Republicans Elect Mike Johnson Speaker

It brings the impasse to an end, but the House GOP still has a lot of hurdles to overcome this year.

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U.S. Rep. Mike Johnson shakes hands with Rep. Andy Barr as the House of Representatives holds an election for a new speaker of the House Wednesday. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

If you ask House Republicans about their speakerless October—why Kevin McCarthy was ousted, why the conference had to go through four replacement candidates to find one who didn’t have sworn enemies determined to block him—you’ll get varying answers.

Rep. Dusty Johnson of South Dakota blames “an increasingly polarized political environment that rewards intransigence, stubbornness, and fighting as opposed to finding common ground.”

Rep. Mike Gallagher’s theory is institutional decline. “You have people that feel no loyalty to an institution like Congress because it’s weak,” he told reporters. “We’ve gone from being the most powerful branch of government to the weakest, and they’re not going to abide by the rules of the conference or the norms of congressional behavior.”

Far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, on the other hand, believes the past month of chaos on the House floor was actually because “the GOP conference is changing, and it’s changing to reflect ‘America First.’”

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  1. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    I strongly dislike Mike Johnson’s actions after the 2020 election, but if he puts that aside and tries to govern and makes the House work, I will applaud him for it. Those quotations from moderate House members who ended up voting for him sounded to me like the principled position. Sometimes you have to be the responsible adult and that means compromising and accepting a guy like Johnson in order to get the House to go back to business.

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  2. Jack H Wolf

    A take on this from an article in the Persuasion Sub Stack "The MAGAfication of the Republican Party is Complete":
    "The Republican Party in the House is remarkably unified on policy and in what its members will say on the record to reporters and in public to constituents. It’s a party that supports Donald Trump, thinks the 2020 election was stolen, blames the former president’s legal troubles on out-of-control partisan prosecutors, opposes abortion, denies the reality of anthropogenic climate change, and increasingly expresses hostility to gay and transgender rights, and to funding for Ukraine in its war with Russia. It sounds, in other words, like a fully MAGA party.

    But that impression is deceptive—or rather, only skin deep. As countless anonymously sourced stories and books (the most recent being McKay Coppins’ candid biography of Mitt Romney) have demonstrated, Republican elected officials will roll their eyes and express contempt and even disgust when speaking in private and off the record about Trump and where their party has ended up. This implies that most don’t actually believe much of what they say for public consumption. They say it because the voters back home demand it, because saying it gets them media hits, and because if they don’t say it, Trump might turn on them and encourage a primary challenge from further to their right.

    They talk like extremists, in other words, but it’s a put-on. This was the subtext of the Gaetz-led revolution against McCarthy: The MAGA true believers sensed that the Speaker of the House was faking it. He was a standard-issue Republican with views and procedural commitments antedating the right-populist takeover of the GOP that began with the Tea Party but became truly transformative with Trump’s victory in the 2016 primaries and general election. McCarthy tried to walk the walk of a Trumpist Republican. But his willingness to cut even a temporary deal with Democrats revealed the truth: He was a squish, content to go along to get along rather than showing a willingness to break the system to get his way. "

    I fault the Democrats for not taking the cue here and getting a more reasonable GOP speaker but a lot of the Dems applaud the Freedom Caucus victories as a way to increase their electablility in the cynical way they donated money to MAGAs in the 2022 primaries. I think they missed an opportunity to have a more reasonable speaker like Emmer.

    Here is the whole Persuasion article, a good Sub Stack, and one of the things I like is that I still haven't figured out their politics:
    https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-magafication-of-the-gop-is-complete

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  3. Avatar photo
    Barry Alexander

    I can think of one Congresswoman who seems to want to be Speaker pretty badly. McCarthy's perfect pupil, Elise Stefanik.

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  4. Ben Kissling

    "How do I say that I'm mad this particular guy got elected Speaker without contradicting my earlier arguments that the House needs a Speaker? Hmmmm..."

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  5. Bobby D

    It was probably futile to hope for a better speaker. Johnson will provide a lot of boob bait for Bubba, which will lead anyone with an IQ north of 100 to sit out the 2024 election or vote for the Democrat.

    I’d suggest that it’s a replay of 2012. But in 2012 the GOP had a credible candidate at the top of the ticket. He was dragged down by all of the GOP clownery around him. This time around it’ll be clownery through and through, unless Trump keels over in a bucket of KFC and Nikki Haley pulls through.

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  6. Jnedwards43

    We'll know how this is working in less than twenty days. Forgive me for being less than optimistic.

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  7. Jim.H

    Well, it looks like Matt Gaetz move gave us a more conservative speaker…..will see how it goes.

    The fact that the left wing media (or media) doesn’t like him just makes me think he is a good pick.

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    1. Bobby D

      We got a more Trumpy speaker. I wouldn’t say that we got a more conservative speaker. After all, it’s awfully hard to make the case that the MAGA movement is a conservative movement. MAGA is basically a nativist variant of socialism not unlike that promoted by Woodrow Wilson.

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      1. Avatar photo
        Matthew Thirteen

        That's good distinction to note. Johnson demonstrates that he is against same-sex marriage, against aid to Ukraine, anti-abortion, mimicked FL so-called 'don't say gay' legislation, bishop to the election deniers, linked school shootings to teaching evolution, and thinks he received a complete and total endorsement from the all mighty.

        I don't see that as more conservative. That's more loony tunes. Those values do not reflect a Conservative. They represent an undiagnosed mental illness.

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  8. Rockefeller Republican

    He added he believes Johnson “is a man of strong character”. Really? Someone who tried to overthrow the duly elected President of the United States? I need to check Merriam Webster’s definition of moral again.

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  9. Trimliner

    Very fine article on the new Speaker. It (anonymity) helped get him elected, but his success in governing depends on whether he can wriggle even slightly out of the grip if the ultra- MAGA people, who assume they own him. At the first sign he is not a Trump puppet, they will throw him under the bus like they did McCarthy.

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  10. John

    I’m giving him a chance and not judging him by his prior mistakes. I may be mistaken but a lot has happened in the last three years and is happening now. Federal and state indictments are moving to trial. The facts surrounding them have become increasingly obvious. Trump himself is appearing unstable. He always did, but he’s worse now. Johnson is young and has the ability to see these things. Let’s give him some slack

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