Judging Johnson and what comes next

IN THIS EDITION

The impact of the Mike Johnson furor

House Dems talk FISA, DHS funding

McDuffie: D.C. needs a fighter, not an ideologue

ICYMI: AI Innovators on cybersecurity

THE TOP

The impact of the Mike Johnson furor

Happy Tuesday morning.

Tonight at 8 p.m. is the deadline for Iranian officials to cut a deal with President Donald Trump to re-open the Strait of Hormuz. Trump has said that if there’s no deal, he’d “blow up the whole country,” including ordering attacks on Iran’s infrastructure and energy production facilities.

It seems like Trump wants a deal, and it behooves him to get one. For its part, Iran continued attacks on Israel and Saudi Arabia into Tuesday, although Iranian officials suggested there were positive signs coming out of Pakistani-led peace talks. There’s no deal yet, however. World financial markets are steady, although the price of oil keeps rising.

On the House GOP. The House Republican Conference is quiet right now with members out on recess. The Department of Homeland Security shutdown is now in Day 52.

The House returns April 14, and the GOP leadership isn’t going to bring up the DHS funding bill that the Senate sent back across the Capitol last week.

Speaker Mike Johnson and the House Republican leadership team will wait until there’s some progress on a GOP reconciliation push before they schedule a vote on the bill to fund nearly all of DHS, except for ICE and border patrol.

There is a healthy amount of anger at Johnson among his rank-and-file members right now. This morning, we want to explore whether that furor is fair, and what the speaker can and likely will do to get out of it.

The backdrop. One of the cardinal sins of being a congressional leader is guiding your membership into a box canyon with no way out — and then immediately reversing course.

That’s what House Republicans feel that Johnson did when he said that the GOP-controlled Senate’s original DHS funding bill — passed by unanimous consent — was a “joke” and the product of some nefarious plot hatched by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

In response to the Senate’s action, Johnson had House Republicans pass a 60-day stopgap funding bill for DHS, which rank-and-file GOP lawmakers immediately demanded the Senate accept. Then House members went home for this two-week recess.

With the chamber out of session, Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Johnson got on the same page and issued a joint statement saying that the Senate’s DHS bill — the very one that the speaker dumped on — was the answer to ending the funding impasse.

Johnson felt like Thune left him twisting in the wind, and now Johnson has to deal with the blowback.

What Johnson did, unintentionally his allies say, was have his House Republican Conference stick their necks out for a negotiating position that he immediately abandoned.

It was always clear that Senate Democrats weren’t going to allow the passage of a 60-day DHS funding bill since they rejected similar measures a number of times during the preceding weeks. The Senate is also unwilling to end the filibuster. So Senate Republicans’ only choice was to pass a bill that Democrats would support.

It doesn’t take the second coming of Henry Clay to see that Johnson’s negotiating position was extraordinarily weak in this case. When we ran the headline “House GOP leadership decides to continue DHS shutdown” immediately after the GOP leadership rejected the Senate’s bill, the speaker’s leadership team was up in arms. But it was the only way to assess the situation.

Johnson’s allies say that they reacted how they did because Senate Republicans folded.

“My question for everybody who doesn’t like what we did is give me a better idea,” Thune countered.

The fallout. The House Republican Conference is given to rash, nasty infighting and recriminations. House Republicans had a nearly three-hour conference call on Friday. There was plenty of bellyaching about the leadership’s strategy and the Senate’s alleged weakness.

Even some of the GOP leadership’s closest allies say they’re furious with Johnson for what they see as a bait-and-switch tactic on the DHS bill. The Main Street Caucus’ text chain was lighting up with frustration.

But let’s say this: We don’t think that House Republicans are going to try to dump Johnson. He has the seemingly unshakable support of Trump. His committee chairs support him. There’s a razor-thin GOP majority. Plus, Johnson is raising a ton of money. Do House Republicans really think it wise to dump their speaker 210 days before the midterm elections when their poll numbers are in the dumps? Come on.

Senate GOP leaders are fuming at the situation too. Thune has answered the critics of his approach with “show me a better option.”

The deeper frustration for Senate Republicans is that they feel like they worked hard to frame the shutdown around Democrats’ refusal to support immigration enforcement, only to have House Republicans choose to prolong the impasse.

Some Senate Republicans are also griping privately that Trump’s executive order to pay DHS employees gave Johnson a longer runway to hold out, even though that was intended as a temporary patch. They see it as being in Trump’s interest for the shutdown to end, although the president isn’t acting like it.

The future. Johnson will return to the ongoing DHS mess, with reconciliation on top of that. And then there’s the unpopular Iran war.

Section 702 of FISA expires in two weeks. There’s been significant discontent among House Republicans that the renewal doesn’t include warrant requirements for foreign wiretapping.

Johnson called off consideration of the FISA extension before the recess. Can Johnson jam through a clean extension next week — like he says he’ll do — with all the discontent in GOP ranks? A clean extension would pass with a cross section of House Republicans and Democrats. Does Johnson have to give hardliners amendment votes? There’s a lot at stake here.

