At today's House Republican leadership press briefing, Speaker Johnson was asked about GOP divisions on the budget.
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00:00As you head into the final sort of stretch for reconciliation, members, centrists, conservatives seem to have a very different expectation of what the final product is going to look like.
00:10Have you made assurances? Have you made promises that you can't keep to different members as this process begins to wrap?
00:15No, I don't make promises I can't keep. This is a consensus building operation, as you know, and it's member driven, bottom up.
00:22And every single member of the conference has had many opportunities and has more this week to weigh in and let their preferences be known.
00:29This is about balancing preferences. I mean, no one's going to be surprised.
00:33Everybody knows where the where the touch points are on the final details of the final analysis.
00:38And we've been working really hard to take all the input and find that kind of equilibrium point where everybody is at least satisfied.
00:46Some people are not going to be elated by every provision of the bill. It's impossible.
00:49The bill's one big, beautiful bill. It's a big piece of legislation. There's a lot in it.
00:53So there's always going to be things page by page. Somebody can go through a large bill and find things that they're not that they would have preferred to be handled another way.
01:02But in its totality, this is going to be the most important, most consequential legislation that we'll ever be involved in in our lifetimes and arguably one of the biggest in the history of Congress.
01:10And so I think at the end of the day, we'll get that consensus. And, you know, there may be some grumbling about certain provisions.
01:17But as the whip said so aptly this morning in the conference meeting, he said, you got to you got to focus on the totality of the bill and not just individual details.
01:26But my job is to work out those details. And look, I'm very confident that we're going to get to that that point by the end of this week.
01:31And we'll move this thing forward.