Johnson finds himself in a no-win situation of his own making.
Johnson finds himself in a no-win situation of his own making.
O n Thursday morning, Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman reported that House Speaker Mike Johnson planned to endorse Montana representative Matt Rosendale’s quest to capture his state’s Republican senatorial nomination and square off against Senator Jon Tester in November. This would have pitted Johnson against not just Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and the committees he and his allies control but also nervous Republican donors who believe Rosendale’s nomination would only culminate in a reprise of his 2018 loss to Tester. In the end, however, Johnson changed course.
According to Politico’s Burgess Everett, following “some internal blowback (including from some Trump backers),” Johnson has decided that he “will not endorse Rosendale after all.” Everett’s colleague, Olivia Beavers, confirmed the about-face. “I can confirm that upon reflection, the speaker withdrew his endorsement largely based on the reality that Rosendale is the weaker candidate by far against Tester,” Montana representative Ryan Zinke told her.
Johnson’s reversal is consistent with his confused performance throughout a pivotal week in the federal legislature. The speaker’s missteps all but confirm the apprehensions shared by Republicans who worried that the ouster of Kevin McCarthy from leadership would make for an even more ungovernable GOP conference.
On Tuesday night, Johnson forged ahead with a scheduled vote on impeaching Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas — a vote he had to know would only pass, if it passed at all, by an impossibly small margin. Indeed, he had to understand that because a handful of his own members insisted that they could not support the initiative on constitutional grounds. Its success depended on Democratic absences. And in this case, Democrats declined to play along. Rising from the hospital bed in which he was recovering from a recent surgery, Representative Al Green (D., Texas) made a dramatic return to the House floor and scuttled Mayorkas’s impeachment.
That embarrassment for the House Republican conference was followed shortly thereafter by another. In a bid to put Democrats in the tough spot of having to oppose a standalone bill in support of Israel’s defensive war against Hamas, the speaker put that measure to the floor, too. But he had to do so by appealing to a “suspension of the rules” because his own members on the Rules Committee objected to the bill if it was not accompanied by commensurate spending cuts elsewhere in the budget. That maneuver ensured that the bill would need the support of a two-thirds majority in the House, and it didn’t come close. Indeed, why would it have? Democrats would not consent to being boxed in by the GOP speaker, and his own members had made their objections plain. Johnson had to know he was waltzing into a buzzsaw, but he waltzed on anyway.
In his short time as speaker, Johnson has made a bad habit of pursuing losing propositions. He has not gotten his way on votes related to appropriations, tax policy, and even motions to expel his own members. And his members are starting to grumble about it. The disunity that typifies the House Republican conference has become a self-perpetuating condition. The more fractious it becomes, the more inclined its members are to speak openly of the resentments they are cultivating toward their colleagues. Those resentments foster reciprocal resentments, and on it goes. This dynamic ensures that this week will not see an end to the humiliating spectacles over which Johnson presides.
The GOP’s unenviable condition was foreseeable. The problem its most dogmatic members attempted to solve with McCarthy’s ouster wasn’t the spinelessness of their leadership but the near impossibility of forging cohesion and unity in a conference with such a small majority. The solution to that problem is to win more elections. The remedy Republican mutineers settled on ended up costing them even more members (McCarthy, knowing full well where he wasn’t wanted, left). Johnson inherited McCarthy’s role by default, only after candidate after candidate proved unable to secure enough GOP votes. Johnson evinced no special managerial skills, nor was he a particularly well-known member of the Republican conference when he assumed the speakership. He just happened to be standing in front of the chair when the music stopped.
But the sacrifice of institutional memory to which Republicans committed themselves with McCarthy’s ouster was a meaningful one. A speaker with that memory might have known that it’s not unprecedented nor especially rare for hospitalized members to suddenly appear on the floor when a crucial vote is on the line. A speaker with that memory might have foreseen the pressure he would bring down on himself by endorsing one of the least electable Republicans in a pivotal race for one of the GOP’s prime senatorial targets this fall. You don’t have to be a parliamentary scholar to know that a vote that requires supermajority support will fail if it is designed to jam the opposition that controls roughly half of the lower chamber, but that would probably help.
If, as seems likely, the Senate passes supplemental legislation stripped of controversial border-security provisions that also restores America’s ordnance stockpiles and provides support to our frontline allies in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, Johnson will face another serious test of his leadership skills. Given the degree to which a small but crucial minority of Republicans seems steadfastly opposed to providing any support to Ukraine in its effort to beat back Russian invaders, Johnson would today seem compelled to rely on Democratic votes for its passage. That would probably cost him his speakership, leading to even more chaos in the conference. If he doesn’t bring up that bill, he leaves America’s allies in the lurch, and Democrats will hang every battlefield setback our partners abroad endure around Republicans’ necks. That, too, would likely cost Johnson the role he occupies, but the authors of his demotion would be the voters in the districts that sweep Republicans out of the majority.
This is a tough spot, but it’s one in which Johnson put himself. These are the problems associated with being the governing party in control of the House of Representatives. If Republicans don’t like or want that responsibility, their conduct only makes it more likely that the voters will relieve them of their burden soon enough.