By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
New United States House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana gets a ringing endorsement from northern Missouri Congressman Sam Graves.
Graves, a fellow Republican, calls Johnson a friend who he has known for some time.
“He’s going to make a great Speaker, he really is,” Graves tells KFEQ/St. Joseph Post in an interview. “He’s conservative. He thinks through things before he jumps to a decision and I think he’s going to make a great Speaker.”
It took the Republican Caucus three weeks and four candidates for find a replacement for Kevin McCarthy, the first Speaker to be unceremoniously removed from office after angering staunch conservatives for fashioning a compromise with President Joe Biden and Democrats to keep the federal government running.
Graves says Republicans settled on Johnson for a number of reasons, one being that he is conservative.
“He hasn’t acquired a lot of enemies in his time here in Congress and so that obviously helped him,” Graves says. “It’s just a matter of finding the right person. Sometimes it takes a little time and it can be painful along the way, but here we are. We’ve got him and now we’re off and running.”
The full House voted 220-to-209 for Johnson to replace McCarthy.
Graves backed McCarthy and then threw his support behind the candidacy of Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana. Graves admits it was a rough three weeks.
“It’s obviously been very tiring, very frustrating at many times,” Graves acknowledges. “Just the whole process from the beginning was unfortunate. That’s the way our system is set up and the way our Founding Fathers put it together. They had a contingency for this. The process worked and we’ve got a Speaker now and we’re back to regular order.”
And regular order, according to Graves, is getting back to approving a federal budget for the fiscal year. Graves says the Republican Caucus must push for more budget cuts to rein in federal spending.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.