WASHINGTON – One year since Kevin McCarthy was booted from the House speaker's office after Congress voted in a bipartisan way to prevent a federal government shutdown, the new House Speaker Mike Johnson finds himself courting, but so far avoiding, a similar political fate.
Johnson is leading the House this week to vote on legislation to fund the government and ensure no interruption in federal services, but he's similarly abandoning demands from his own hard-right Republican colleagues and relying on Democratic votes and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries to push the package to bipartisan approval.
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While Johnson appears to be in no imminent threat of being ousted — the way McCarthy lost his position in a historic vote last fall when eight hardline Republicans engineered a motion to vacate the speaker — the new leader's ability to hold on to the speaker's gavel for the long term is not at all certain.
“It’s a tough job,” said McCarthy, who is now retired from Congress and watching from the sidelines.
The government funding vote provides a notable capstone to what has been an extraordinary and tumultuous session of Congress with the House Republican majority that swept to power in January 2023, as lawmakers now prepare to face voters.
The outcome of November's election will determine the White House and control of Congress, and may very well decide Johnson’s political future. Colleagues are weighing whether to keep Johnson or try someone else as their leader ahead of internal party voting expected later in November after the election.
“The vast majority support Speaker Johnson — it’s a shame that we've got like 10 people that always hold this over his head,” said Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, among the more centrist Republicans.
“He's a good man. He's got a great heart,” Bacon said. “I think he's learned a lot this year.”
On the job for the past 11 months, Johnson had been an unlikely choice for the speaker’s gavel. The Louisiana congressman was a relatively unknown low-rung party leader, first elected to office in 2016 alongside Donald Trump, when he emerged as Republicans’ last-ditch consensus choice to replace McCarthy.
Republicans had fought behind closed doors over who should become their new speaker after they took the historic step of ousting McCarthy — passing over their Majority Leader Steve Scalise, their GOP Whip Tom Emmer and hard-right Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, among others — before Johnson stepped up and won support, with Trump’s blessing.
Johnson, a lawyer, had led one of Trump’s main legal cases challenging President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election and could play a prominent role in the 2024 election amid potential legal challenges to the outcome.
As the new speaker, Johnson inherited a bitterly divided House GOP majority and worked quickly to pick up the pieces. He cleaned out the speaker’s staff at the Capitol, moved in his own team — and closely aligned himself with Trump, throwing his support behind the indicted former president’s bid to retake the White House.
Johnson prioritized several House initiatives, from the Biden impeachment inquiry to the House impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, that aligned tightly with Trump’s agenda.
But the annual spending fights over the federal budget always loomed over Johnson’s term. With the Sept. 30 deadline signaling the end of the fiscal year, the House GOP's ultraconservative flank agitated for the speaker to push for spending cuts, even if it meant throwing the government into a shutdown.
Trump urged the House Republicans to take a hardline approach.
“I wish he would take Trump’s advice,” said Rep. Ralph Norman, R-South Carolina, a member of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, who said of Johnson: “He's risk averse.”
But with a very slim majority that leaves Johnson with just a few votes to spare on any issue, he needs almost unanimity from his own ranks to pass legislation over the objections of Democrats. He already survived one attempt from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to boot him from office this year.
Ahead of Wednesday’s expected vote on the spending plan, Johnson defended his decision, saying it would have been “political malpractice” to lead the government into a federal shutdown weeks before the election.
Johnson said he had tried to run what he called “the best play” he could, which was attaching a bill called the SAVE Act, which would prevent immigrants who are in the U.S. without legal status from voting in the nationwide elections, even though that's already the law and experts say it rarelyhappens.
But that approach from the speaker failed, voted down by more than a dozen Republicans along with almost all Democrats. A similar dynamic played out on several other bills to fund the various agencies when lawmakers opposed the steep budget cuts or the specific policy provisions as too extreme.
“So we have to go with the next available thing,” Johnson said at his weekly press conference Tuesday.
Johnson described the temporary government funding bill, which will keep operations going until Dec. 20, as bare bones, with no add-ons — except for $231 million for the U.S. Service in the aftermath of the two assassination attempts on Trump this election season.
He insisted he and Trump are “on the same page” on the strategy and have spoken “at great length” about the situation. And Johnson vowed House would hold the line against extra spending next time, in December, when the next round of funding will be needed.
“There's no daylight between us," Johnson said of Trump.
One key difference between the situation McCarthy faced and this week's vote is that last year Congress was also considering funding to help Ukraine buy weapons as it battles the Russian invasion, something Trump and the hard-right flank did not support, and it was eventually dropped from the final bill.
Extra war funding is not included in this week's temporary bill either, but Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is expected on Capitol Hill later this week as he presses Congress to ensure ongoing support.
"I actually think Kevin McCarthy would have done much better,” said Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., an ultraconservative who opposes most of the spending bills.
Massie said he thinks "the only way Mike Johnson gets reelected speaker is he gets a lifeline from Trump, should Trump win the White House.”
As for the eight House Republicans who dislodged McCarthy, they've had their own political journeys since then — one, Rep. Bob Good of Virginia, a former chairman of the Freedom Caucus, lost his primary bid for reelection.
McCarthy, meanwhile, is not necessarily eying any comeback, but fundraising for the House majority and showering Republicans in tight reelection contests with money to run their campaigns — and opposing those who crossed him.
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Associated Press writer Kevin Freking contributed to this story.