People wait for a press conference by US Republican Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene, of Georgia, and Thomas Massie, of Kentucky, on House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries' (L in photo) endorsement of Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson (R in photo), outside the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on May 1.BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/Getty Images
In a country where the unpredictable no longer is unusual – in an age when American political allegiances are flexible – the events developing this week still are astonishing: a posse of liberal Democrats likely riding to the rescue of a conservative Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives in a desperate effort to curtail the power of even more conservative Republicans.
The radicals who have controlled the House are about to be cancelled, at least for now.
Six months ago, no one would have predicted that House Democrats would salvage the speakership of Mike Johnson of Louisiana. Then again, six months ago, no one thought the little-known Mr. Johnson would be Speaker at all – and hardly anyone outside of the famous Shreveport Orlandeaux’s Café could have identified him in a police lineup. Now, he’s second in line to the presidency.
And six months ago, when the Republican rebels seemed to have a chokehold on the House, no one expected their power to melt away.
The result of the expected Democratic assistance to permit Mr. Johnson to retain his wooden gavel is a twin reckoning and a twin weakening – the dissipation of the power of the Republican rebels who have wreaked havoc in the House and used their power in a closely divided body to exercise outsized control of the chamber; and the accompanying diminution of a Speaker, alienated from his onetime allies, who now must depend on his most ardent ideological foes to keep him in power and whose prerogatives are restricted by his rivals’ policy priorities.
“We now have at least a momentary pause on the extreme right’s ability to dictate much of what goes on in the House,” said Christopher Borick, a political scientist at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa. “We’ve seen that segment exert incredible influence on the direction of the party and of Congress and this is a signal of some degree of pushback. You can almost hear people murmuring: Enough is enough.”
That apparently will not stop Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia from attempting this week to dethrone Mr. Johnson, himself a reliable conservative who otherwise is comfortable in the far-right circle of fervent Donald Trump supporters that she occupies.
She has the power to set that process in motion because of the desperation of Mr. Johnson’s predecessor, former speaker Kevin McCarthy of California, to win his position. Faced with a rebellion from the same far-right lawmakers who now are assailing Mr. Johnson, he granted a key concession: the ability of a single House member to call for a vote to declare vacant the office of the Speaker – in essence, to press for a recall of the presiding officer.
That is what toppled Mr. McCarthy 19 months ago, making him the only Speaker to be removed from his own onetime supporters. That is the bludgeon that Ms. Greene now plans to employ against Mr. Johnson. Though Ms. Greene says she has the support of several of her colleagues, only two other Republicans, Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Paul Gosar of Arizona, have publicly said they will join the effort.
The conservative rebels have grown increasingly impatient with Mr. Johnson, who they believe was too conciliatory to the Democrats and the Biden administration in agreeing to a measure to avoid a government shutdown and who they consider a turncoat in his successful effort to forge a coalition to provide a fresh US$95-billion infusion of military aid to Ukraine, Israel and to American allies in the Indo-Asia region.
Defying party leaders who have counselled her that she is jeopardizing Republican unity and the effort to oppose Biden administration priorities, she has “absolutely” vowed to press ahead. Her ardour, and her argument that Mr. Johnson is an unwitting co-conspirator with Democrats, grew sharper after it became clear that the Speaker would be saved by Democratic votes – itself a remarkable phenomenon without clear precedent.
“Mike Johnson is not capable of that job,” Ms. Greene said last week. “He has proven it over and over again. Now we have [House Democratic Leader] Hakeem Jeffries and the Democrats coming out, embracing Mike Johnson with a warm hug and a big, wet, sloppy kiss.” On X, formerly known as Twitter, she wrote, “Mike Johnson is officially the Democrat Speaker of the House.”
Ms. Greene is no stranger to controversy. She suggested that the California wildfires of November, 2018, might have been triggered by a “laser beam or light beam coming down to Earth I guess” from space, speculating that the California utility PG&E and the Rothschilds, a banking family often prominent in antisemitic tropes, might be responsible.
Last week, she voted against a House antisemitism measure, saying, “Antisemitism is wrong, but I will not be voting for the Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2023 today that could convict Christians of antisemitism for believing the Gospel that says Jesus was handed over to Herod to be crucified by the Jews.”
Ms. Greene knows that her attempt to remove Mr. Johnson is doomed to fail but wants voters to see Democrats salvaging his speakership. In that regard, she is often portrayed as more accomplished in the art of performance than in the art of politics.
“Marjorie Taylor Greene is the star of the show,” said Mr. Jeffries, the Democratic leader. “The show is called Republicans Gone Wild.”