Johnson is operating under the growing possibility that his biggest detractors will trigger a snap vote on his speakership just six months into his tenure.
Earlier this week, Representative Thomas Massie (R., Ky.) told reporters that he didn’t have any candidates in mind to replace Speaker Mike Johnson should the low-profile Louisianan soon be ousted from his post.
How quickly things can change on Capitol Hill. “I’ve got dozens of candidates in mind, dozens,” the libertarian-leaning Kentuckian told National Review on Thursday afternoon. Any names he’d like to share with the press? “No.”
Keeping Johnson on his toes seems to be a new pastime of sorts for the speaker’s biggest political adversaries, Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.). The two isolationist members have spent recent days ramping up their threats to trigger a vote on their motion to vacate the chair amid Johnson’s push to muscle a four-part foreign-aid package through the lower chamber this week. Votes on that package are expected over the weekend. As NR reported yesterday:
Most rank-and-file House Republicans are aligned with Johnson’s mainstream, Reaganite Republican view that sending additional aid to Ukraine is the only morally defensible position for the GOP, even as many self-described defense hawks continue to voice frustrations over President Joe Biden’s refusal to clearly articulate what success in the conflict should look like.
But this year’s slim and fractious House GOP majority has given outsize leverage to anti-interventionist Republicans on Capitol Hill who are skeptical of U.S. engagement overseas. For months, this small but vocal crowd of hardline House Republican detractors has expressed vehement opposition to the Senate-passed $95 billion foreign-aid supplemental, with two Republican members even threatening to oust Johnson from the speakership if he continues to push Ukraine aid through the House, no matter his means.
As Johnson navigates this tricky political climate, he may have passed on a prime opportunity to secure his leadership post. Hours after Punchbowl News reported that Johnson and his aides were considering possibly amending the requirement for raising the motion to vacate from its current single-member threshold, the speaker announced that he had ultimately decided against the measure.
“Since the beginning of the 118th Congress, the House rule allowing a Motion to Vacate from a single member has harmed this office and our House majority,” Johnson said in a statement Thursday afternoon. “Recently, many members have encouraged me to endorse a new rule to raise this threshold. While I understand the importance of that idea, any rule change requires a majority of the full House, which we do not have. We will continue to govern under the existing rules.”
That announcement came after Johnson had gotten some backup from other members of House GOP leadership in the press, with majority leader Steve Scalise telling Punchbowl News on Thursday morning that the “the vast majority” of the House GOP conference “supports a higher threshold” and that amending the rule is “something that members are talking about a lot.” Hours later, National Republican Congressional Committee chairman Richard Hudson told NR: “It’s really an imperative that we change the motion to vacate because the one-person threshold is just too low.”
As things stand, Johnson is operating under the growing possibility that his biggest detractors will trigger a snap vote on his speakership just six months into his tenure.
Privately, even some rank-and-file Johnson sympathizers say the new speaker may be a bit out of his depth and that he has struggled to balance the different priorities of competing GOP factions. Others counter that he was dealt a near-impossible hand with such a bare and disagreeable majority and that he’s doing about as well as anyone could given the circumstances.
Those circumstances include a camera-loving contingent of members who complain about him constantly to the press.
Of course, Democrats have their fair share of internal disagreements, with Representative Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) reportedly storming out of a House Democratic caucus meeting today over discussions surrounding sending additional U.S. aid to Israel. But storming out of a closed-door meeting is not the same thing as threatening on live television to hold a snap vote of confidence on your party leader.
Speaking with National Review in the U.S. Capitol on Thursday, Representative Mike Kelly (R., Pa.) struggled to recall the last time a House Democrat made a habit of regularly dunking on Democratic leadership to a sea of reporters — what has become a near-daily occurrence for House Republican hard-liners this Congress when the House is in session.
If only intra-GOP squabbles over this week’s foreign-aid negotiations stayed behind closed doors, Kelly lamented, the House GOP conference would be in better shape: “These are in-house conversations,” he said.
Today is as good a day as ever to reflect for a moment on the first sentence of my “How Mike Johnson Won the Speaker’s Gavel” story, published in these pages on October 26: “In the end, the Republican race for Speaker of the House came down to which candidate had the fewest enemies.”
How quickly things can change on Capitol Hill!