asked for a sense of what that might take, Emmer said that it’s too early to tell.
“Well, right now we don’t know what’s going to be needed. We know it’s significant. What we do know is that Congress, in December, before we left, the 118th Congress, passed the American Relief Act, which provided billions of dollars to FEMA to not only deal with the pre the hurricanes Milton and Helene, but also for situations such as this, although no one could predict what’s happening right now in LA,” said Emmer.
Asked about his relationship with Trump, who was critical of Emmer last year when he was considered for House speaker as being “totally out of touch” with Republican voters, Emmer said he and the president-elect are on “good terms.”
“The president has been wonderful to me, been wonderful to my wife. Has done everything that he could to campaign in Minnesota. He’s been amazing,” Emmer said. “We’re going to do some good work together, but it’s Donald J. Trump’s agenda. My job is to make sure that we execute.”
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