Speaker Johnson's beginning of the end
Trump's elfish toady is quickly losing control of the House.
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Last week, Analilia Mejia won her election in a suburban northern New Jersey district, narrowing Speaker Mike Johnson’s majority to a measly three seats. To celebrate, and before Mejia was even seated, Johnson went ahead and lost two crucial and embarrassing votes in a 24-hour period, solidifying his standing as one of the weakest leaders in House history.
Worse for Johnson, the losses were the result not just of defections from the right, but from what passes these days as Republican moderates. The right-wingers are just auditioning for Newsmax and can be counted on to cave. Moderates, though, are actually afraid of losing their seats if they don’t distance themselves from the more toxic aspects of the Trump/Johnson agenda.
Up to now, those moderates have seemed more scared of primaries and the wrath of Trump than of their own Trump-skeptical voters. But as midterms loom, and the president’s approval stagnates at historic lows, the calculus appears to be changing. That bodes ill for Johnson’s legislative agenda — and for his party’s 2026 prospects.
Inmates take over the asylum
Johnson’s first failure came last Thursday.
Trump’s white nationalist administration has been trying for months to revoke Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 350,000 Haitian immigrants so it can terrorize and deport them. The courts have blocked the move, but the community remains in limbo as the case plays out.
At the end of March, Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley — a progressive Democrat — brought a discharge petition to the House floor to try to restore TPS for Haitians. Discharge petitions allow a majority of House members to force a vote on legislation that House leadership refuses to bring to the floor.
In the past, discharge petitions have been a rare occurrence. But Johnson has a slim majority — and perhaps more importantly, he regularly tries to ram through Trump’s priorities despite the wishes of his own caucus. As a result, there have been exponentially more successful discharge petitions this Congress than ever before in history.
Every Democrat and four Republicans from purple districts — Florida’s Maria Elvira Salazar, Pennsylvania’s Brian Fitzpatrick, New York’s Mike Lawler, and Nebraska’s Don Bacon — signed the the discharge petition, getting it to the needed 218 votes. Six more Republicans later joined Democrats to pass the bill last Thursday.
Even though it has passed the House, it’s unlikely to become law because of the 60-vote threshold in the GOP-controlled Senate. Even if it somehow overcame that, neither chamber is likely to be able to muster the two-thirds vote required to defeat a presidential veto.
Nonetheless, Pressley’s legislation is an important milestone. As reporter Jamie Dupree noted, it’s the “first real immigration rebuke to Trump from the 119th Congress.” More, it is one of the few examples in years of a straightforwardly progressive immigration bill that doesn’t include any sort of sop for conservatives. It is not a “grand bargain” like the right-leaning Biden immigration reform measure which failed years ago in the Senate. Instead, it’s an uncompromising rejection of Trump’s anti-immigrant xenophobia.
That rejection, again, garnered bipartisan support. In related news, Trump’s approval is hovering around 38 percent (and 20 points underwater), and the politics of immigration is shifting.
Immigration used to be one of Trump’s strengths, but polls show that most voters now disapprove of his handling of the issue. Tellingly, immigration is one of the matters most cited by 2024 Trump voters who today disapprove of his performance, according to analyst G. Elliott Morris.
Swing district Republicans, then, have strong incentives to turn against Trump on immigration. It’s not a coincidence either that multiple representatives from Ohio and Florida voted with Pressley — those are both states with large Haitian communities. The vote, in other words, was inspired by members turning against the bigoted agenda of the president and his House lickspiddle.
That’s the kind of coalition which could well hold on other votes. And it provides a blueprint for a better immigration politics — one that could create a bipartisan consensus to fight for humane policies, breaking free of 20 years of escalating cruelty to assuage the right.
“They have no clue what they’re doing”
Johnson’s second loss of the day last Thursday was in many respects even more striking.
Trump and Republican leaders wanted to extend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was on the cusp of expiration. Section 702 of FISA is particularly divisive; it allows warrantless collection and surveillance of foreigners. But because those foreigners sometimes communicate with people in the US, it has also been used to monitor US citizens.
