Welcome back to the Pod Force One podcast. I'm Miranda Devine and today I'm in the United States Capitol Building and I'm joined by the third in line to the presidency.

Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. Speaker Johnson, thank you so much for joining us on Podforce One.

And congratulations on getting the one big, beautiful bill over the line.

How did you do it?

A lot of prayer and patience.

Really, we're getting a lot of credit for pulling off a miracle.

It wasn't.

I think it was Vince Lombardi that said,

Victory Loves preparation.

So we prepared for this.

Back in the spring of 2024, we had the vision for what we believed would happen. I was convinced

President Trump was coming back to the White House and I thought we'd have the majority in the

House and the Senate, but we knew the majorities would be small because we're in an era of gerrymandering

and redistricting and we have a three vote margin in both chambers now. So we looked ahead of that, anticipating we would have this historic moment and that we would have to fix every metric of public policy because Biden and Harris just destroyed everything in four years. So to do that, we knew we would need to do a partisan exercise. We would have to use the budget reconciliation process, which is, as you know, the only way around the 60 vote threshold in the Senate, which is always otherwise necessary. So to do that. That's never going to make. Never going to make. I mean, Chuck Schumer and the Democrats, not going to help it. No. And we knew that. So I told all my colleagues, we had a retreat where we planned all this. And I said, guys, this is what's going to happen. We're going to have a unified government. We've got to make the most of it. Let's do reconciliation bigger than it's ever been done in history. Instead of just using two committees of jurisdiction, like in the past, why don't we use 11 committees? But to do that, it's going to be very complicated, very complex. It's going to be a very large piece of legislation. But if we plan accordingly, we can achieve that goal together. And that's what

we did. So we started planning over a year ago, about 15 or 16 months of work went into delivering

that final vote in time for July 4th. And when you say work, I mean, it's patience. It is actual

like wrangling human beings. So how do you do that? What does the speaker actually do?

Well, the speaker in the modern era is different, I think, than it was probably in previous generations. There's always been a whip operation. But the way Congress has evolved now in the age of social media, when everyone can go online every two minutes and say what they're disgruntled about, I'm really as much a mental health counselor

as I am a legislator, you know, a policy director, because you've got to do all these things

simultaneously and you have to deal with everyone with their individual preferences and peccadilloes,

and it's not always easy you know but we had a

a one vote margin for most of the first hundred days the smallest in history um it would seemingly

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