Former GOP Rep Warns Speaker Johnson To Have Hakeem Jeffries ‘On Speed Dial’ Because They’ll ‘Need’ Dems: ‘Accept It’
Former Rep. Charlie Dent (R-PA) warned House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to keep House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s (D-NY) number “on speed dial” because 2025 is only going to bring more chaos for House Republicans.
Dent joined MSNBC’s Chris Jansing on Friday to discuss Johnson’s current hold on the speakership following a continuing resolution to fund the federal government taking multiple tries to get passed at the 11th hour to avoid a government shutdown. The Republican majority in the House will be just one vote going forward and the current budget measure only funds the government through mid-March.
“Practically speaking, what’s a Speaker, whether it’s Johnson or someone else, to do?” Jansing asked Dent, who served in the House for over 10 years.
Dent argued that “hardliners” in the party would never vote for any continuing resolutions, leaving Johnson in a position where he would need Democrats to avoid utter chaos in his own party.
Dent said:
I think the next Republican Speaker has to have Hakeem Jeffries on speed dial because they probably will need him. As we’ve seen many times, Republicans have had a dysfunctional majority in the House for the past few years. Now, with Donald Trump as president, that dysfunction may be less because Trump can lean on them. But just remember there are 30-some votes in the House, and we saw this a couple of weeks ago with the continuing resolution discussion.
There are 30-some Republicans who are never going to vote for continuing resolutions to fund the government or appropriations bills or debt ceilings, so they need Democrats to help them in the House on any number of issues. So they have to get ready for that and just accept it.
Republican control of the White House, Senate, and House should help matters, Dent added, but the current one-vote majority in the House only further empowers “hardliners” who refuse to “compromise.”
“The hardliners don’t like to do compromise, particularly in divided government, but now that we have one party government, Republicans controlling the House, Senate, and presidency, that might help them a bit, but again, there will always be a few people who won’t support the agenda, and it might not be hardliners this time,” he said. “It could [also] be people from the center who don’t want to support something too hardline because they have to worry about general elections. It can come from a lot of different directions.”
Watch above via MSNBC.
