Mike Johnson once again survived a brush with political disaster as he won reelection as House Speaker after President-elect Donald Trump personally helped talk two right-wing holdouts into changing their votes to back him before the first ballot was finalized. Now the House can proceed as scheduled to participate in Monday’s joint session to confirm Trump’s election and prepare to implement the new administration’s agenda.
But there were abundant signs that Johnson’s problems with members of the House Freedom Caucus were deferred, not necessarily solved. Shortly after the vote, the board representing the group of hard-core lawmakers released a letter to all Republican members making it clear they stayed out of Johnson’s way to avoid screwing up Trump’s plans, not out of fealty to a speaker whose record has left them with “sincere reservations”:
Aside from HFC chairman Andy Harris of Maryland, the letter was signed by (among others) one of the initial holdouts, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, and also by frequent Johnson critic Chip Roy of Texas.
The letter nicely combined regular HFC grievances against Johnson (and, for that matter, against his predecessor Kevin McCarthy) with expressions of an overweening desire to help Trump fulfill all his legislative dreams. In the former category are the usual demands for sharper and deeper spending cuts aimed especially at Biden-administration accomplishments, along with procedural reforms to reduce the Speaker’s power to herd members into quick votes or (horror of horrors!) bipartisan votes (e.g., Johnson’s power to get legislation to the floor without going through the conservative-dominated rules committee, or without time to examine bill language, would be restricted). On the Trump-fealty front, the HFC wants Johnson to make the House take up a more arduous schedule to speed up consideration of Trump’s priorities and to undertake MAGA measures to address the phantom menace of voter fraud despite the big Republican victory in 2024.
There are two notes sounded by the board that might be of concern to both Johnson and Trump: an insistence on fixed deficit-reduction goals, which may be difficult for the Speaker to get past swing-district Republicans, and which the next president may consider unimportant or even politically counterproductive, and a demand that Congress “not increase federal borrowing before spending cuts are agreed to and in place.” While the debt-limit increase or suspension Trump unsuccessfully sought as part of the pre-Christmas stopgap-spending measure technically didn’t increase federal borrowing (the debt limit involves payment of past obligations), it’s pretty clear these fiscal hard-liners don’t share the boss’s hostility to borrowing limits.
In any event, the proximity of a near-death experience for Johnson to this new expression of suspicion from troops he does not fully command is a reminder of how much the Speaker depends on total backing from Trump and how short a leash he’s on from both the Oval Office and his own ranks. If Trump and the HFC stalwarts ever start agreeing that Johnson isn’t doing a suitable job, he might as well drop the gavel and identify a different political future for himself. He’s won a reprieve, not any real or enduring power.
