Mike Johnson's downward spiral
Speaker of the House is a tough job. But he's particularly bad at it.
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Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is a mild-mannered fellow. He never raises his voice, and usually wears an expression somewhere between satisfaction and resignation.
But the calm exterior belies the truth: Johnson’s speakership is a story of chaos and failure at a time when he and his party should be racking up wins.
Johnson has barely had a good moment since becoming speaker two years ago, and things are getting worse by the day. His majority hangs by a thread, with a series of retirements steadily diminishing the margin he has to pass any legislation. President Trump treats him less like a partner and more like a sad and irritating underling; in private, Trump reportedly jokes, “I’m the speaker and the president.”
In public, Johnson’s low-key manner easily reads as weakness, especially when he tries to spin the indefensible, as he so often does.
Though he insists that everything is fine in the House and all the Republicans get along, Johnson increasingly finds himself in personal, embarrassing feuds with his own members.
In a recent softball interview with former White House aide Katie Miller, the speaker lamented all the phone calls he has to answer and sounded like all he wants to do is curl up into a ball and cry. (“Even when you think the work of the day is done and you put the phone down, it can be 11:30 at night — ‘ring ring,’ another crisis,” he whined.) The man who was supposed to bring a fractious caucus together seems to be miserable and flailing.
Managing the House is a tough job, without question. But Mike Johnson seems particularly bad at it. How did this happen?
Fraught from the start
Johnson became speaker in a moment of vicious infighting among Republicans.
In October 2023, they ousted Kevin McCarthy in a vote of no confidence, then went searching for a replacement. One candidate after another won support from a majority of the caucus, but couldn’t win the vote in the whole House: first Steve Scalise, then Jim Jordan, then Tom Emmer. Johnson finally emerged as the one all the party’s factions could live with.
As Johnson explained soon after, he had help from above.
In a speech to the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, Johnson said that over the three weeks in which Republicans were trying and failing to find a new speaker, God repeatedly woke him up in the middle of the night with ideas and plans. But at first, he thought he was supposed to help someone else become speaker.
“The Lord kept telling me to wait,” Johnson said. But then came the twist, when “the Lord said ‘Now step forward.’”
Apparently, the Lord was playing a trick on his humble servant: He may have given Johnson the job, but He didn’t say he’d be any good at it.
With control of both chambers of Congress and the White House, Johnson should have been shepherding one consequential bill after another through the House. Instead, all legislating has essentially been shut down.
Republicans certainly did the one thing they will always do when they have the opportunity: pass a tax cut for the wealthy. While they were at it, they slashed away at social spending, especially Medicaid and food stamps. There have been a few other meaningful bills, like the GENIUS Act, a gift to the crypto industry (for which they paid handsomely).
But on the whole, this has been a stunningly unproductive Congress. As of this writing, Trump has signed 46 bills into law since taking office, most of them of modest importance (with apologies to the Salem Maritime National Historical Park Redesignation and Boundary Study Act). By this time in his term, Joe Biden had signed 70 bills, and by the time the congressional session that spanned his first two years in office was over, the number had risen to 365, including such sweeping bills as the American Rescue Plan, the Inflation Reduction Act, the bipartisan infrastructure law, and the CHIPS and Science Act.
This Congress will not have that kind of record, even if the difference is partly accounted for by the fact that Donald Trump finds legislating boring and would prefer to just issue executive orders. But that has rendered Johnson increasingly irrelevant. And he couldn’t deliver legislative wins even if he wanted to.
In fairness, the caucus Johnson leads is fractious and has been for a long time. While there are some serious Republican legislators left in the House, a large portion of the membership is comprised of extremists and halfwits, many of whom are only too happy to cause chaos. Their antipathy toward government leaves them perfectly happy to watch it flail about even at the expense of their own party’s image.
But successful speakers have managed to keep their caucuses together when it counted; that’s the most important part of the job. Speakers such as Nancy Pelosi, Tip O’Neill, and Sam Rayburn succeeded precisely because they excelled at the task Johnson seems incapable of doing. The speaker Johnson most closely resembles these days is John Boehner, who endured four tumultuous years leading the chamber before quitting in disgust. Johnson may be holding on to his job only because Republicans don’t think anyone else could succeed at it either.
