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WASHINGTON — Under pressure from right-wing members, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., faces stark challenges in keeping the government funded and responding to a potential Senate deal that would toughen immigration laws while providing funding for Ukraine.
He’s caught between a right flank that wants to kill both measures and the need to cut deals with Democrats who control the Senate and the White House to pass any legislation. The dilemma is ratcheting up as presidential primary season began this week in Iowa, adding a fresh political layer to the parliamentary dynamics of Johnson’s wafer-thin majority in the House, where some restive members are mulling whether to oust him from his job after less than three months.
For now, Johnson says he wants to protect his spending deal with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., after he met with conservatives who revolted against the deal, complaining that it would spend too much money. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, said on “The Steve Deace Show” last week that a motion to vacate the speaker’s chair, removing Johnson from his job, is “on the table.” Any one member can force a vote.
“Our top-line agreement remains,” Johnson told reporters Friday. Over the weekend, Johnson and Schumer released a short-term bill to keep part of the government funded through March 1 and the rest through March 8, which Johnson said would buy time for Congress to finish full funding bills and for Republicans to achieve “meaningful policy wins.”
It’s an important test for Johnson on whether he can keep his word on his first big bipartisan deal and deliver the votes. Giving into right-wing pressure and abandoning the deal would undercut his ability to negotiate in the future. Some say he should stick with it.
“A deal is a deal,” said Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., who represents a swing district. “We’ve got to keep our word.”
But passing the spending deal could make it politically more difficult for Johnson to support an emerging bipartisan Senate immigration deal that the right wing of the GOP is turning against.
“There’s a slim majority and enough members for whom it’s not that nothing is ever good enough, but nothing could ever be good enough,” Doug Heye, a former House GOP leadership aide, said in a text message. “There’s always a reason to vote no.”
“If you’re positioning yourself as a ‘fighter’ above all, there’s no deal on the border that you’ll accept,” Heye said. “That’s been true for a decade-plus but acutely true when the majority is so small.”
Johnson appears to be angling against the bipartisan package to tighten asylum laws, which the Senate has been working on for months to unlock the votes to approve additional funding aid to help Ukraine fend off Russia. Johnson has sided with his far-right members, so far, by demanding the House’s more restrictive bill, known as H.R. 2. Over the weekend, Johnson fueled their discontent by blasting out a dubiously sourced summary of the Senate talks displayed on Fox News, tweeting the graphic with his response: “Absolutely not.”
The lead Republican in the border talks, Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, weighed in to dispel the rumors. “I encourage people to read the border security bill before they judge the border security bill,” he wrote on X. “I also advise people not to believe everything you read on the internet.”
House Republican hard-liners say they project the tougher asylum and parole laws that senators are closing in on to be insufficient to stop the arrival of prospective refugees at the border. Democrats have offered significant compromise to toughen asylum laws in part to secure the necessary GOP votes to assist Ukraine.
In a twist, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., is threatening to call a vote to oust Johnson if he offers any Ukraine aid in exchange for immigration policy changes, no matter what emerges from the deal.
“The Republican speaker of the House and any Republican, or really anyone elected to serve in the United States Congress, should be protecting America’s national security interests. And they would never vote for that deal. And that’s why I told Speaker Johnson if he made that deal in exchange for $60 billion for Ukraine, I would vacate the chair,” Greene said Sunday in an interview on Fox News.
On a Republican conference call Sunday night, Johnson told lawmakers they would have more leverage by not shutting down the government and by working instead to get their priorities included in the 12 appropriations bills that fully fund the government, according to two people on the call. On immigration, he reiterated that H.R. 2 is his position, but he was careful not to reveal specifics of what the House would accept if a Senate immigration deal came together, the sources said.
It’s a familiar set of challenges that former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., faced before a group of eight rabble-rousers banded together to overthrow him in October after he refused to shut down the government.
Johnson’s allies believe GOP opponents of the spending deal may vote against it but doubt they’ll come for his job.
“Nobody wants to end up back where we vacate the speakership and go through the contest for who’s going to be the next speaker that we trust,” said Rep. Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, the Budget Committee chair. “Because it’s a small margin, it’s a divided Congress, and it was a deal that was made before we got here. Those are realities that we have to keep in perspective.”
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