WASHINGTON (AP) — House Speaker Mike Johnson lamented that he wants to preside over a “normal Congress,” but that the Republican-led House is anything but.
All night meetings. Hours of dead zone, no movement on the floor. The legislation was hastily crafted behind closed doors. Voting is scheduled suddenly. Spectacular failure. And, as happened this week, in a stunning turn of events, the House actually passed the bill.
“Sometimes it’s an ugly process, sometimes it’s a long process,” Johnson said after the House passed a bipartisan bill to provide most funding for the Department of Homeland Security, ending the longest agency shutdown in history. “But we got it done.”
Republicans face an uphill climb this election year to maintain a slim majority in the House, years after returning to power in 2022, and have at times appeared to be learning on the job as they prepare to ask voters to rehire them for a second term in November.
The start and end of the week – with Johnson working behind closed doors to salvage his agenda, for example, with a five-hour delay and then a sudden vote count at around 11pm – would normally be the kind of situation that shocks the political and procedural sense. Now, it’s another Wednesday.
Or two weeks ago, when a routine hearing in the House Rules Committee turned into a midnight forum before a hasty 2 a.m. vote on the committee’s first introduction of a freshly minted 14-page bill to amend a surveillance bill called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. It failed.
“House Republicans have once again shown they can’t govern,” said Rep. Ted Lieu of California, a member of Democratic leadership.
“They often send bills to the Senate that are too extreme, and we end up sitting all these days without getting anything done,” he said.
House Republican’s slim majority makes leaders’ jobs challenging
Johnson, who succeeded the ousted Kevin McCarthy more than two years ago and now leads a House with one of the smallest House majorities in modern times, has little leeway if he tries to pass legislation on party-line votes without Democrats’ input.
The speaker will have to juggle the priorities not only of President Donald Trump but also of the various factions that make up his majority, from the conservative House Freedom Caucus to the more pragmatic conservatives remaining in the Republican Party.
Johnson’s own future has also been in constant doubt after Republicans chased other speakers, including McCarthy, John Boehner and Newt Gingrich, with early exits.
Last year, Johnson in Louisiana passed the party’s signature achievement, a massive bill with tax cuts and safety net cuts that Trump signed into law. At the time, he joked about how difficult it was to cross the finish line.
“I desperately want to have a normal Congress,” the speaker said in July.
“But that won’t happen again,” he said. “Our approach is to work through it and get through it.”
What’s next as House Republicans try to stay in power
Ahead of the fall elections, Johnson and other Republican lawmakers discussed an agenda that included a commitment to another Republican-only budget package, such as a tax cut bill, that they could pass in the House and Senate without Democratic votes.
Texas Budget Chairman Jody Arrington said Thursday that he expects the “core” of the plan to “support our military,” providing more than $100 billion for the war against Iran, as well as funding to replenish defense munitions and other Pentagon-related needs.
Despite a tumultuous week in the House, Arrington said what they call Budget Reconciliation 3.0 should be “the next step.”
However, Republican lawmakers may decide it’s better to skip the hard work of legislation and the drama that comes with it and instead go on the campaign trail to win over voters.
Republican Rep. Richard Hudson, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, the House Republican campaign arm, acknowledged that trying to pass legislation with such a supermajority “is probably going to be tough. It’s ugly.”
“I would love for us to come home and campaign,” Hudson said. “But we still have a lot of important work to do.”
Some of Johnson’s most ardent sparring partners, the most conservative Republican lawmakers, blame their own Republican allies in the Senate, who have often dismissed the work of the House, rather than Johnson’s leadership for the chaotic process.
“Yes, at times, things can get a little tense,” said Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas. “But we’re still getting the job done. We’re sending it to the Senate. So we expect them to do their job.”