President Joe Biden congratulated House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who won the speakership after 15 rounds of voting, just after midnight Saturday morning.
“Jill and I congratulate Kevin McCarthy on his election as Speaker of the House,” the president wrote in a statement Saturday morning.
‘POLITICAL STUNT’: WHITE HOUSE DINGS GOP LEADER MCCARTHY FOR BORDER VISIT
“As I said after the midterms, I am prepared to work with Republicans when I can and voters made clear that they expect Republicans to be prepared to work with me as well. Now that the leadership of the House of Representatives has been decided it is time for that process to begin,” Biden added.
McCarthy’s win comes on the eve of Biden visiting the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas, for the first time as president. The trip is ahead of meetings next week in Mexico City and comes after numerous complaints by Republicans about border security and the overwhelming amount of fentanyl crossing the border, causing one of the deadliest overdose crises in the United States.
In November, McCarthy had vowed as speaker he would secure the border and invited the president to travel with him to visit the southern border.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre had slammed McCarthy’s visit to the border as a “political stunt.”
During the same visit, McCarthy had called on Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to resign and threatened impeachment.
“If Secretary Mayorkas does not resign, House Republicans will investigate every order, every action and every failure, and will determine whether we can begin an impeachment inquiry,” McCarthy said at the time.
In addition to investigating the homeland security secretary, McCarthy had laid out Republican priorities and investigations into the Biden administration, including taking on China for the flood of fentanyl bought from China by Mexican cartels.
“You first do a very frontal attack on China to stop the poison from coming,” McCarthy told CNN.
Biden announced on Thursday that the administration would immediately begin turning away migrants from Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua who cross the border from Mexico illegally, but would accept 30,000 people per month from these countries for two years.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Among the many concessions that McCarthy made to the group of conservative holdouts that helped him win the speakership was reportedly a vow to enact specific border policy legislation.
