Since Kevin McCarthy took the gavel in January, the deeply divided House GOP has existed in a state of cognitive dissonance.
Republican leadership assured members they would only fund the government through conservative spending bills, and that a Democratic Senate and President Joe Biden would bend to the GOP’s will—or Republicans would use a government shutdown to bend them to their will.
Republican leadership said the party would pass more Ukraine aid, an idea supported by Democrats and Republicans in the Senate, while conservative voters—and the House lawmakers who represent them—fiercely turned on the notion of another cent for Kyiv.
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McCarthy said he could navigate these issues and stay in power, even though he ceded power through House rule changes that would allow just one member to force a vote on ousting the speaker.
And now, Republican leaders are telling members that, if they just keep trying, if they just keep nominating—even as McCarthy may be poisoning the well against anyone but himself—the House GOP will break the speaker logjam and choose its new leader.
Miraculously, by sheer exhaustion, they may have just done that.
Late Tuesday night, Republicans nominated Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) to be their fourth speaker nominee. The election came not even 10 hours after Rep. Tom Emmer (R-MN) had become the third speaker nominee, and not even six hours after Emmer was forced to drop out.
But Republicans are holding out hope that Johnson—a baritone conservative who traveled in Freedom Caucus circles before becoming the Republican Study Committee chairman—will succeed where everyone else has failed. And the immediate indications were that Johnson is poised to do just that.
Normally, Johnson’s chances of securing the votes on the floor would look shaky at best. While Johnson received 128 votes of the 224-member GOP conference Tuesday night, 43 Republicans wrote in McCarthy and another 29 voted for conservative Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) on the final ballot.
On Tuesday evening, McCarthy and his allies began floating an idea that McCarthy take back the speakership, while Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH)—the party’s second speaker nominee to fail, after the first nominee, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), realized he didn’t have the votes—would take on an “assistant speaker” role.
But Republicans don’t seem ready to reimagine leadership. Instead, they appear ready to throw Johnson into the speakership and let him figure out how to solve all the problems and disappointments that bedeviled McCarthy—on top of dealing with a party that has been bruised and fractured by the last three weeks.
Essentially, Republicans are embracing the cognitive dissonance for just a while longer.
When Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) was asked whether he knew where Johnson stood on Ukraine aid or preventing a government shutdown—issues that Bacon has been passionate about, and which may have led him to help sink Jordan’s speakership bid—Bacon indicated he might be holding Johnson to a different set of standards.
“Obviously I oppose shutdowns and I want to support Ukraine aid,” Bacon said. But he added that he believes in the premise that “you get behind the majority.”
“To his advantage, he doesn’t have a lot of baggage,” Bacon, one of the more moderate Republicans in the conference, said of Johnson. “He’s a nice, decent person. He’s a man of convictions but he treats people very respectfully.”
One of the most right-wing members in the conference, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL)—the initial instigator who pushed McCarthy out—was also almost giddy with the pick.
“I’ve been sitting next to Mike Johnson for seven years on the House Judiciary Committee. I see how thoughtful he is, how skilled he is as an attorney,” Gaetz said. “As chairman of the Republican Study Committee, he showed real effort on fiscal reforms, put downward pressure on spending.”
Gaetz continued that “the Mike Johnson campaign plan for House speaker really aligns with my perspective that we should have single subject spending bills. He got at that microphone and promised us that we are going to move our appropriations bills, and that gives us a lot of hope.”
And even the most wildcard Republicans, the ones who seem simply to revel in the attention of holding up legislative business, look to be supportive of Johnson.
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) told reporters Tuesday night that she was “100 percent” behind Johnson.
“He is an honest man, a truthful man, a trustworthy man, and will be a great leader for the conference,” she said.
Johnson is moving at breakneck speed to solidify his speakership. He appears to have enough support to muscle through his bid without answering any of the questions GOP speaker nominees before him were subject to. (At a brief press conference after he won the nomination late Tuesday night, Johnson said he would only take a few questions “because we’re all pretty weary.”)
