The House Speaker Is Safe (for Now)

Speaker Mike Johnson yesterday did exactly what got his predecessor fired last year: He pushed through legislation to keep the government open with mainly Democratic votes. So is Johnson about to lose his job?

Almost certainly not. Ultraconservative House members were sputtering mad that Johnson, the novice speaker, didn’t drive a harder bargain with Senate Democrats on a short-term funding bill to prevent a shutdown this weekend. But they aren’t yet ready to depose him as they did with Speaker Kevin McCarthy in October.

The main reason is that the right sees him as an honest broker who listens to his members even if they don’t like the deals he ultimately brokers. They trust him as a true conservative. They’re reassured by his deep and public evangelical Christianity. So they felt better about swallowing a spending agreement that seemed inevitable anyway — since it had to be negotiated with Senate Democrats and the White House.

Because of the resistance from the hard right, Johnson faced a choice. He could shut down the government and risk public ire or lean on Democrats to help him to keep it open. He chose the latter, calculating that a shutdown would hurt Republicans politically and that he was simply following through on a spending agreement previously struck by McCarthy.

Republicans said it wasn’t enough to fire Johnson. “It’s not going to happen,” said Representative Ralph Norman, a hard-liner from South Carolina who opposed the measure. “No one will put the country through that.”

The legislation that averted a government shutdown this week was a classic congressional Band-Aid. It keeps the spigot on into early March so lawmakers from both chambers can work on 12 spending bills.