Face the Nation: Rep. French Hill

Interview

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Good morning, Margaret.

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I'm hopeful we can avoid a shutdown.

And the number one thing that I think House Republicans need to do -- and I have certainly urged all my colleagues on this point -- Margaret, is get the other 11 bills that we have not passed during the summer across the House floor. We've only passed one, and the Senate's passed 12.

So, that gives them a distinct advantage over the House in the negotiation for 2024 spending details. And if we want to merit that and have the right kind of negotiation that House conservatives want, then we need to come together and pass those 11 bills as soon as possible, including using a brief continuing resolution, if necessary, in order to get that work done.

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But, you know, this is what's -- I think it is -- it is frustrating.

We don't control the Senate. We don't control the White House. But what we do control is our own appropriations process. And Chairman Kay Granger has written more conservative bills and more conservative funding levels than the Senate, more conservative than the debt ceiling deal that President Biden and Speaker McCarthy agreed to. So that's good.

But to have that negotiating clout, we need to get all those bills passed acro

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A government shutdown is not going to improve that situation. And a long-term continuing resolution only institutionalizes last year's Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden priorities.

I don't think House conservatives want that to happen.

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No, short term -- to me, short term is shorter than that.

I think I would certainly support something in the October time frame to give the House the time it needs to complete -- complete these other 11 bills. They've come through committee.

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People have their amendments ready. We just need floor time to debate them and pass them.

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I don't have insight on that. I would doubt that, because I don't think Jamie Comer, the chairman of the Oversight Committee, or Jim Jordan, the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, think that's a good idea.

I don't believe they've even remotely completed their work on the kind of detailed investigations and quality work that Speaker McCarthy is expecting both those committees to produce before someone goes to an impeachment activity.

We don't want to repeat the mistakes we think that Nancy Pelosi made by prematurely moving to impeachment during the Trump administration.

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Well, look, I think a majority of House Republicans would prefer that those core spending items, not so much the FEMA emergency numbers, but the other numbers, be handled through the existing budget and appropriations process. And that's going to cause concern for a lot of House Republicans, not just conservatives, in the House conference.

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Well, I wanted to see for myself the death and destruction caused by 12 years of Assad's brutality against his own people.

He said: Keep me in office, or I will destroy the country.

And he's certainly done that. Just last week, Russian aircraft flew 41 sorties, killing some 40 people in Syria, including 15 children. So, I went across the border with my colleagues Ben Cline from Virginia and Scott Fitzgerald from Wisconsin, and we met with orphans that had been orphaned at the Wisdom House orphanage, which is supported by wonderful, generous donors here in Little Rock, Arkansas, to see pictures of their kid -- their parents killed by Assad.

What we need is for the whole world to have a political solution to Syria. And let's recognize that this is the first battleground that Vladimir Putin began killing innocent civilians several years before he went into Ukraine.

These are -- this is a failure of the national and global leadership. And we need to continue to take action to find a political solution and cut off Assad's funding, cut off his ability to have a drug trade throughout the world and get help to the people in Northwest Syria that -- that are victims of the February earthquakes.

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You bet.

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