Dramatic Speaker Vote May be the Start, Not the End, of House GOP Chaos

The Washington Post · Paul Kane

16:24 JST, January 5, 2025

The House Republicans have been so dysfunctional over the last few years that once mundane tasks are celebrated like major milestones.

Every speaker vote from 1925 through 2021 ended in one ballot. But after the intra-GOP wars of the 118th Congress, Mike Johnson’s reelection Friday – with just one, messy, vote – was hailed as a win, and a sign that the fractured caucus could come together in the 119th.

“We just elected a speaker of the House and we got Republicans on board. So there’s a path,” Rep. Andrew Ogles (R-Tennessee), one of the far-right lawmakers who have needled Johnson, told reporters after the vote.

But there are perhaps more signs that the speaker vote was just the first fight in a long battle between a far-right faction of about 20 conservatives and the more establishment-leaning Republicans who want to govern in a more traditional or pragmatic way.

“Make no mistake about it, there are things that will be, in fact, red lines that we need to deliver on,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), one of the last conservative Republican holdouts to vote for Johnson, told reporters.

Republican moderates, feeling emboldened after winning close elections that kept Republicans in the majority, are ready to take on the likes of Roy.

“We’re tired of it. We’re tired of being nice,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Nebraska) said Friday. “We dealt with these guys for three years, and we have very little tolerance or patience. And you could see a little bit of that today.”

This conflict will play out as House Republicans try to push ahead with legislation to impose strict migration laws and fund President-elect Donald Trump’s long-sought border wall, along with the bid to slash taxes on the wealthy.

Given that Johnson’s caucus will range in size from 217 to 220 over the next year, he will have only one or two GOP votes to spare to hit a majority, as every Democrat is expected to oppose these measures just as they all voted against Johnson for speaker Friday.

Just like Friday’s vote – which ran almost an extra hour as Trump and Johnson tried to twist Republican arms – Johnson will need more than 99 percent unity to get those plans across the finish line.

But Congress is staring down several must-pass items in the next six months or so that will almost certainly end up requiring significant Democratic support.

With just 53 Republicans in the Senate, that chamber’s rules requiring a 60-vote hurdle to end debate on most legislation mandates Democratic votes there. Those will be needed on funding federal agencies and lifting the Treasury’s borrowing limit, both of which must be acted upon by mid-March and the late spring or early summer, respectively.

But Johnson’s math problem in the House has little to do with the Senate filibuster. Roughly a dozen or more hard-line conservatives refuse to vote for government spending and lifting the debt limit, no matter who is president. Unless those far-right lawmakers change their tune, Johnson will be forced to negotiate with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (New York) for Democratic support. And when Johnson does that, the legislation will include Democratic priorities that drive Roy and a couple dozen members of the House Freedom Caucus politically apoplectic.

Johnson faced that precise dilemma just before Christmas when he took a simple extension of government funding and negotiated a sprawling set of policy riders that Democrats and Republicans alike had been seeking.

Conservatives and even establishment Republicans blew up after the roughly 1,500-page package was released, which eventually got trimmed to a less ambitious bill. “We can have no more of the nonsense that happened before Christmas,” Roy said Friday, referencing the funding bill.

To formalize their demands, 11 Freedom Caucus members issued a letter with proclamations that range from aspirational (increasing the number of legislative work days) to the next-to-impossible (“secure the border to stop the flow of illegal aliens completely”).

It served as a thinly veiled threat that Johnson could end up like Kevin McCarthy, who got tossed aside after less than nine months as speaker in a dispute over living up to the private deals he brokered to claim the gavel.

“If anything happens like happened before, right before Christmas, there will be consequences for that,” Roy told reporters.

Add in Rep. Thomas Massie (Kentucky), the lone Republican who refused to vote for Johnson, and that’s a dozen far-right members who have put Johnson on notice that he is walking on a very short political leash.

To keep power, Johnson may need Trump to keep serving as a unifying force who demands that lawmakers stay loyal to his choice for speaker and help pass key legislation.

The optimistic Republican view relies almost entirely on Trump to continue serving as a unifying force who demands that everyone falls in line behind his choice for speaker, as well as key legislation.

“I do think it’s going to be different having President Trump in the executive office,” Rep. Elijah Crane (R-Arizona), a Freedom Caucus member, said leaving the House floor.

But Trump has a tendency to fixate on only a handful of policy areas such as border security and tariffs and to delegate other issues that Johnson probably will need to cut the type of deals with Democrats that anger critics such as Roy.

One of Johnson’s predecessors, then-Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wisconsin), learned this lesson during Trump’s first two years in office when Republicans also controlled both the House and Senate. Ryan frequently had to negotiate agency funding bills with members of the Appropriations Committee, congressional leaders and Trump aides, deals the president supported but which drew staunch opposition from Freedom Caucus members.

Ryan had a big majority, with a cushion of more than 20 seats, so rebellions back then were mostly just noise. Now, under the rules approved Friday, a small group of nine could oust Johnson.

“It remains to be seen what the attitude of the dissidents is,” Rep. Harold Rogers (R-Kentucky), the dean of the House and senior member of the committee, said. “We have people on our side who won’t vote for any appropriations bills. So, yeah, we’re not out of the woods yet.”

Bacon, who won a district that Vice President Kamala Harris won by almost 5 percentage points, suggested Johnson and Trump need to isolate these far-right members.

“Nobody could do better than Johnson. None of these guys offered an alternative. And so they’re just … ,” he said, pausing to find the right description. “They like to piss on their own team. That’s what goes on, and they feel good about it. And then they’re mad when we don’t perform well.”

Johnson’s dissident faction, in allowing him to win Friday’s vote, might have calculated that the mercurial Trump will grow frustrated with the slow pace of his agenda on Capitol Hill and seek to blame Johnson for the failures.

The final holdouts at Friday’s speaker vote made clear that they were working to support Trump’s agenda, not oppose him.

“This was about how we support President Trump, as the House with a very narrow majority,” Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas), who initially voted for another Republican, said afterward. “How is that going to happen?”

Self said he spoke twice to the president-elect Friday, including during the hour-long pause in the vote when Johnson was two votes short of the 218 needed to win an outright majority.

Trump never threatened him or Rep. Ralph Norman (R-South Carolina), who was also on the phone with him, according to Self, declining to elaborate on the details of their talk. Eventually, Norman and Self went to the House well and switched their votes to Johnson, giving him the majority.

Roy, who was one of six far-right Republicans who initially did not cast a vote during the alphabetic roll call, said Johnson persuaded him that a vote for him was a vote for enacting Trump’s agenda.

“Speaker Johnson contends that in an environment where we have the White House and the Republican Senate, that he’s going to be able to go get the job done. So we’ll give him a chance,” he said.

That chance came with a warning. “There’s no room for any excuses now,” Roy said. “Quick, you know it when you see it.”