From bad to worse
In one of Johnson’s most public humiliations, he refused to allow a vote on a bill to force the Department of Justice to publicly release more files on Jeffrey Epstein, but failed when a discharge petition forced the vote. The ensuing pressure to allow the release grew so great that the final House vote was 427-1 (even Johnson himself voted in favor).
That wasn’t the last discharge petition his own members have filed to force his hand; Republican members are gathering signatures to require votes to ban stock trading by members and impose more sanctions on Russia. Whether the petitions succeed, they show how individual members are frustrated with Johnson and willing to make a show of opposing him.
“Rarely have things been completely harmonious in the conference, but it does seem like there is an unusually high level of discontent,” Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley told the New York Times, explaining that GOP members are frustrated that they have virtually no role in making policy. An anonymous member said their colleagues’ feelings about Johnson are “eye rolls, and no better options.”
Johnson seems to be arousing particular ire from some female members, perhaps none more visibly than Elise Stefanik, who is leaving to run for governor of New York. What started as a disagreement over a provision Stefanik wanted to add to a defense spending bill became an ugly public spat.
“Just more lies from the Speaker,” Stefanik tweeted at one point as they argued about the bill. “He certainly wouldn’t have the votes to be speaker if there was a roll-call vote tomorrow,” Stefanik told the Wall Street Journal.
Weeks earlier, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is also leaving the House, lambasted Johnson for the “complete and total utter failure” of keeping the House out of session during the government shutdown. Responding to his fight with Stefanik, she tweeted, “As usual from the Speaker, promises made promises broken. We all know it.”
What they say in private may be even worse. CNN reported that “in one recent private conversation with a GOP lawmaker, Johnson was told his leadership was ‘slipping away,’ that the frustration members are feeling is ‘boiling over’ and that ‘morale has never been lower.’” Johnson has taken to begging members not to air their grievances in public.
Impending doom
Driving all this discontent forward is the fact that Republican members feel incredibly vulnerable, both for their own seats and their majority.
They know that chances are very strong that Democrats will win control of the chamber in the midterms. To judge by the results of off-year and special elections, not to mention Trump’s unpopularity, the ordinary midterm setback for the governing party looks like it could become an absolute blowout.
While only a few (including Greene) were willing to come out in favor extending the expiring Obamacare subsidies that were at the heart of the shutdown conflict, they all know the spike in health insurance premiums will be an albatross for them next November. Johnson and his leadership team seem to have no idea what to do about it.
To be effective in this situation, a speaker needs to be strong and in control. He’d have to provide members something they can take back to their constituents to give them a better chance of surviving the coming blue wave. And he’d have to be able to keep them in line in both their public comments and their votes. Strong speakers like Pelosi knew how to wield both the carrot and the stick, convincing their members that staying on the team is good for their own interests and straying will carry an intolerable cost.
But right now, Republican members don’t fear Johnson and are increasingly willing to raise their frustrations in public, which only makes him look weaker and more ineffectual. He has ceded the House’s power to the president. Under his leadership, Republicans have no apparent idea how to address the problems voters are most concerned about, and nothing to show for their time in the majority.
So it seems increasingly likely that Johnson will lose the speakership a year from now, and go down as one of the least effective speakers in history despite the fact that his party holds all the levers of power. As daunting as his task was, it’s hard to see how he could have done much worse.
That’s it for today
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AND, to be honest...thank the gods for Johnson's ineffectiveness! Think of the horrifying mess we'd have to clean up if Johnson was actually good at being Speaker.
Worse, if Johnson WAS an effective leader, we wouldn't have even the glimmer of an opportunity to win the House and Senate at midterms. I despise his sniveling, little ratweasel heart...but in this one way at least, thank goodness that Johnson IS such a wimpy little pos.
I believe Little Johnson did exactly what he was supposed to do. He wasn't put in place to be effective. He was put in place because he's the typical "yes man" for Don Snoreleone. This administration needs an ineffective Congress if their goal is to strengthen power in the Executive Branch.
A well-functioning Congress would actually be a check on the President's power, even if the party controlled both the House and the Senate. Just the fact that he let Mango Mussolini enact tariffs without Congress' approval goes to show that his ineffectiveness is a feature, not a bug.