If Johnson Can’t Win Speaker Election, D.C. Grinds to a Halt

It would be a vast understatement to say that a lot is going on in Washington this month. The 119th Congress, featuring a Republican majority in both houses, is due to begin on January 3. On January 6, a joint session of Congress is supposed to confirm the results of the 2024 presidential election (a mere quadrennial housekeeping duty until it became the occasion of an attempted insurrection four years ago). On January 20, Donald Trump’s inauguration is on tap (the day after, he holds yet another political rally in Washington), and he has promised a host of first-day executive orders and likely pardons to jump-start his avowedly radical second administration. A Trump-directed Republican legislative blitz has also been in the planning stages since Election Day.

But the hinge of all this frenetic and consequential activity is the election of a House Speaker, which must take place before House members can be sworn in for the new term and occupy their seats. This is the new Congress’s first order of business on January 3, and it should be routine; the majority party has already chosen its candidate for the Speakership in a postelection gathering. But the razor-thin Republican majority in the 119th Congress — along with a vacancy and a never-quite-extinguished backbench rebellion against incumbent Mike Johnson — has made his formal reelection more than a little iffy despite vocal backing from Trump.

The arithmetic of the Speaker’s election is clear enough. All 215 House Democrats are expected to be in attendance and will vote for Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries. Republicans won 220 House seats (down one from their preelection numbers) in November. But one of those seats, belonging to former attorney-general nominee Matt Gaetz, is vacant. Far-right Kentucky congressman Thomas Massie, who has already survived a Trump-backed primary challenge, has announced repeatedly that he will not vote for Johnson, who needs 218 votes for a majority of elected members. One more defection and the Louisianan simply won’t have the votes, leaving the Speaker’s chair empty. The jam-packed January schedule for Washington will stall until the Speakership is resolved.

Will another House Republican join Massie to do in Johnson? It’s entirely possible, particularly given the grumbling aimed at the Speaker after his less-than-deft handling of pre-Christmas stopgap spending legislation, which nearly shut down the federal government. More significant, multiple members of the House Freedom Caucus have carped regularly about Johnson’s failure to pull off deep domestic-spending cuts in the last Congress along with his willingness to work with Democrats to keep the wheels turning in Washington. The Wall Street Journal has identified three possible Freedom Caucus members who could stick a fork into the incumbent’s reelection plans: longtime fiscal-hawk gadfly Chip Roy of Texas, who has regularly defied orders from Mar-a-Lago to get into line; Freedom Caucus chairman Andy Harris of Maryland; and the highly eccentric Victoria Spartz of Indiana, whose fury over government spending recently led her to resign her committee assignments and pledge allegiance to the Elon Musk–Vivek Ramaswamy DOGE initiative to destroy the deep state.

Herding all these cats into a vote for Johnson won’t be easy, even if Trump personally lobbies them, as he might. He likely has his own issues with the incumbent after Johnson failed to comply with his direct order to include a debt-limit measure in the recent stopgap spending bill. But the last thing he needs is a chaotic beginning to his second term in office, and the absence of any viable alternative to Johnson could produce a sobering effect on would-be rebels. They may, however, drive a hard bargain, particularly in terms of more drastic and publicly enumerated promises to slash absolutely every area of domestic federal spending that hasn’t been explicitly placed off-limits by Trump himself (e.g., Social Security and Medicare), adding to the already fraught fiscal math of Trump’s agenda. The fiscal hard-liners could also keep their powder dry and move against Johnson later, though the proposed new House rules, which the Freedom Caucus agreed to earlier this year, would raise the number of House members it takes to trigger a “motion to vacate the chair” (the maneuver that brought down Kevin McCarthy in 2023) from one to nine.

If, however, Johnson does not get the votes for reelection, the House and the country could enter unknown territory, as the Journal notes:

If no speaker is elected by Jan. 6, Congress likely won’t be able to ratify Trump’s election or the election of Vice President-elect JD Vance. If there is still no speaker, no functioning House, and no certification by Inauguration Day on Jan. 20, then the new GOP-controlled Senate’s president pro-tempore, 91-year-old Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), would become president, according to the presidential line of succession.

The specter of President Grassley should be enough to whip House Republicans into shape sooner rather than later. But no one should assume anything until Johnson has won and the planned rollout of Trump 2.0 begins in earnest.