The Walls Are Closing in on Mike Johnson’s Speakership

After a two-week recess away from Capitol Hill, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) was clearly hoping his House GOP colleagues would come back to Washington, put past issues behind them, and tackle the current challenges in a spirit of understanding and unity.

That didn’t happen.

As one senior GOP staffer put it, what Johnson actually came back to is best described as a “clusterfuck.”

Referencing just one of Johnson’s controversial moves—this time, his decision to delay sending articles of impeachment for Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to the Senate—the aide said it was “another example of the clusterfuck that is the House under Speaker Johnson.”

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The Mayorkas impeachment has been a chronic headache for Johnson’s speakership, especially after his leadership team bungled their whip count and embarrassingly failed to impeach the Biden official on their first attempt in February. Eventually, Republicans muscled through the impeachment, but after announcing plans to finally send the impeachment articles to the Senate this week, Johnson backtracked on Tuesday, riling up House Republicans who were eager to celebrate just some partisan victory—one of their only ones—this Congress.

“He needs to stop listening to his staff and start listening to GOP members,” the aide told The Daily Beast.

As an embattled Johnson nears his sixth month of the speakership, the criticism is nothing new. And while the self-inflicted wound of the Mayorkas impeachment is his latest humiliation, it’s hardly his only one. It might even turn out to be a footnote in Johnson’s challenging week ahead.

That’s because the speaker is trying to navigate two of the most fraught issues in his conference: a controversial surveillance program due for reauthorization and Ukraine aid. Just about every lawmaker on Capitol Hill recognizes that Johnson is in an unwinnable, and unworkable, position.

“Certainly, the speaker has a tough time right now trying to figure out, sort of, the path forward with the slim majority that we have,” Republican Study Committee Chair Rep. Kevin Hern (R-OK) told The Daily Beast on Tuesday.

Hanging over all these discussions is a motion to oust Johnson—initiated by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA)—that she could force a vote on this week. If all Democrats support the motion, as they did when Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) brought the motion against then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), it would only take three GOP votes to remove Johnson, though Greene could also wait until Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) retires from Congress on April 19, which could lower the margin of success on a motion to vacate to two votes, depending on absences.

Greene’s motion—which she initiated on March 22 in a procedural form that didn’t force a vote—was ostensibly over Johnson’s agreement with Democrats to keep the government open. But it’s come to represent a sword of Damocles hanging over Johnson for a litany of reasons. It’s the physical manifestation of discontent that’s been mounting on Johnson’s right flank for months.

Ever since Johnson took the gavel in October, there’s been disagreement—in a House GOP majority predisposed to disagreement—over spending, strategy, and leadership style. But Greene’s effort to remove Johnson was a new mark of fury with the speaker.

Her blitz against Johnson is the most serious retaliation against his speakership yet. But two weeks have passed since Greene filed the motion, and there hasn’t been another member to come out publicly and say they will support the motion, though plenty of lawmakers have been less than definitive about how they would vote on it.

Still, Greene has conspicuously not forced a vote on her motion. (If she does—known in congressional procedural terms as making the motion “privileged”—she would initiate a vote in at most two days.)

For now, Greene seems to be biding her time, letting Johnson’s moves persuade her fellow conservatives to join her crusade. In a five-page letter to colleagues on Tuesday, Greene enumerated each of her grievances with Johnson. The speaker’s collaboration with Senate Democrats to pass a spending bill and avert a government shutdown—which left a bitter taste in many conservative mouths—topped her list.

“I will not tolerate our elected Republican Speaker Mike Johnson serving the Democrats and the Biden administration and helping them achieve their policies that are destroying our country,” Greene said in her anti-Johnson missive.

While she isn’t doing much to actually convince lawmakers, her strategy of giving Johnson rope might actually be working. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY)—a contrarian conservative who came to Congress as a libertarian ideologue—called out Johnson on X over failing to meet right-wing expectations.

“We are starting to wonder when you: suspend all of our rules, give us no time to read bills, increase foreign aid, include earmarks that undermine morality, spend more w/omnibus than Pelosi, don’t secure the border, and pass laws with more D’s than R’s,” Massie said.

The size of the “we” Massie invoked is critical. If the House voted on removing Johnson tomorrow, it would take only three GOP rebels to oust the speaker.

Even if Johnson survives in the short term, it’s clear there just aren’t the votes to achieve the sweeping changes that most Republicans want. On top of only having a three-seat majority in the House at the moment, Democrats control the House and Senate. And yet, Johnson’s detractors hardly cut him a break based on the realities of governing and their slim majority.

As Massie suggested in a response tweet, Johnson and Republicans seem to be capitulating rather than actually winning.

While many Republicans acknowledge the difficulty of Johnson’s situation—one GOP lawmaker told The Daily Beast on Tuesday that Johnson’s position is “strategically untenable”—it’s much easier for Johnson’s biggest critics to blame him than to level with their conservative voters and tell them the things they’ve promised aren’t achievable.

For years, Republicans have campaigned on near-impossible goals like balancing the budget, ending all illegal immigration, and imposing the GOP’s will on spending priorities. None of those goals are actually achievable in a split government, at least not to the degree that conservatives have promised their voters. And rather than modifying expectations or simply trying to make progress on their goals, some of the loudest conservative voices are just blaming their leaders.

