Republicans have spent months assuring voters they wouldn’t do what Democrats have claimed they would do if they win control of Congress and the White House. They wouldn’t try and repeal the health care law known as Obamacare. They wouldn’t repeal a critical program creating tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs.
But in the last week of the 2024 campaign, several top Republicans let slip comments indicating their desired agenda if they return to power next year, including dismantling popular government programs that have bipartisan support in Congress.
On Friday, House Speaker Mike Johnson said House Republicans would seek to repeal the CHIPS and Science Act a bipartisan law whose federal investments in semiconductor factories have ushered in a manufacturing renaissance, adding thousands of new jobs, including in many battleground Republican districts across the country.
“I expect that we probably will but we haven’t developed that part of the agenda yet, we gotta get over the election first,” Johnson told Syracuse University student journalist Luke Radel while campaigning with Representative Brandon Williams in his central New York district on Friday.
Williams, one of the most vulnerable Republican incumbents this cycle who was elected by just one percentage point in 2022, awkwardly pushed back against the speaker, calling the law “hugely impactful” for his community.
“I would remind him night and day how important the CHIPs Act is,” Williams said of Johnson, who stood at his side, noting the law is helping finance a $100 billion Micron chipmaking facility in the Syracuse area.
The speaker attempted to walk back his comments soon after in a statement, apologising “profusely” to Williams and claiming that he misheard the reporter, even though the question was clear as day. He also said the law, which poured $54 billion into the semiconductor manufacturing industry, “is not on the agenda for repeal.”
But the damage was done, and Democrats immediately pounced on his comments.
“What I would like to thank Speaker Johnson for is his honesty and his forthrightness about what they plan to do with a Republican majority in the House of Representatives,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez said on Friday evening in an interview on MSNBC. “I want everyone in Buffalo to know you heard it straight from the horse’s mouth.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a main proponent of the CHIPS Act, also weighed in with a post on social media. “The Republican Speaker of the House just told the tens of thousands of construction workers building New York and America’s future they want to send them pink slips ASAP,” Schumer wrote.
Johnson also sparked a firestorm earlier in the week when he criticised the Affordable Care Act during an event in Pennsylvania and promised that “health care reform’s going to be a big part of the agenda” if Republicans are in power next year.
After an attendee at the event asked him, “No Obamacare?” Johnson responded, “No Obamacare.”
“The ACA is so deeply ingrained, we need massive reform to make this work, and we got a lot of ideas on how to do that,” he added.
The speaker later said his comments were misinterpreted, saying in a statement that he “offered no such promise to end Obamacare” by acknowledging that “the policy is ‘deeply ingrained’ in our health care system.” But Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign pointed to his remarks as more evidence of the Republican Party’s intended goals if they win a majority next year.
“Health care is on the ballot this November. Speaker Mike Johnson is making it clear — if Donald Trump wins, he and his Project 2025 allies in Congress will make sure there is ‘no Obamacare,’” Harris campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said in a statement.
Another Republican also got into hot water over comments about the Affordable Care Act on Friday. In Pennsylvania, Republican Senate candidate David McCormick, who’s running to unseat Senator Bob Casey, said he opposes a popular provision of the law that allows dependents to stay on their parents’ health insurance plan up to the age of 26.
“Is that Obamacare, a result of Obamacare? I’m not for that. I got to get my kids working,” McCormick told a voter about the provision, according to audio posted Friday by the progressive outlet The Heartland Signal.
Asked by the woman if he wanted to repeal the law outright, McCormick said he wanted to reform it and “reduce the cost for folks on Obamacare.”
These are only the latest self-inflicted wounds from top Republicans giving Democrats fodder in the closing days of the 2024 election. The backlash to racist comments about Puerto Rico made by a comedian at a Trump rally in New York City’s Madison Square Garden has grown steadily this week. And billionaire Trump donor Elon Musk caused another political headache for the Republican nominee’s campaign after he said that he would subtract trillions from federal spending — and acknowledged the cuts would result in “some temporary hardship” for the country.
Musk claimed that he could easily cut $2 trillion out of the federal government’s more than $6 trillion in annual spending. That kind of reduction would almost certainly require draconian cuts to popular programmes like school lunches and national parks, as well as necessities like transportation and food assistance ― things the Republicans put on the chopping block to some extent in every Congress.