As 2025 got underway, House Speaker Mike Johnson faced a daunting challenge. On the surface, the pieces were in place for the Louisiana Republican to succeed — his party controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress — but just below the surface, the GOP leader was working with a narrow majority and several members who appeared disinclined to follow his lead.
As 2025 nears its end, Johnson — the Republicans’ fifth choice when he was elected in 2023 — doesn’t exactly appear pleased with his recent efforts. In fact, in a recent episode of “The Katie Miller Podcast,” the House speaker seemed rather miserable. The New York Times reported that the interview offered “a portrait of a Republican leader barely keeping his head above water in a job to which he does not appear particularly well suited.”
The same report added, “Mr. Johnson presented himself as a man toiling to fulfill his duties at a moment when his weak grip on his conference appears to be slipping even further.”
And then things got worse. Politico reported:
Even by the high standards of chaos for the 119th Congress, Speaker Mike Johnson being accused Tuesday by a member of his own leadership team of protecting the ‘deep state’ was a remarkable development.
Rep. Elise Stefanik’s rare move to publicly accuse the speaker of being a liar and then, in a separate provocation, signing on to an effort to force a vote on legislation Johnson has kept bottled up is the latest symptom of a House Republican Conference seemingly on a razor’s edge.
Punchbowl News reported that the congresswoman “is now engaged in an open war” with her own party’s speaker.
Stefanik — who’s running for governor in New York next year, and who might be looking for ways to put some distance between her candidacy and her unpopular party leadership — has lashed out at Johnson over a provision she wants to see in the annual National Defense Authorization Act. But as important as the details are, it’s the bigger picture that paints a brutal portrait of a speaker who has a gavel, but little else. “I do think that there’s a lot of frustration right now in the House with the effectiveness or lack thereof of this body in recent months,” Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley of California told Politico. “The House has … in some cases ceded its own authority, hasn’t taken the lead on a lot of important policy measures and has even taken steps now to limit the agency of individual members.” Meanwhile, a whole lot of Republicans are giving up their seats, and some are even resigning early; and with increasing frequency, members are going around Johnson with discharge petitions to govern on issues he’d prefer to ignore. “We have this joke that I’m not really a speaker of the House,” Johnson told Miller. That’s true in a metaphorical sense — he’s so subservient to Trump that the president has reportedly said, “I’m the speaker and the president” — and given the prevailing political winds, it might well become literally true about a year from now, if not sooner.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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