— Jake Sherman and Andrew Desiderio

THE MINORITY

House Dems talk FISA, DHS funding

House Democrats convened virtually Monday night to talk strategy ahead of next week when two major bills — FISA reauthorization and funding for the Department of Homeland Security — will be on their plate.

Here’s one piece of news: Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, signaled he’d support a clean reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, per multiple sources on the call.

FISA needs reforms, Himes said, but Congress shouldn’t allow it to lapse when the deadline comes up on April 20.

Republicans may very well need Democratic votes to reauthorize FISA because hardline conservatives are demanding changes to the legislation. Speaker Mike Johnson, the White House and House Intelligence Committee Chair Rick Crawford (R-Ark.) are all pushing for a clean 18-month extension.

But it’s not yet clear how FISA will come to the floor, as we just explained above. If Republican leaders allow a bunch of amendment votes to appease GOP conservatives, it’s possible that Democratic support will disappear.

FISA reauthorization consistently sparks debate over whether its benefit to national security outweighs its potential infringement on privacy and civil liberties.

Coming up. House Democratic leaders also stressed the need for strong attendance in the coming weeks when Congress returns from recess.

We don’t yet know when the House will consider the Senate-passed bill to fund all of DHS except ICE and CBP. Democrats expect to see few defections on this bill because it doesn’t fund the agencies executing President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

— Ally Mutnick, Jake Sherman and Max Cohen

THE DISTRICT X CONGRESS

McDuffie: D.C. needs a fighter, not an ideologue

As Kenyan McDuffie seeks the Democratic nomination for D.C. mayor, he’s warning that congressional Republicans are “attacking us in ways that we have not seen since we got limited Home Rule 50 years ago.”

In an interview, McDuffie said the current moment calls for a “fighter” who can stand up to Republicans while also building coalitions across the aisle.

“You need to be strategic. You can’t be ideological, like some folks who want to be mayor,” McDuffie told us, taking a shot at progressive candidate Janeese Lewis George, his main opponent in the primary race.

This Congress, the Republican-controlled House has dedicated significant time to advancing legislation exerting congressional authority over how the District enforces public safety. President Donald Trump has also deployed the National Guard inside D.C., with that likely to continue to continue throughout his time in office.

While Republicans claim their bills are common sense reactions to a burgeoning crime crisis, D.C. Democrats like McDuffie say it’s an attack on self-governance.

“They are overriding our laws. They’re meddling in our local budget, they’re costing us real money and local taxpayer dollars, and they’re threatening to take away our right to govern ourselves entirely,” McDuffie said.

McDuffie is a former city council member who worked on the Hill for Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton after graduating from Howard University. McDuffie said he “learned from Eleanor firsthand how to advocate for statehood and how to fight to protect Home Rule.”

McDuffie’s Hill outreach. But McDuffie insists that in order to promote D.C.’s interests on Capitol Hill, “the mayor has to make the case directly to members on either side of the aisle.”

“You can’t be sort of looking just at Democrats. I think that’s naive,” McDuffie said.

McDuffie points to his role negotiating the land transfer for RFK Stadium as an example of how working with Hill Republicans can bear fruit.

“I’ve spent time in Congress talking to members in both chambers and talking to members and staff on either side of the aisle,” McDuffie said. “We’ve seen success stories like the work between our mayor and the House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer.”

The Democratic primary to succeed retiring Mayor Muriel Bowser — who’s been in office since 2015 — is June 16. In deep-blue D.C., this is the de facto general election.

— Max Cohen

THE AI INNOVATORS

ICYMI: AI Innovators on cybersecurity

We released the latest installment in our series, The AI Innovators, last week. In this edition, we explored how cybersecurity is becoming more sophisticated as artificial intelligence enables advanced defenses that can respond in a fraction of the time.

From real-time threat detection, automated incident responses and quick data analysis to identify anomalies, AI is already boosting cyber defenses in both government and private organizations.

But AI also complicates cybersecurity efforts by equipping malicious actors with new tools to outmaneuver defense systems.

The heightened risk of cybercrimes isn’t lost on policymakers as they seek the best way to regulate AI and protect the nation’s information systems and infrastructure.

Check out our latest segment on cybersecurity, and listen to the accompanying podcast. You can also read the previous segments focused on health care and education. Check back in on April 16 for our next edition.

– Shania Shelton

AND THERE’S MORE

The special election to replace former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is tonight. Republican Clayton Fuller will face Democrat Shawn Harris.

This is a deep-red district and Fuller is heavily favored to win. But the margin should be telling here. GOP groups poured in money in the closing weeks to help Fuller notch a stronger win.

Fundraising news. Republican Mike LiPetri raised $850,000 in the two months since launching his campaign against Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.).

Suozzi represents a district on Long Island that President Donald Trump won in 2024. LiPetri lost to Suozzi by about four points last cycle.

– Ally Mutnick

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