That isn’t to say there aren’t legitimate complaints about Johnson’s leadership. The new speaker has consistently talked out of both sides of his mouth, and while he has delayed making a decision on the most perilous issues—like Ukraine aid and that surveillance reauthorization—his refusal to act has, in effect, been a decision. The war in Ukraine continues to be complicated by the fact that U.S. aid to the country has been in limbo for months.

But Johnson has survived this long because, at least at the moment, key Republican allies have his back. Some of the eight Republicans who deposed McCarthy—including Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Nancy Mace (R-SC)—say they want to keep the new speaker they helped install.

Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH), a leading House conservative who made his own insurgent bid for speaker last year, told The Daily Beast that he doesn’t think “it helps us to be switching speakers.”

“I don't think a third speaker in one Congress—six months before an election—is probably where we need to go,” Jordan said.

Another staunch conservative, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA), also criticized Greene’s motion saying he “generally opposes cannibalism” and called his fellow Louisiana Republican a “beautiful man.”

“He has an impossible job to do, and he deserves our support,” Higgins told The Daily Beast. “That does not mean that we’re going to agree with every decision that he makes, and sometimes we’ll have fundamental disagreements, but the motion to vacate should be reserved for the most egregious conditions.”

Rep. Max Miller (R-OH), who has not been shy about his criticisms of Johnson, doesn’t believe the speaker will be ousted and believes this whole motion to vacate talk is a charade.

“Marjorie is a party of one,” he told The Daily Beast. “It’s all a gimmick. She wanted attention and, mazel tov, she got it.”

While the vast majority of Republicans are on Johnson’s side, that was true for McCarthy, too. As the former speaker learned while watching his decades-long dream go up in flames, appeasing most of the GOP doesn’t matter if you piss off just a couple right-wing firebrands impetuous enough to defenestrate their own leader.

Compounding the stakes for Johnson is the all-out Republican war erupting over a section tucked into that surveillance program, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Section 702, as the provision is known, is an obscure but powerful measure enabling the federal government to surveil foreigners without a warrant for national security purposes.

The House is approaching an April 19 deadline to reauthorize that key surveillance program. However, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle allege that the program has historically been abused, including to spy on a 2016 campaign official for former President Donald Trump as well as protesters during the 2020 Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

A bipartisan House contingent wants to overhaul Section 702 by requiring the federal government to get a warrant for every FISA query. The most vocal advocates for the requirement are—surprise!—hardline conservatives like Greene, posing a dilemma for Johnson, who has reportedly indicated he opposes compelling the warrants.

Dozens have pledged to vote against reauthorization if Johnson declines to include the warrant requirement. Many conservatives have publicly taken Johnson to task on the issue, with several posting “get a warrant” on X as a last-ditch pressure campaign.

Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ)—one of the eight McCarthy rebels—outlined Johnson’s evolving positions on FISA since 2018. By Biggs’ count, Johnson has backed two measures that enshrined the warrant requirement. Now, Biggs said, “he opposes both.”

"Still think the DC Cartel isn’t real?” he ominously asked his X followers Tuesday afternoon.

But should his own party pounce, Johnson’s other problem could solve the FISA conundrum.

Some Democrats say they will save Johnson from an intra-party revolt if he advances aid to Ukraine.

But passing Ukraine aid—which has become something of a political quicksand in the GOP—would likely exacerbate his problems among Republicans. While it might elicit Democratic support, it would further instigate a strike against his speakership and likely make his position untenable.

Greene and fellow self-proclaimed “America First” opponents of foreign aid have framed a House vote on U.S. assistance to Ukraine as a bright red line Johnson should not cross—or else.

Still, much of the GOP quietly supports Ukraine aid, and if Johnson continues to refuse to put a vote on the floor, they could actually join forces with Johnson’s GOP detractors to get their way—if they really wanted to play hardball.

The other, more likely route to get Ukraine aid through the House is by packaging it with Israel aid. But Johnson has reverted back to insisting on sweeping border changes in exchange for a foreign aid bill, even after Democrats agreed to major border concessions and Trump blew up the compromise for overtly political reasons. (He didn’t want to give President Joe Biden a win on the border.)

All the same, the Senate passed a $95 billion Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan aid bill in February that’s been sitting stagnant in the House. And apparently, border policy is back on the table as a key ingredient in a Ukraine deal.

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“One of the things that has not been used a whole lot but been talked about is how we’re going to secure our southern border in all this,” Hern said, ignoring the months of tortured, doomed negotiations trying to accomplish just that.

“I think there’s gonna be a combination of three of those things working together to get to a supplemental that we can all agree to,” Hern added, referring to funding to address Ukraine, Israel, and the U.S.-Mexico border.

Johnson has kept his intentions for Ukraine close to his chest. His early proposals seem directed at building broad Republican support rather than appeasing Democrats. He floated linking Ukraine aid to reversing Biden’s pause on liquefied natural gas exports.

A pitch to package aid with legislation to seize Russian oligarch assets to help supplement Ukraine’s defense might allay some GOP cost concerns, but no matter what road Johnson takes on the issue, it might not be sufficient to save his speakership.

Former House Freedom Caucus Chairman Scott Perry (R-PA) said on Tuesday that a Johnson ouster “depends on what the bill looks like,” referring to Ukraine.

“I hate to say this, but you’re asking me, like, how long is the string?” Perry said.