Is House Speaker Mike Johnson about to get Kevin McCarthy'd?
Johnson could soon face calls for ouster after he announced a tentative deal with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to set spending at nearly $1.66 trillion in the 2024 fiscal year, Political consultant Jay Townsend told Newsweek Monday.
"There is little [the House GOP] can do to stop it other than threatening the career of a member who runs with it," Townsend said.
Newsweek reports about a dozen House Republicans have already begun blasting the deal as a "total failure."
On Sunday, Johnson's Congressional colleagues in the House Freedom Caucus expressed outrage over Johnson's Democratic detente in a letter of their own, according to the outlet.
"It is a fiscal calamity," the letter reads. "We are extremely troubled that House Republican leadership is considering an agreement with Democrats to spend even higher than the modest $1.59 trillion statutory cap set six months ago by the Fiscal Responsibility Act and to obscure the actual spending numbers with more shady side deals and accounting tricks. This is totally unacceptable."
They then doubled down on their Speaker's deal discontent.
"It's even worse than we thought," the House Freedom Caucus wrote on X. "Don't believe the spin. Once you break through typical Washington math, the true total programmatic spending level is $1.658 trillion — not $1.59 trillion. This is total failure."
Townsend said talks of ousting Johnson are likely to "come up in caucus meetings, on the floor and in the hallways among Republican members."
That's why Johnson must try to put on a sales pitch to his caucus members to join him or possibly lose House control, Republican strategist Alex Patton told Newsweek.
"Only God may know what this Republican caucus may or may not do," he said. "But I would think that even they realize vacating the speakership this soon would be a major mistake."
