As members prepare to leave town for the year, the House Republican Conference is breaking at the seams.
A contingent of members is fed up with Speaker Mike Johnson and his leadership, and others are livid at moderates for teaming up with Democrats.
While Johnson claims he has “not lost control of the House,” his members would beg to differ.
“It’s a shitstorm of Johnson’s own creating,” one senior Republican member told NOTUS.
Trending
The anger reached a tipping point Wednesday when four moderate Republicans signed a Democratic-led discharge petition to circumvent the speaker and force a vote on a three-year clean extension of the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies.
Johnson infuriated moderates when he refused to allow a vote on a Republican-led amendment to extend the subsidies this week . Now, he has to deal with a mutiny in his conference, where just about everyone is miserable, and a significant number of members are laying the blame directly at Johnson’s feet.
“Shitty,” is how one member described Johnson as a leader. “If you asked members for their honest review of Johnson, he’d be at a 20% approval rating.”
Johnson’s office did not return a request for comment.
A second senior Republican told NOTUS that the conference “might be running to their rope.”
“But this is not a parliamentary system, so you can’t call a special election,” the member said. “We have to deal with whatever we’ve got until the first Monday in January in 2027.”
While House rules allow a vote on a new speaker with the support of nine members, it’s equally unclear who could get a consensus vote at this point. The ousting of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy — and the many votes it took to elect Johnson — remains fresh in the mind of the conference.
This member also pointed out that for ages, discharge petitions were only successful when someone in the majority started them, and then the minority joined in. But because Johnson has failed to act, “you’ve got so many Republicans who think they’re drowning and they’re trying to reach for Hakeem’s lifeboat,” speaking of the Democratic leader.
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, a moderate Republican from New York, said “it’s frustrating” because they had a bipartisan solution but Johnson refused to bring it to the floor, leaving moderates no choice but to work with Democrats to extend the subsidies.
She also added that Johnson’s tactics often force moderate members away from working with leadership because he’s too busy placating the far-right faction of the conference.
“It shows that he’s very one-sided, right,” Malliotakis said. “He’s much more, he’s further to the right than many of his members who want to see a vote on this issue. And it’s not just people from the Freedom Caucus. We have people from across the political spectrum who have said they want to address this issue in a careful manner that doesn’t continue just giving subsidies to big insurance, but protects our constituents from premium increases.”
However, some members on the far right are equally angry, just not at Johnson. Much of their frustration is directed at the moderates who signed onto the discharge petition in the first place.
“I’m going to give Johnson a pass, but I’m not going to give these members a pass,” Rep. Eric Burlison, a member of the House Freedom Caucus, told NOTUS. “The message I’m going to send to them is: Don’t even think about asking me for help politically, period. Because why would I? You basically just stabbed us in the back to help the Democratic Party get a major win that’s going to deflate my voters.”
Author
