Far-right House members suggest Johnson’s woes may not be over

Republican members of the House of Representatives emerged from their caucus meeting on Wednesday with their moods bolstered by the successful retention of their majority - but with clear signs that a post-election unity period may be short-lived.

There’s clearly no appetite among the GOP’s party elders for another drawn-out leadership fight similar to the one that consumed the party in the fall of 2023, or the more than a dozen votes required to elect Kevin McCarthy as speaker at the beginning of that same year.

But that isn’t likely to stop the party’s rowdy and camera-ready rank-and-file members, who indicated to reporters on Wednesday that Speaker Mike Johnson had yet to consolidate the kind of support he would need to avert such a conflict in January. On Wednesday, he won unanimously on the party’s secret ballot — whether that will hold through January, or through the first year of Trump’s presidency — remains to be seen.

“I’m sure…yeah, I think there will be some opposition [to Johnson],” Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna told reporters as she departed the meeting. She declined to name any possible challengers to the speaker, or say whether or not she’d be supporting Johnson on a secret ballot.

She and other members including Marc Molinaro described a jovial, light-on-policy vibe in Wednesday’s meeting, which was attended by President-elect Donald Trump and members of his incoming administration, including Elon Musk, who is set to lead a likely White House advisory council called the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE.

“Elon won’t go home. I can’t get rid of him. Until I don’t like him,” Trump said, jokingly, according to members in the room. He would also joke that he planned to poach a few more members from the chamber for his Cabinet, a prospect GOP leadership has looked at with chagrin.

Molinaro, who recently conceded his House race in New York, told reporters of the president’s remarks: “The President was relaxed and funny today, and it was refreshing... He was being funny. I think that we all spent far too much time [parsing his words].”

But while Paulina Luna predicted that Johnson would suffer “less” defections than McCarthy did on the secret ballot, she still expected that the speaker would see some support drop off. She hinted that Johnson could do much to earn back trust with backbenchers by negotiating with them on House rules for the upcoming term.

“[I]t’s a big game of trust, and there’s not a lot of trust in Washington,” said Paulina Luna. “So hopefully, though, everyone can unify behind the President’s agenda.”

House members will convene at the beginning of next year to select a new speaker for the chamber; traditionally, the two parties determine their respective nominees in private conference meetings like the one Wednesday.

In 2023, however, Republican backbenchers mounted a resistance to the confirmation of McCarthy, who had previously won his party’s private ballot. The result was an embarrassing dragged-out fight, after which McCarthy prevailed through sheer attrition.

He’d go on to last less than a year in the job, eventually ousted by a handful of conservative members voting with the chamber’s Democratic minority in unison to unseat him. Johnson was installed after the rise and fall of several alternatives, including Jim Jordan, Steve Scalise and Byron Donalds, only to face another attempt to unseat him led by Marjorie Taylor Greene the following year.

Greene’s bid to kick Johnson out of the speaker’s chair over his support for Ukraine aid was defeated when Democrats, who supported the Ukraine aid package too, voted to protect the GOP speaker.

Thomas Massie was the lone House Republican supporting that second bid to oust Johnson alongside Greene. He declined to say on Wednesday how he’d vote in the speaker’s race, but blasted the speaker for holding a “neocon” worldview and Johnson’s reversal on support for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which libertarians and progressives have argued constitutes severe government overreach into individual privacy rights — Massie called the speaker’s flip-flop a “betrayal.”

“Well, I’m still trying to get over the betrayal on FISA, where he flipped 180 degrees, said he was in a SCIF and he learned things in the SCIF. I was in the same SCIF for three and a half hours. I’m sorry — there was nothing in that SCIF that would persuade you to betray the Constitution that way,” said Massie, referring to a secure chamber where members view classified materials.

He argued that the FISA policy coupled with Johnson’s support for Ukraine aid essentially put him at odds with the non-interventionalist aims of the incoming Trump administration — though analysts have questioned how genuine Trump’s supposed stance really is.

“[Johnson]’s basically a neocon, and Trump, at least in his campaign, is the opposite of that. I don’t know what his Cabinet positions are telegraphing, but Speaker Johnson is going to have to do a 180 on a lot of the policy that he’s shoved down our throats in the House if he’s going to support Trump’s mandate,” commented Massie.

But there’s likely to be significant pressure — both internal and external — working against any Republican who tries to mount a direct challenge against Johnson over the next year.

Trump, in the House Republican conference meeting on Wednesday, gave Johnson his full backing: “I’m with him all the way.” House GOP members in leadership are also already publicly playing offense against any would-be malcontents. Party members will also be under significant scrutiny from MAGA-world, which will be on the lookout for anyone deemed a traitor to the incoming president’s nationalist conservative agenda.

“I think it would be a huge mistake to challenge [Johnson] and anybody that thinks what we did last term worked well, I think, is delusional,” said Tom Cole, chairman of the powerful (and highly sought-after) Appropriations panel.

“The challenge got us off to a bad start. It bedeviled things. Getting rid of Speaker McCarthy was a dumb idea. The reality is the people that did it had no exit strategy, no alternative, and it plunged the Congress and the country into chaos for weeks. So I hope we learn from that.”