WASHINGTON—Many House Republicans are experiencing buyer’s remorse, yet they’re saddled with Speaker Mike Johnson for the foreseeable future. The feeling seems mutual.
Johnson still smiles for the cameras, but his future as a speaker is uncertain. Rank-and-file Republicans say he’s not a fighter like those running atop the GOP ticket this fall.
“The public is thirsty to fight for something,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) told Raw Story after voting against a measure averting a government shutdown Wednesday. “You don't have to win every fight, but you got to fight. We’re just not fighting.”
This week, after 11 months of overseeing bruisingly embarrassing internal GOP squabbles, Johnson could hardly wait to gavel the House of Representatives into an extended recess through Election Day, which he did Wednesday after canceling this Thursday and Friday’s planned legislative days on Capitol Hill.
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The GOP is just looking sloppy heading into this election, which has some Republicans comparing Johnson to his predecessors.
“Mike is the leader right now, and he's got a tough job,” Norman said. “Nancy Pelosi knew how to operate in the realm of — she understood leverage. And she understood how to get it passed.”
Johnson has learned that to get things passed, he must reach across the aisle and rely on Democrats. This was on display this week when 209 Democrats helped Johnson and the GOP do the basic work of Congress and fund the federal government through the election. On the GOP side of the aisle, 82 Republicans opposed the measure.
"I share the anger and frustration, and I don't think Republicans deserve to be re-elected to hold the majority," Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said Thursday. "And it's a double-edged sword, and here it is."
It wasn’t me…
Leaning on Democrats to run the House only enrages Johnson’s right flank even more. They’re itching for more fights while hoping their ranks of rabble-rousers grow this November.
“How do you go home and say, ‘send me back, we know how to govern’?” Raw Story asked members of the far-right Freedom Caucus on the Capitol steps as lawmakers rushed to catch their flights out of town. “What's your pitch to voters?”
“Well, I do my job. I can't speak for the rest of everyone else,” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) told Raw Story before hopping in her awaiting car. “Well, I fulfilled every single one of my campaign promises. So I think if I was talking to voters nationally if you're frustrated, stop sending us more of the same old.”
As Republicans headed for the exits yesterday, many were bemoaning GOP leadership and the lack thereof.
“America always loses when these clowns,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) vented Wednesday to reporters on the Capitol steps.
“Did you see what just happened right now? They all applauded because we're leaving a day early. ‘Oh, we get to go home a day early,’” Roy said. “The hardworking average American out there doesn't usually leave a day early. They need a government that's not incompetent.”
Roy, now on his third term, and other relatively newer members of the GOP feel they were sent here to upend Washington, including their own party.
“It is a difficult task when you've got a twin problem, which is radical progressive Democrats who will work with us on virtually nothing and then Republicans who kind of keep going around each other, you know, chasing our tails, and you got to reform what you might pejoratively call the uniparty or the swamp,” Roy explained.
As for Roy’s personal appeal to voters this fall?
“My pitch is actually pretty easy. We moved the ball way down the field. We've had many more amendments than we’ve been able to have. We've exposed a lot of the votes that were being closed that were being clamped down by leadership by opening up the process,” Roy said. “The reason we couldn't go further is you've got Chuck Schumer and the Democrats who literally won't work with us. They haven't passed a single bill. So I can make that pitch.”
“We don't really have a working majority”
The bomb throwers may be the loudest in today’s new right, but complaints from veteran Republicans are starting to grow louder.
“I think this is kind of extraordinary. They hate everything, you know, and so that means we don't really have a working majority,” Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-CA) told Raw Story, walking to vote in the Capitol this week.
Last week, 14 Republicans opposed a different version of the government funding measure — a.k.a. the continuing resolution or CR — even though it included former President Donald Trump’s SAVE Act, which would, redundantly, require proof of citizenship to register to vote.
“I’m like, ‘What the hell do you want?’ We could have at least golfed it over to the Senate, and they would have had to deal with it or strip it out — or something — and send it back. And then, okay, then that'll be a terrible bill you can all vote against it,” LaMalfa complained of his fellow Republicans. “At least move the bill and continue discussion in the Senate. So that's what my frustrations are.”
LaMalfa says Republicans are missing an opportunity to reach voters with the very reins of power voters handed the party in the 2022 midterms.
“We passed some good bills here and there, and we've kept the place going. I think we've curbed spending to a degree that would not have happened otherwise,” LaMalfa said. “We were able to put some brakes on some things, but do people want to hear ‘putting brakes on some things’ or do they wanna hear great new things?”
