House Speaker Mike Johnson wages precarious bid for reelection
WASHINGTON >> Speaker Mike Johnson’s bid to be reelected to his post remained precarious today, as he continued to try to tamp down resistance from the most conservative lawmakers in his ranks a day ahead of the vote on the House floor.
Johnson received the endorsement of President-elect Donald Trump for another term Monday, and no other Republican has thrown a hat into the ring to challenge him. But several GOP lawmakers have vented dissatisfaction with his performance in the top job and suggested that they want a new leader.
The problem for Johnson is that in order to win reelection, he will need nearly unanimous support from his fractious House Republican Conference. If every lawmaker is present and voting and Democrats support one of their own, Johnson will be able to lose only one GOP vote — and one Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, has already declared that he will oppose him.
Other hard-right Republicans have declined to say how they plan to vote Friday, saying they are undecided.
“We’ll have a margin of probably two votes tomorrow,” Johnson said on “Fox and Friends” this morning, “but I think we’ll get it done.”
Johnson said he had been calling “every single” House Republican over the holidays. “I think the reason they’re all going to vote yes is this: We’re shifting into a brand-new paradigm. We have unified government that begins tomorrow.”
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He is hoping to avoid the chaotic stretch that plagued former Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California in 2023, when he twisted in the wind for four days as he scrounged for the votes to become speaker, a feat that took 15 ballots and had lawmakers nearly coming to blows. Ten months later, hard-right Republicans deposed McCarthy, casting Republicans into the wilderness for nearly three weeks without a leader until they finally coalesced around Johnson.
In the weeks after the November election, as Republicans reveled in victories that would hand them a governing trifecta — control of the House, Senate and White House — Johnson seemed to be on a glide path to reelection.
But in December, he infuriated House Republicans, especially those on the hard right, when he struck a bipartisan spending deal to avert a government shutdown before the holidays that kept federal spending flat and included a bevy of unrelated policy measures.
After Trump and Elon Musk effectively tanked that deal, the president-elect implored Johnson and House Republicans to raise the debt limit in whatever spending bill they ultimately passed. But ultraconservatives balked at that request, and Johnson ended up having to strip the measure from the final bill, a move that left Trump fuming.
Johnson spent New Year’s Day at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida estate, to “map out some strategy,” he told a Shreveport, Louisiana-based radio station. He said Tuesday that Trump had originally intended to roll out his endorsement Jan. 1 but that he nudged the president-elect to do so earlier.
“I called him yesterday and said, ‘Mr. President, let’s go ahead and do that,’” Johnson said with a chuckle.
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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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