When a reporter asked Johnson if he stood by his efforts to overturn the 2020 election—Johnson not only voted against certifying the electoral college hours after a bloody insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, but he was also the lead author of an amicus brief for a Texas lawsuit to overturn the election—he passed on answering.
“Next question,” he said, as Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) told the reporter to “Shut up!”
Pressed on Ukraine funding—one of the issues that helped undo McCarthy’s speakership—Johnson once again took a pass.
“We’re not doing any policy tonight,” Johnson said, as members flanking him booed the question and, in Foxx’s case, told the reporter to “Go away!”
Just last week, Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) insisted he wouldn’t vote for Jordan because the Judiciary Chairman wouldn’t acknowledge that Trump lost the 2020 election fair and square. There’s nothing to indicate that Johnson would make that admission or express regret over his intense efforts to overrule voters.
Yet Buck appears onboard. He told CNN late Tuesday that Johnson would likely win the speakership on Wednesday and didn’t signal any of his own opposition.
The key to Johnson’s success? Republicans are just tired.
GOP members emerging from their late Tuesday closed-door election—their second of the day—emphasized just how exhausting the process has been.
Asked what set Johnson apart from McCarthy, Emmer, and Jordan, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) said it was “possible there’s just an amount of exhaustion setting in.”
“Or, I think, a recognition that this can’t go on forever,” he continued.
Indeed, Republicans finally seem to admit they have to find a way out of the circle of failed speaker candidates.
After Johnson was elected speaker, Republicans held a roll call vote to determine who may oppose Johnson on the floor. While 19 Republicans were absent from the vote, only three members indicated they weren’t ready to support Johnson on Wednesday.
One of those holdouts, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), has been vocal that he doesn’t think Johnson can get the votes.
“He’s uniquely positioned to lose 30 votes on either side of the conference,” Massie said before the election Tuesday night.
But that looks more like projection than an accurate prediction—at least at this moment.
Johnson plans to go to the House floor Wednesday at noon, before GOP opposition can really crystallize against him. And absent a sudden change of heart, Johnson appears to be the unlikely Republican to break the House GOP from its string of failed speaker candidates.
Ironically, McCarthy’s last-minute bid to potentially reinstall himself as a speaker—with Jordan getting a new position in leadership too—may have actually provided the impetus for some of the GOP’s most cantankerous members to fall in line.
Mace told reporters Tuesday night that she firmly believed McCarthy was behind the effort to get Republicans to write his name in on the latest round of ballots.
“It was definitely organized,” Mace said. “There’s no way that it wasn’t.”
She went on to say McCarthy was having a “meltdown” because his handpicked successors had all failed and the conference was finally selecting someone outside of his circle of influence.
“I mean, come on,” Mace said.
The combination of exhaustion and anger seems to finally be enough to get someone over the line.
The problem for Johnson, however, is that he hasn’t reckoned with any of the underlying issues that undid McCarthy. He’s promising to do appropriations bills one issue at a time, and he’s continuing the charade that the Democratic Senate and Democratic president will buckle under the House GOP’s slender pressure.
While Scalise, Emmer, and Jordan were grilled over how they would approach stopgap resolutions to fund the government to avoid a shutdown, or over how they would approach aid to Ukraine and Israel, members weren’t clear on how Johnson addressed those questions privately—or if he even addressed them at all.
For some on the right flank, any leadership member who was anywhere near McCarthy’s deals to extend the debt limit, or his move to push a stopgap spending bill to avoid a shutdown in September, was suspect. That included Scalise and Emmer, the conference’s No. 2 and No. 3 under McCarthy. (Johnson voted for the debt limit increase, but against the September stopgap funding bill.)
But when he was pressed at a private candidate forum, even Jordan admitted that he would have to enact another continuing resolution to avoid a looming Nov. 17 shutdown.
The irony that Jordan would likely have been given a pass by the right flank for doing what McCarthy had just done exposes a deeper driving factor behind the House GOP’s dysfunction.
It appears Johnson—who is well-liked and respected above all else—might get some of that grace. At least, for now.
“He has credibility in spades,” said Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-ND). “Now, this job has a way of making that go away in a hurry. But he has a better chance than most of making it happen.”
