WASHINGTON, D.C.—House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) joined Fox News Channels’ The Daily Briefing with Dana Perino to discuss President Trump’s work to combat Russian aggression, the Goodlatte-McCaul immigration reform bill, and the importance of preventing Democrats’ from acting on their plans to raise taxes on American workers and families.

 

Click here or on the image above to watch the interview.

 

On President Trump’s response to Russian’ aggression:

“I applaud President Trump in taking this strong decisive action against Russia. If you look at what they did in our elections, he’s finally taking action when the previous administration didn’t. If you look at what President Trump recently did just a few weeks ago to finally sell javelin missiles to our friends, the Ukraine, so that they can push back on Russia’s aggression in the Ukraine. These are strong decisive steps that our allies have been calling on us to take for years. I’m glad we finally have a president, Donald Trump, who is willing to support our allies and push back on Russia’s aggression. 

“First of all, if you look at the work that the House Intelligence Committee has done to identify the problems, they’re going to be coming out with a report real soon. That will have specific recommendations to Congress, as well as, to Secretaries of State in each state. Ultimately, elections are run in all 50 of the states and their Secretaries of State are responsible. We’re going to be giving them more tools and we’re going to be identifying problems that we can address. President Trump, actually, took real decisive action and there are a lot of other things he’s doing. Again, the selling of javelin missiles in Ukraine is going to be a game changer to give them the ability to push back against those Russian tanks that are coming in and to push back on Putin’s aggression. It’s about time. In so many cases, we’re seeing with President Trump that he’s supporting our allies. He’s doing it in Israel. He’s pushing back against the Iran deal. He’s pushing back against North Korea’s aggression towards a nuclear weapon. I’m glad we finally have a president standing up for America.”

On the Goodlatte-McCaul immigration reform bill:

“The good news is, Dana, that we are working on a really good bill in the house. I’m a cosponsor of the Goodlatte-McCaul bill, which authorizes and starts moving forward with building the wall and securing our border. It fixes the DACA problem and ends chain migration and ends this visa lottery system—so many broken parts of our legal immigration system—and makes it work again. I think that’s a really good approach and it finally solves a real problem that Democrats refused to solve when they were in the majority.

I’m not sure if it fits in the spending bill, but again a lot of work is being done in the House. as the Majority Whip, I just had a meeting with Chairman Goodlatte yesterday on some of those issues in the Goodlatte-McCaul bill that we’re working on with our members to get more people to yes. We have another meeting later today on that. DACA and all immigration issues are very complicated and complex but we’re working through those complex issues to try to solve these real problems that were frankly, Dana, created when Barack Obama said to thousands of people across the country or across south and central America, he said, come here illegally, bring your kids here illegally, and he said, America would just look the other way and somebody else will have to figure out the problem. That’s what Barack Obama did with DACA. We’re finally working on a solution.”

On tax reform:

“Let’s stay big and let’s stay bold. Kevin Brady is as good as it gets. It was his bill, H.R. 1, that cut taxes for nine out of ten Americans, who are seeing more money in their pocketbook and over 400 major companies—that list is growing—who have given bonuses and pay raises to their workers. We’re going to continue to work on getting this economy back on track. The Democrats, by the way, just recently said if they get the majority back and Nancy Pelosi is Speaker, they’ll reverse that success we’re having and they would raise taxes on families and on businesses. What we want to do is make the tax cuts permanent. Rodney Davis from Illinois has a great bill to do just that. I’d like to see that bill move forward and there’s a lot of interest. Hopefully, it would be bipartisan, but we thought the idea of cutting taxes for families would be bipartisan. Nancy Pelosi decided that they wanted to block that benefit to American families. We got it through anyway and now we’re seeing the benefits in our economy. Let’s keep building on that success. President Trump has been right there with us every step of the way saying let’s help rebuild the middle class, let’s bring jobs back to America and we’re seeing it happen. Now’s not time to turn back the clock and let Nancy Pelosi be Speaker. That’s why November is so important. In the meantime, let’s continue to be bold and build on this success.”