A Wild Day in the House Could Cost Speaker Mike Johnson His Job

During a House vote Thursday, Speaker Mike Johnson found himself surrounded by members of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, demanding answers about rumored rules changes that would go a long way toward defanging the Freedom Caucus’ veto power over the body. As Johnson was being berated, Wisconsin Rep. Derrick Van Orden interjected to defend the speaker. He began hurling insults at the Freedom Caucus members, including calling Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz “tubby.” Of all the things to say about Gaetz … tubby?

Why is everyone so mad? Well, getting mad is just what Van Orden does, whether the target of his opprobrium is Gaetz, Joe Biden, or a group of teens enjoying themselves.

The most right-wing members of the House GOP, however, were furious at Johnson for threatening to finally do what’s necessary to retake control of his chamber after 15 months of gobsmacking dysfunction.

After months of delays, Johnson has finally found the gumption to allow a package of bills providing security assistance to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan to move through the House. He’s organized it in a clever way. There will be separate votes on each of those three measures, allowing some Republicans to vote for the Israel portion alone and some Democrats to vote for the Ukraine portion alone, with plenty of crossover voting for both. There will also be a separate, fourth vote on a piece of “sidecar” legislation, intended as a legislative sweetener to move certain House priorities through the Senate. It would include measures seizing Russian foreign assets and forcing the Chinese company ByteDance to sell TikTok, among other things. Whatever passes will be rolled into one bill for the Senate to take up.

No sweetener, however, can satisfy the hard-right Republicans who’ve made abandonment of Ukraine a top priority. And Johnson’s decision to push through Ukraine aid—a policy choice he’s now passionately advocating for in a way we hadn’t previously seen—all but guarantees that Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, or some other fellow traveler, will force a vote on removing Johnson from his job, as she threatened to do several weeks ago.

And so Johnson’s maneuver to pass the aid package, and to keep his job, would rely on votes from the opposition party to a very, very unusual extent. Under the process Johnson has laid out, Democratic votes could be needed in every step of the process. That would mean Democrats would vote to advance a rule governing floor debate in the Rules Committee, on that rule in a full House vote, during votes on the legislative package itself, and, perhaps, in a vote to sustain Johnson’s speakership afterward. There is little if any precedent in modern times of a minority party bailing out the majority leadership on procedural votes like this. But Democrats may be willing to swallow it if that’s what it takes to re-arm Ukraine.

What really teed off the right, though, beyond Johnson relying on Democrats to assist Ukraine, was a story about something else Johnson was considering. Punchbowl News reported Thursday morning that House Republican leaders were “discussing using the debate over the $95 billion foreign aid package to make it harder to oust Speaker Mike Johnson.”

Under current House rules, any individual member can force a vote to oust the Speaker. This was the process by which ex-Speaker Kevin McCarthy was removed, and it is the move that Greene has been threatening to deploy against Johnson. It is the central source of the far right’s control over the speaker: Rely on Democratic votes to pass something we disapprove of, and you will lose your job.

It’s poison, and rank-and-file House Republicans are at their wits’ end with the crippling effect it’s had on the ongoing, internationally embarrassing session of Congress. The change under discussion, then, would have raised the threshold for what it takes to force a vote on ousting the speaker. Johnson, then, wouldn’t have needed Democrats to bail him out repeatedly when his speakership would come up for a vote, putting everyone in an unsustainable position.

This is what the Freedom Caucus members—even the ones who previously hadn’t supported an ouster of Johnson—confronted Johnson about on the House floor on Thursday.

Matt Gaetz, who was among those confronting Johnson, told reporters that they “sought clarification” from Johnson that he wouldn’t attempt to change this, and “we did not get the answer that we wanted.” Johnson, Gaetz said, was “equivocating.” (As for the interaction with Van Orden, Gaetz said “the only thing I gleaned from it is that Mr. Van Orden is not a particularly intelligent individual.”)

Gaetz, who led McCarthy’s ouster, had been outspoken against ousting Johnson, even as he was staunchly against sending additional aid to Ukraine. But the rumors of a rule change to release the speaker, once and for all, from the Freedom Caucus’ grip got him to reconsider that.

“My hope was that the motion to vacate would be an elixir that only required one dose for effectiveness,” Gaetz told reporters Thursday. “But sometimes, there are some therapies that require more than one dose. And I hope that’s not the case with the motion to vacate, but we’ll administer that elixir as many times as necessary to save the country.”

By late Thursday afternoon, Johnson had decided against pursuing the rule change. “Any rule change requires a majority of the full House, which we do not have,” he said. “We will continue to govern under the existing rules.” His gumption, in other words, still only goes so far. But he is nevertheless risking his job and his standing among conservatives to support Ukraine, which is gumption enough for the moment.

In spite of this, paranoia is still rippling through the Freedom Caucus. Their members were also worried on Thursday that Republican leaders could attempt a sudden removal of three hardliners from the Rules Committee, another source of the right’s power. Just in case, the Freedom Caucus decided to take shifts with members monitoring the House floor should leaders attempt to pass any of these changes by unanimous consent. That group of members is known as the Freedom Caucus’ Floor Action Response Team—aka “FART.”

The debate happening in Congress now is a weighty one. Members are fighting about America’s role in the world: whether it has an obligation to prop up an independent country facing aggression from its neighbors, and whether it should help other allies defend themselves against a concerted effort from Russia, China, and Iran and its proxies to destabilize the Western-led order. It’s a serious moment.

But also: “FART.”