Mike Johnson managed to avoid a drawn-out battle for the speakership on Friday. His headaches are just getting started.
While Johnson ultimately secured enough votes to remain speaker on the first ballot — after two members switched their votes after further lobbying from Johnson and phone calls with President-elect Donald Trump — the aftermath of his victory made it clear that conservatives see this as a tentative truce.
Hardliners said they have certain expectations for the speaker going forward, and signaled that forcing a vote to oust him is on the table if Johnson doesn’t meet them. The newly adopted rules package requires the support of nine GOP members, up from the current threshold of one, to trigger an ouster vote.
“It's always going to be there. I think our founders wanted it there for a reason as a check,” said Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.),who backed Kevin McCarthy’s ouster last year, when asked by POLITICO if a motion to vacate is on the table. “I really hope it never has to be used again. But we'll see.”
Yet Johnson’s allies are hoping the speaker’s race is an early glimpse of things to come — that Republicans will ultimately get in line on party priorities, even if the process is messy and chaotic. And they’re encouraged by Trump’s repeated support for the speaker, after the incoming president made it clear he’s willing to lobby members and keep them in line, even when Johnson isn’t able to do so.
“I just hope President Trump pounds them into submission,” said Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.).
Regardless, the speakership episode is a reality check about what the next two years have in store for Johnson. His margin is only set to shrink in the near-term as some members leave for positions in the Trump administration, and he can currently only afford to lose one GOP vote on partisan legislation. He’ll need near, if not complete, unity to pass Trump’s agenda on the border, energy and taxes — or anything else. If he relies on Democrats to move must-pass items like spending legislation now that the GOP has total control of Congress, he’ll risk a severe backlash from his right flank.
Johnson’s critics are already drawing lines in the sand. Eleven members of the Freedom Caucus, who comprise the group’s board, circulated a letter to all of their colleagues just as Johnson won the speaker’s vote. It laid out what they believe Johnson should have agreed to and what they want to see in legislation moving forward, including lowering inflation, ending stock trading by members of Congress and other provisions.
And they notably included an indirect salvo at Johnson’s leadership in the letter, saying that “there is always room to negotiate on so-called ‘leadership’ positions under the rules.”
Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.), one of the signatures on the letter, demurred when it was suggested that it seemed like a warning: “It is what it is.”
“It’s there for a reason. It’s about accountability. Mike has laid out a plan and a vision and now he’s got to execute it,” Ogles said about early mentions of speaker-ousting measures, known as the motion to vacate. “And if he doesn’t, you have … some members that will be willing to pull the pin on the hand grenade.”
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), who had declined to publicly support Johnson up until the speakership vote, brushed off questions about the motion to vacate immediately after the speaker’s vote but hinted at “consequences” if Congress couldn’t deliver on certain priorities.
“Let’s make no mistake about it. There will be things that are, in fact, red lines that we need to deliver. We can have no more of the nonsense that happened before Christmas,” Roy said.
The warnings are a flashback to the McCarthy era. Though the former speaker managed to win the speaker’s gavel after 15 ballots, eight Republicans joined Democrats to boot him just 10 months later. Many of those rebels said it was because of his handling of government funding, though the Californian’s allies believe some, namely former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), just had a personal ax to grind.
Johnson has a better relationship with his right flank than McCarthy, as someone who was widely known as a conservative himself before taking the gavel. And he spent the back half of the year working to shore up his relationship with hardline conservatives after a failed ouster effort against him last May. He focused the conference largely on GOP messaging bills, criss-crossed the country helping reelect his members and put some of his critics on key panels, including the Intelligence Committee.
“We don’t want to sound the alarm. This is not what it was after Speaker McCarthy was vacated. That situation has built lines of communication because we don’t want to go through that again,” said Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.).
Jennifer Scholtes and Nicholas Wu contributed to this report.
