After a whipsaw couple of hours, Mike Johnson remained speaker of the House of Representatives with the help of some pressure from President-elect Donald Trump. The move shows that the mild-mannered Louisianan is a far more deft politician than his predecessor Kevin McCarthy, who had to go fifteen rounds before he became speaker two years ago.
But Johnson’s speech afterward did not set the tone, nor did the speech of House Republican Conference Chairwoman Lisa McClain.
Rather, it came when House Democratic Caucus Chairman Pete Aguilar nominated Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and called Democrats the “governing majority.”
On the surface, it might sound daft to hear with Democrats failing to flip the House. Republicans also gained four Senate seats, securing them the majority, giving Trump his trifecta. Trump also won the popular vote, which he didn’t do in 2016, meaning he does have a mandate, though not as large as he may like to claim.
But just last month, Democrats bailed out Johnson and other Republicans when a handful of Republicans opposed a stopgap spending bill after Elon Musk and Trump tanked the bill.
“It seems to be that that’s the MO for this Congress, just like we saw with the speaker vote, a small group of extreme Republicans holding up Congress for the American people,” Aguilar told The Independent.
This pattern repeated itself throughout the last two years of Joe Biden’s presidency. And it will likely have to repeat itself throughout the next few years when it comes to government spending fights and legislation to raise the debt ceiling, given conservative opposition.
Jeffries laid out how he was willing to work with Republicans in his acceptance speech.
“The American people need us as their elected representatives in this season to put down our partisan swords and pick up bipartisan plowshares,” he said.
“He laid out that they are going to have to come to the table if they actually want to govern, and he focused on governments, that’s who Democrats are,” Representative Jasmine Crockett of Texas told The Independent.
Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois, who in the past has had a good working relationship with Republicans as the head of the China committee, said Johnson will have no choice based on today’s results.
“They had to basically flip two votes with last-minute deals in order to elect their speaker,” he told The Independent. “It just goes to show how slim the margin is and how much they’re gonna have to rely on Democrats to actually govern.”
To be certain, Republicans will still have plenty of power. Republicans took control of the Senate on Friday, all but guaranteeing that Senate Majority Leader John Thune will turn the upper chamber into Trump’s personal judicial confirmation factory as Mitch McConnell did during his first presidency.
Republicans will also be able to sidestep a filibuster to pass much of their legislative agenda using the process of budget reconciliation, which allows legislation to pass with only 51 votes as long as it remains germane to the budget. Johnson and Thune will also determine which bills make it to the floor.
But by conservatives continuously rebuffing any legislative package that Johnson proposes, no matter how conservative, he will need to lean on Democrats. Ironically, this means that Republicans will not get the type of steep cuts that conservatives desire because they are never going to be enough.
This means that Johnson might need to rely on Democrats with good relationships with Republicans. Democrat Jared Moskowitz chatted with his fellow Floridian Anna Paulina Luna, who called Johnson “MAGA Mike” when she voted for him.
For Moskowitz, it’s about simple math
“It’s not about leverage,” he said. “At the end of the day, it’s a divided Congress. If they want to pass things, they got to work together.”
During the vote, Moskowitz tried to have his son cast his vote for Jeffries if it didn’t count. Dealing with House Republicans might be slightly harder than wrangling youth around the Capitol complex.
