The Education of Mike Johnson

David Super

      On January 7, House Speaker Mike Johnson announced an agreement with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on the total amount that would be available for discretionary appropriations in the fiscal year that began more than three months earlier.  The unusual timing of his announcement – on a Sunday afternoon, after the day’s political talk shows had concluded – provides some indication of just how proud the Speaker was of his achievement. 

     The Speaker’s disappointment is not surprising:  this agreement was essentially to abide by the deal former Speaker Kevin McCarthy made last summer with President Biden.  Last summer’s deal enraged the far-right House Freedom Caucus, causing them to shut down the House floor until Speaker McCarthy agreed to renege on his promise. 

     Speaker McCarthy’s directive that appropriators make draconian cuts in domestic programs ensured that no progress would be made on appropriations over the summer and early fall as Democrats refused to honor Speaker McCarthy’s duplicitous behavior.  With Republicans endlessly squabbling, and rejecting many of their own extreme appropriations bills, Speaker McCarthy saw that he had no chance of blaming a government shutdown on Democrats.  Accordingly, he tabled a six-week temporary funding measure, which passed with Democratic votes.  A few days later, Freedom Caucus Members defenestrated him.   

     After the Freedom Caucus rejected various candidates for being too close to the Republican leadership and swing-district Members rejected high-profile disruptor Rep. Jim Jordan, the Republican Caucus unanimously settled on Rep. Johnson.  His far-right positions and obscurity met the respective needs of the Freedom Caucus and the swing-district Members. 

     Speaker Johnson promised to take a firmer stance on fiscal issues than Speaker McCarthy.  After the House Republicans’ internal divisions had dominated headlines for weeks, however, Speaker Johnson concluded that he, too, would be unable to blame a government shutdown on the Democrats.  He therefore tabled his own temporary funding bill in November.  With his conference divided, this again depended on Democratic support to pass.

     Since then, Speaker Johnson has been negotiating with Senate Democrats to establish a top-line funding number for appropriations bills.  Majority Leader Schumer refused to budge, however, reasoning that once he let Republicans walk away from one agreement, no future deals would have any value.  By early January, Speaker Johnson had come to recognize that his only choices were to begin shutting down the government in mid-January over his unwillingness to honor McCarthy’s budget agreement or to accept those funding levels.  Freedom Caucus Members threatened to revolt again if he did not achieve substantial budget cuts, but swing-district Members implored him not to provoke a confrontation he could not win. 

     The plan Speaker Johnson settled on with Senator Schumer retained the overall funding level from last summer’s agreement.  This included both the headline number Speaker McCarthy had insisted upon to make his cuts look more dramatic and a series of side agreements softening that number (e.g., by preventing some appropriations from counting against the overall ceiling) that were President Biden’s price for accepting the especially austere headline number.  Senator Schumer made two modest concessions to allow Speaker Johnson to save face:  speeding up by one year a cut in Internal Revenue Service enforcement spending and rescinding coronavirus relief funds that still had not been spent. 

     Predictably, Freedom Caucus responded the same way they did to Speaker McCarthy’s original deal:  by shutting down the House floor.  Speaker Johnson reportedly has responded by vacillating, expressing openness to reneging on his deal with Senator Schumer in meetings with far-right Members while assuring swing-district Republicans that he will honor his word. 

     By all accounts, House and Senate appropriators are working busily behind closed doors on the details of the twelve bills to fund the government.  Because the spending targets on which House Republicans have been insisting are so extreme as to be unacceptable to their own Members, no preliminary agreements with the Senate have been possible up to this point.  Appropriators clearly will be unable to finish the legislation and move it through both chambers of Congress by January 19, when the first four bills are needed to avoid a partial government shutdown.  Speaker Johnson therefore will have to bring another temporary funding extension to the House floor despite his earlier pledge not to do so. 

     House Republicans could still bring about a government shutdown by rejecting appropriations bills at the level Speakers McCarthy and Johnson agreed to, by attaching extremist policy riders to their appropriations bills, or by ousting Speaker Johnson and throwing the House back into chaos.  At this juncture, it seems unlikely that the Freedom Caucus will persuade enough of their colleagues of the desirability of fomenting such chaos in an election year. 