Democrats have opposed the program, and so have Republicans with libertarian inclinations who worry about government overreach. In the run up to the vote, Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden and Republican Rep. Thomas Massie both said that, in light of a classified and secret interpretation of FISA, the constitution required them to vote no on reauthorization.
Republicans frantically struggled to get their caucus together before the bill expired, promising some cosmetic adjustments, including strengthening penalties for misusing surveillance powers. Just past midnight last Friday they called a vote, prompting Democratic Rep. Christian Menefee to post that he was “rushing back to the Capitol at midnight to vote because Republicans control Congress and have no clue what they’re doing.”
House Republicans were eager to prove Menefee right. In the wee hours, 12 of them defected on FISA, more than offsetting four right-leading Democrats who voted for it (Jared Golden, Josh Gottheimer, Tom Suozzi, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez), and the bill was defeated by 20 votes.
Johnson wasn’t done with losing though. After he lost the five-year reauthorization, he tried to push through an 18-month clean extension with no changes — and lost 20 Republicans on a rule to even consider it. With no other options, the speaker managed to get the House to push the deadline to April 30. That gives him a week and a half to see how many more times he can trip over his own feet and clonk his smug mug on his gavel.
As with the Pressley vote, the mix of members that defied Johnson on one or both votes is as consequential as the defiance itself. Unsurprisingly, many members of the House Freedom Caucus took the opportunity to performatively distance themselves from House leadership so they can claim to be the real conservatives. They dominated the second vote against the 18-month extension.
The first vote, though, included an eclectic mix of members telling Johnson to pound sand. Brian Fitzpatrick and Mike Turner, both of whom had voted to protect Haitian immigrants earlier in the day, decided they enjoyed defying leadership so much they’d do it again. New Jersey’s Jeff Van Drew was elected to Congress in 2018 as a Democrat and switched parties in December 2019; his no vote is a rare instance of him bucking leadership. Iowa’s Mariannette Miller-Meeks is from a swing district in a state that looks bluer this cycle. Zach Nunn, from the same state, is in a safer district, and like Van Drew is usually a reliable GOP vote. Tennessee’s John Rose is currently running in his state’s primary for governor.
The immigration vote shows how Johnson is struggling in the face of a growing bipartisan coalition. The FISA vote, in contrast, finds him losing votes on left, right, and even in the center of his caucus, in what seems to be a remarkably non-factional expression of no confidence in his leadership.
Johnson has such a small majority he can’t really afford to alienate anybody — and he has, nonetheless, somehow succeeded in alienating everybody. Democrats, meanwhile, look unified on the kind of national security issue that used to cut much deeper into their coalition a mere four votes.
Tired of winning yet?
The Freedom Caucus lives to cave, and the vote to extend the FISA deadline for a couple weeks suggests that there is a desire to pass it in some form. It’s difficult to know what a compromise might look like, but it’s more likely than not that leadership cobbles something together.
But while Johnson might stumble over the finish line on a version of FISA extension, there is every reason to believe this late-night failure will not be his last.
Trump’s approval seems unlikely to improve, Democrats are going to keep winning special elections, and the midterms are only going to get closer. Johnson has not built a reputation for honesty or competence and has done little to show vulnerable House members in his caucus that he cares about protecting them or their seats. The coming months should be brutal for him — and will, hopefully, end with his majority and speakership destroyed in a humiliating and titanic blue wave.
That’s it for today
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The real question is whether the House as an institution still functions by the time we find out.
Vote counts matter only in a chamber whose outputs still bind. This one increasingly does not.
Emergency powers, defied court rulings, and a Speaker too weak to discipline his own caucus add up to a legislature that performs procedure without producing consequence.
Procedure without consequence is theater.
Johan
I watch what goes on in Washington, and I don’t see governance. I see stupid games being played and we are winning stupid prizes. MTG won us the stupid prize of Mike Johnson when she tossed Kevin McCarthy into the fire. She could have done us a solid and offered up Johnson for sacrifice before she “retired” from Congress. They are so good at making the mess… not so good at cleaning it up.
Thank you for your spot on analysis, Noah.❤️