Leslie Marshall: It’s Going to Be ‘Very Difficult’ for Speaker Johnson to Navigate with Narrow Majority

RUSH TRANSCRIPT:
BAIER: “Apparently there was the speaker phone kind of conference call in the office of the House chamber where the president-elect essentially told all of them, it would be a vote against the American people and the presidential election and it would be disrespecting me, Leslie. So, Democrats, how do they look at this in the message from Hakeem Jeffries was one of common ground in reaching across the aisle when they can. How much do you think they are going to do that?”
Marshall: “Well, I don’t know, there were a lot of kum ba yah moments. Mike Johnson referred to Hakeem Jeffries as a good friend and the 11 caucus members stood up and supported the Speaker Johnson but the reality is you already hear from the Freedom Caucus. We’ve already seen the chaos in December when it comes to a government shutdown. That was a foreshadowing of things to come. You rightly pointed out earlier in the program, Bret, that you are looking at probably a two-seat majority so you already have Thomas Massie looking like the new Joe Manchin. Only he will be a Republican instead of a Democrat. I think that’s what people on my side are looking at and, of course, you have the 11 Freedom Caucus members who don’t want really Republicans to rely on to really work heavily with Democrats. And that’s just not going to be possible when you are looking at some of these numbers. I’m not speaking alone on that. The incoming Senate majority leader John Thune says it’s going to be very difficult to navigate some of this stuff and especially going back to those Freedom Caucus members when you have just, for example, immigration where they really want clean legislation on one issue, immigration is an example of that just solely having that in the bill. I don’t think we are going to see that going forward. I think we are going to see a lot of the drama that we saw today in December. I think it’s going to be very, very difficult for Speaker Johnson to navigate going forward.”