It would be hard to argue that a different speaker would have been any more effective given the internal party dynamics.
After the election, especially with Republicans expected to lose control of the House, there are going to be a lot of assessments of Speaker Mike Johnson’s leadership. Two former senior staffers, Dan Ziegler and Jay Fields, who served as Johnson’s policy director and deputy policy director, have made an extensive case for their former boss, which you can read here.
Johnson’s crowning achievement was wrangling a fragile majority around the sweeping One Big Beautiful Bill, which, in addition to renewing President Trump’s first-term tax cuts, rolled back some Democratic initiatives such as green-energy tax credits and included some reforms to Medicaid.
Among other accomplishments, Ziegler and Fields go on to note that under Johnson’s leadership, the House:
- Immediately enacted the Laken Riley Act, the first significant immigration enforcement and border security bill to become law since 1996; signed into law by President Trump on January 29, 2025.
- Enacted the GENIUS Act, the first major legislation creating a regulatory framework for the digital assets industry; signed into law by President Trump on July 18, 2025.
- Enacted the president’s historic Rescissions Act of 2025, the first successful rescissions package since 1999. This effort eliminated $9 billion in wasteful spending and defunded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a goal sought by conservatives for decades; signed into law by President Trump on July 24, 2025.
My own assessment would be more mixed. I would have liked to see Congress assert itself more during an era of American history in which successive presidents have been testing the limits of executive power. Trump’s arbitrary and destructive tariffs were a perfect example of where Congress should have stepped in. Not only did Johnson decline to do so, he tried to block efforts in the House to rescind the tariffs.
Also, while Ziegler and Fields point to Republican victories in appropriations and various nips and tucks to government spending, the reality is that the federal debt has kept growing, with the annual deficit having reached $2 trillion in the fiscal year that just concluded. Given that, it’s hard for me to get too excited about a $9 billion rescissions law.
Having said all that, there is a practical question of what the alternative to Johnson would have been. We saw how a few reckless actors in the House were able to oust Johnson’s predecessor as Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy. And it was hard to find a replacement who was able to straddle the line between the traditional conservatives, moderates, populists, and outright arsonists in the Republican caucus. Johnson had to legislate with only a handful of votes to spare, so a few representatives could tank any bill. While I have my criticisms of the past several years, especially on the spending front, it would be hard to argue that a different speaker would have been any more effective given the internal party dynamics.