Speaker Mike Johnson is in an extraordinarily unenviable position.
More than 10 months into his speakership, Johnson finds himself in the same pickle that’s plagued his GOP predecessors. For Johnson — a real movement conservative who has a good relationship with former President Donald Trump — the experience as a Republican speaker was supposed to be different. Yet it’s exactly the same.
With just 19 days until the federal funding deadline, Johnson is pushing a bill that most lawmakers and Congress watchers understand is dead on arrival — a six-month stopgap package with the SAVE Act attached to it. The stated objective is to ensure election integrity, which Johnson termed a “righteous” pursuit and Trump says is needed to save the country. The practical objective is to try to establish a House GOP negotiating position in the face of unified Democratic and White House opposition.
Johnson’s detractors are aplenty — especially inside the House Republican leadership, where the speaker’s seemingly earnest determination is being met quietly with sneers, jeers and head shaking.
Just days after Johnson unveiled his proposal, he pulled it from consideration Wednesday. The speaker announced that he’d deputized House Majority Whip Tom Emmer to try to convince the more than a dozen Republicans who are opposed to support the bill.
“This is his priority,” Emmer responded when asked if Johnson’s task was doable. “And he’s leaning in on it.”
But is it doable? “Everything’s doable,” Emmer insisted.
With all due respect to Emmer, not everything is doable. And there’s lots of evidence that the path of least resistance — a clean funding bill until mid-December — is where the House will end up.
However, please consider Johnson’s plight for a moment.
– The Louisiana Republican has Trump demanding that he should shut down the government unless Democrats agree to the SAVE Act. Yet Johnson told us in an interview this week that he doesn’t believe federal agencies should shut down. Even Trump’s top allies on the Hill — such as House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) — don’t want that either.
– The speaker has a tiny majority and a GOP that’s deeply divided on both its goals and the strategy for achieving them.
– Johnson faces an election in 54 days, where his fragile majority is at risk.
– On the other side of Nov. 5, Johnson faces a potentially brutal lame duck session. How that session goes depends largely on what happens on Election Day. There are too many variables to get into everything here. But let’s just say government funding may be the simplest of his worries then.
– And at some point during that lame-duck period, Johnson faces an internal GOP election of his own, either for speaker or House minority leader. Johnson will have to justify the decisions he made as speaker and the election results.
So Johnson’s handling of the CR is more than just a straightforward tactical decision. It has implications for how the rest of the year will go and could help determine Johnson’s station in the leadership.
Asked how much Johnson’s spending strategy will factor into the future leadership race, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who is against the CR, told us: “Heavily… We can’t keep doing it this way.”
Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) predicted Johnson would hang on to power if Republicans keep the House and Trump wins the White House.
But on the flip side, “It’s going to be difficult” for Johnson if that doesn’t happen, Jackson added.
“There’s going to be a big shakeup [in leadership] if we lose the House, and certainly if we lose the House and the White House,” Jackson said in an interview.
In the PM edition Wednesday night, we ran down what Johnson’s options are to resolve this mess — and yes, it’s a mess.
In short, Johnson can try to get a six-month clean CR through the House. This would help him avoid a gigantic omnibus at year’s end.
But losing the SAVE Act would cause him flack on the right. Plus, the House would need to approve a pricey set of anomalies, provisions that provide funding to specific federal programs during the covered period.
Johnson could shorten the stopgap bill to three months and continue to insist on the SAVE Act. Yet that would still be dead on arrival in the Senate and would also lose conservatives like Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), who told us he’d only support the six-month timeframe.
That’s why a clean three-month CR is widely seen as inevitable at this point. Yet that also carries serious risks for Johnson. That means he’d be trying to cut a deal with Democrats on a massive end-of-year spending package that conservatives will hate while also trying to convince those same conservatives to keep him in power.
It’s way too early to get deep into just who could challenge Johnson. But many Republicans look at Jordan — who has run for both speaker and minority leader in the past — as a prime candidate. We asked Jordan what Johnson should do.
“We gotta get the votes, this is obvious,” Jordan said. “Get the votes, put it on the floor.”
— Jake Sherman and Melanie Zanona