Even though he’s a conservative, LaMalfa knows the contemporary GOP must offer voters more than gridlock.
“That’s what they wanna hear, especially the voters we’re trying to talk to right now in the presidential election,” LaMalfa said. “You wanna say, ‘Who are these joy voters? What are they gonna want to hear?’ That we put the brakes on things or they wanna hear aspirations and things like that, like Kamala talks about? Some of these voters, you have to say, ‘This is what we’re doing. These are the positive things we’ve done.’ That’s a little harder to grasp in this malaise or muddle or whatever you want to call it that’s been going on.”
What’s that portend for the GOP if they maintain control of the House in 2025?
“Unless we add a lot to our majority and there's a pretty big lineup change amongst us, it probably, you know, it could look similar or the same,” LaMalfa said. “But if we blow the majority…”
That’s a terrifying prospect to Democrats.
Johnson is Democrats’ speaker, too
From the embarrassing and drawn-out 15 rounds of ballots it took for the GOP to elect then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy last January to the 21 days the House was leaderless after McCarthy was ingloriously ousted last fall, Democrats have spent the entire 118th Congress watching a GOP civil war engulf the party.
“From the standpoint of, I'm in the minority and, therefore, playing defense, they make it pretty easy to play defense,” Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) told Raw Story outside the Capitol this week. “Even when they pass bills that I vote against in Ways and Means [Committee], they never even make it to the floor, much less to the Senate.”
While Beyer and other Democrats often chuckle at Johnson’s inability to rein in his own, the four-term Louisiana Republican owes his speaker’s gavel to them.
“Was one of the harder votes you took this Congress supporting Speaker Johnson?” Raw Story asked the former ambassador.
“It wasn't that hard, only because we saw the chaos,” Beyer recalled of Democrats rallying behind Johnson after the House went three weeks without a leader last fall. “It wasn't done out of affection or respect for Speaker Johnson, but rather a respect for the institution. To throw it into chaos once again and to have another three or four weeks where nothing happens, it's just crazy.”
The vote was only made easier after Kevin McCarthy reneged on a budget deal he’d negotiated with President Joe Biden earlier last year.
“I think many Democrats, including me, felt that Speaker McCarthy was so unreliable that you couldn't trust what he said from one day to the next,” Beyer said. “And that Speaker Johnson, even if you disagree with him, at least he was consistent.”
It’s gotten so bad in the House under Johnson that even Democrats are missing McCarthy these days.
“They’re a dysfunctional party,” former House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) told Raw Story while riding an elevator in the Capitol Wednesday. “Choosing a leader who had no experience and getting rid of a leader, frankly, who had been able to navigate a lot of rough waters, there’s a large group of people who do not care about doing the work of Congress.”
That’s made House Democrat’s pitch to voters relatively simple this election cycle.
“If the American people, if they want a productive Congress — if they want Congress to be able to do things that will make the country better — than they need to elect us, just based upon performance,” Hoyer said. “We had the same majority they had. We passed everything we wanted. Four votes, and the reason being because our people were productive.”
When political watchers try to compare the far-right Freedom Caucus to progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and her so-called Squad, Hoyer stops them.
“People say, ‘Well, what about the Squad — is it like the Freedom Caucus?’ Not at all,” Hoyer said of the progressives who were thorns in Democratic leader’s sides when they were in the majority. “They’re people who want to do things. The Freedom Caucus doesn't care about getting things done and believes stopping Congress working is a victory.”
If stopping congressional action is a victory, House Republicans are winning. But they’ve failed to advance their agenda of unwinding the administrative state, to name but one issue area in which they’ve made no progress on their campaign promises.
The Trump-sized elephant in the room
According to former high school history teacher and 13-term Rep. John Larson (D-CT), all of this is relatively new even for a Washington that’s been gridlocked for decades now.
“I don't think they're overly concerned about governance,” Larson told Raw Story while walking through the Capitol Tuesday. “They're struggling to pull things together.”
While Speaker Johnson is attracting most of the criticism, he’s far from the only puppet master in today’s Trump-tinged GOP.
“You go all the way back to [former Speaker] John Boehner and the Tea Party, when this all started to happen, has now even become more solidified under Trump,” Larson told Raw Story. “Because he places a whole other set of parameters around what they can do, threatens people with consequences. And you can tell that it's rattling a number of their own members.”
In November, we’ll all find out whether all the dysfunction resonated or rattled Republicans out of their newfound positions of power in the House of Representatives.