It's less than two weeks into the new year, but Politico's Playbook reports that tensions among Republicans in the House of Representatives are already boiling over.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is taking heat from hardliners in his caucus such as Rep. Bob Good (R-VA), who are demanding a government shutdown to extract concessions from Democrats in the White House and the Senate.
“Why don’t you fight more?” Good complained to Johnson this week, according to Politico's reporting. “I’m sick of being told we can’t have the fight.”
Added to this, the publication writes that Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) is already flirting with pushing another motion to vacate the speakership in the wake of Johnson's recently announced deal to fund the federal government and avoid a shutdown.
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All of this caused one unnamed senior GOP aide to despair that "most of our members aren’t even here, and it literally is already unraveling."
However, a second GOP aide said they found it highly unlikely that Republican hardliners would really go through with ousting Johnson given how much turmoil that would cause in an election year.
"How many people have that much appetite to do what we just did in October?" the aide asked. "No one wants to go through this again... And who are they going to put in place to be the next speaker?”