     All the year’s fiscal machinations obscure a simple reality:  the House, and therefore Congress, can only function when House Republicans come to accept their need for Democratic votes.  House Republicans cannot move legislation by themselves:  their margin is too narrow, the Freedom Caucus’s agenda is too extreme, and too many far-right Members are disinterested in legislating.  They are occasionally able to unite their conference to pass bills so wildly extreme that the Senate would not pass them and the President would not sign them.  Any conceivable compromise with the Senate and the President would fail far-right Members’ purity tests and thus require substantial Democratic votes to pass the final bill.  This is true for fiscal legislation, for a Farm Bill, for immigration changes, and for most other meaningful legislation. 

     The Freedom Caucus, of course, is adamant that Speaker Johnson not bring bills to the House floor that need Democratic votes to pass:  once it becomes acceptable for him to count on Democratic votes, the Freedom Caucus becomes largely irrelevant.  Speaker Johnson brought the appropriations extension to the floor in November knowing he needed Democratic votes, and he will presumably do so again later this week.  But neither he nor the rest of his conference has fully accepted the necessity of bipartisanship. 

     This stubbornness has seriously undermined Republicans’ own agenda.  Speakers McCarthy and Johnson’s refusal to negotiate with House Democrats has deprived them of any chance to seek concessions:  when putting a bill on the floor that depends on Democratic votes without prior conversation with Democrats essentially forces the speakers to craft bills with nothing whatsoever that Democrats might find objectionable. 

     Making obviously nonserious, extreme demands until the eve of deadlines eliminates any real chance of not getting blamed for a government shutdown.  So does continually reneging or threatening to renege on one’s own prior agreements.  The combined effect of these antics and waiting until the very last moment to begin negotiating seriously with the Senate yields very little bargaining power. 

     Speaker Johnson’s unwillingness to negotiate with House Democrats also puts him at a considerable procedural disadvantage.  The usual method of bringing legislation to the House floor is by way of a “special rule” proposed by the House Rules Committee.  (The regular House Rules are wholly unworkable:  the Senate is, by comparison, a humming machine of efficiency.  Accordingly, the majority party long has had the Rules Committee propose one-off special rules, with limits on debate and amendments, for the consideration of major legislation.)  This would seem easy as Republicans gave themselves a 9-to-4 majority on the Rules Committee (far in excess of their share of seats in the full House). 

     Speaker McCarthy, however, awarded two Rules Committee seats to Freedom Caucus Members, and a third to a close ally of the Caucus, in his desperate efforts to secure election in January.  This leaves House Republican leadership without a majority on the Rules Committee and hence no ability to bring legislation to the floor under a special rule if the far right is opposed.  Republican leaders could negotiate special rules with the Democrats on the Committee but thus far have adamantly refused to do so. 

     Republican leaders’ solution has been to bring contested legislation to the House floor under motions to suspend the rules.  Motions to suspend the rules limit debate and allow fast action, but they also require a two-thirds majority.  Thus, by refusing to negotiate with Democrats, House Republicans make themselves dependent on even more Democratic votes.  A party so deeply dependent on its opponents has very little leverage indeed.  And the more far-right House Republicans announce their intent to bring down legislation, the more Democrats Speaker Johnson will need to achieve a two-thirds majority.  Such a heavy Democratic vote would be unachievable on legislation that gives Democrats any serious qualms.   

     The hard right’s maximalist agenda would be unachievable in any event with the White House and Senate in Democratic hands, a tenuous Republican majority, and numerous components of that agenda wildly unpopular with the electorate.  House Republicans’ divisions and dogged opposition to bipartisanship, however, is causing them to squander much of the very real leverage they would have had as the majority party in the House.  Speaker Johnson is surely smart enough to see this.  His inability to free his conference from this denial of political reality and self-destructive behavior is therefore quite breathtaking.

     @DavidASuper1