WASHINGTON – On Wednesday, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) joined NewsNation’s Cuomo with Chris Cuomo to emphasize the need for Members of Congress to take the Hippocratic Oath and "first, do no harm," given that the federal government is more likely to cause or exacerbate problems than to solve them. The senator slammed the Biden administration for implementing strategies that are destroying America: open borders, massive deficit spending resulting in 40-year high inflation, the war on fossil fuels, and the embarrassing and dangerous surrender in Afghanistan, which emboldened our enemies.

Watch the full interview with Chris Cuomo here. 

On the federal government exacerbating problems instead of solving them 

“What we ought to do here in Congress is take the Hippocratic Oath and ‘first, do no harm.’ And certainly what I've seen is that Congress so often doesn't fully debate the issue, doesn't fully understand it. If you use the analogy that our federal government is a ship of state and on the hull, over the decades, you've just developed all these barnacles, the solution is pretty obvious, just scrape the barnacles off right? Here in Washington, D.C., we just add another barnacle on. It's an imperfect barnacle, just slows it down even further. So unfortunately, the federal government doesn't solve too many problems. It exacerbates many, causes many. And so we ought to first do no harm.”

 

On being straightforward and honest with the American people

“I care about this country. I wasn't going run for a third term. One of the reasons I did is nobody was advocating for the vaccine injured. Very few people were acknowledging what a miserable failure our response to COVID was. And so that was one of the main reasons. But again, I love this country. I think we are in peril right now. I think if you had designed a strategy to destroy this country, you'd be hard-pressed to come up with a better game plan than what Biden is implementing: the open borders, massive deficit spending resulting in 40-year high inflation, the war on fossil fuels, the embarrassing and dangerous surrender in Afghanistan, which emboldened our enemies. People like Putin. They're on the move because they sense weakness. So listen, I love this country. If I can help it in any way, shape or form by just being straightforward and honest. There aren’t many people like me here in Washington, D.C., that just, you know, basically say what I believe is the truth and do it without really concern about political career or certainly not being reelected.”

 

On the Senate border negotiations debacle

“As chairman of Homeland Security I held more than 30 hearings on it. I actually developed something with [Senator] Kyrsten Sinema called Operation Safe Return. DHS took that. That morphed into Remain in Mexico, a very successful program to secure the border. So I try to bring that expertise to bear. The problem with the McConnell bill, I'll call it, because he's the one that was the mastermind of this thing. It was worse than doing nothing. It actually decreased presidential authority. And the Supreme Court has said that existing law exudes deference to the executive branch. It's true. President Trump had the authority. It's been weakened, by some court decisions. But even that weakened authority he used to secure the border. President Biden used that exact same authority to open it up. So he has the authority to do it. What we asked for in those negotiations is a forcing mechanism, something to force President Biden to secure the border, to use that authority, because he wants an open border. His Democratic colleagues, they want an open border. It's hard to explain why when it's such a clear and present danger. But again, we weren't looking for an immigration bill. We were looking for a forcing mechanism to force President Biden to secure the border…

“Let me explain. First of all, it basically codified a lot of the open-border policies. It would have normalized thousands of immigrants a day. The nastiest part about that bill is, not the 5,000 threshold that made it mandatory to stop processing asylum claims, it was the 4,000 discretionary threshold. That implied, and it would’ve been used in the courts later on, that the President doesn't have the authority. Trump had it. So why would you take it away by codifying it? And then even worse, , that discretionary authority would only last three years. So that bill was worse than doing nothing…

“Trust me, we had we had no idea what McConnell had up his sleeve, [Senator] Murphy said ‘McConnell wrote that bill.’ It was his debacle. We had no idea till the very thing came out and it killed itself in less than 24 hours. McConnell even voted against it, that's how bad it was.” 

###