Speaker Mike Johnson easily fended off an attempt by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia to oust him from his post on Wednesday, after Democrats joined with most Republicans to fend off a second attempt by GOP hardliners to oust their party leader Remove the hammer.
The vote to cancel the action was an overwhelming majority of 359 to 43, with seven votes “present.” Democrats rushed to Mr. Johnson’s defense, and all but 39 voted with Republicans to block the attempt to oust him.
Members of the House minority party have never supported the other party’s speaker, and when the last Republican to hold the office, Kevin McCarthy, faced an impeachment vote last fall, Democrats voted in large numbers to advance the proposal, namely then to throw him off and thus contribute to his historic downfall.
This time, Democratic support made all the difference, allowing Mr. Johnson, who has a tiny majority, to avoid a removal vote altogether. While Ms. Greene appeared to be on a political island for weeks in her quest to get rid of another GOP speaker, 11 Republicans ultimately voted to allow her motion to pass.
That was the same number of Republicans who voted in October to allow the effort to unseat Mr. McCarthy to move forward – but all Democrats joined them at the time.
“I appreciate the vote of confidence from my colleagues to thwart this misguided attempt,” Johnson told reporters shortly after Wednesday’s vote. “As I have said from the beginning and made clear here every day, I intend to do my job. I intend to do what I believe is right, what I was elected to do, and I will let things fall where they may. In my opinion, that’s leadership.”
“Hopefully,” he added, “this is the end of the personality politics and frivolous character assassination that have characterized the 118th Congress.”
The lopsided vote cemented the dynamic that has characterized Mr. Johnson’s tenure as speaker, as well as that of Mr. McCarthy before him: every time the Republican leader faced a critical task, such as averting a government shutdown or a catastrophic default of the nation, said he has relied on a bipartisan coalition of mainstream lawmakers to circumvent the far-right opposition and provide the necessary votes to do so.
The result was the empowerment of Democrats at the expense of the far right, the very phenomenon that Ms. Greene was raging against when she appeared on the House floor on Wednesday — drawing boos from some of her colleagues — to deliver a damning indictment of Mr. Johnson and what she called the “uni party” that he empowered.
“Our decision to stop Marjorie Taylor Greene from plunging the House and the country into further chaos is rooted in our commitment to solving the problems of everyday Americans in a bipartisan way,” Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York told reporters shortly after the vote. “We will continue to govern sensibly, responsibly and results-oriented, putting the people above politics all day long.”
Ms. Greene’s move to oust Mr. Johnson came about three weeks after the speaker pushed through a long-stalled $95 billion national security spending package to boost Israel, despite the objections of Ms. Greene and other right-wing Republicans , Ukraine and other American allies who strongly opposed sending additional aid to Kiev.
Lawmakers loudly mocked Ms. Greene as she called up and read the resolution. As she delivered the measure, a speech lasting more than 10 minutes, House Republicans lined up to shake Mr. Johnson’s hand and pat him on the back.
“Faced with the choice of advancing Republican priorities or allying with Democrats to preserve his own power, Johnson regularly chooses to ally with Democrats,” Ms. Greene said as she read from her resolution .
It concluded by formally calling for his removal: “It is therefore resolved that the office of Speaker of the House of Representatives is hereby declared vacant.”
It was the second time in less than a year that Republicans tried to oust their own speaker, coming about seven months after GOP rebels, with Democratic support, succeeded in ousting Mr. McCarthy.
Earlier this week, Ms. Greene seemed hesitant about whether she would actually vote to be voted out. On two consecutive days, she met for hours with Mr. Johnson, flanked by her key ally, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, and laid out a list of demands in return for not being called to vote.
The demands included halting all future U.S. aid to Ukraine, cutting funding for the Justice Department and imposing a blanket 1 percent cut on all spending bills if lawmakers fail to negotiate a deal to fund the government in September .
But Mr. Johnson remained cool to their requests, telling reporters that he was not negotiating with Ms. Greene and Mr. Massie.
That got Ms. Greene, whose combative political demeanor stems from her relentless willingness to fight her party’s establishment, into trouble. She had no choice but to call a vote that she knew would fail but had been threatening for weeks. Even after Mr. Jeffries made it clear that Democrats would vote to block any attempt to overthrow him, she was still determined to publicly undermine Mr. Johnson and force Democrats to save him.
“This is exactly what the American people needed to see,” she told reporters on the House steps after the vote. “I didn’t run for Congress to come here and join the University Party, and the University Party was on full display today.”
“Democrats now control Speaker Johnson,” she added.
Only 32 Democrats voted to advance Ms. Greene’s motion, while another seven voted “present” and did not register a position.
Ms. Greene initially filed the motion against Mr. Johnson in late March, just as lawmakers were voting on a $1.2 trillion spending bill that he pushed through in the face of opposition from the Republican majority in the House. She called the move a “betrayal” and said she wanted to send a “warning” to the speaker, but then left the threat in limbo for weeks.
Mr. Johnson went ahead anyway and put together an aid package for Ukraine – a move that Ms. Greene had previously said was a red line that would lead her to seek his ouster, but that did not make her immediately follow through on her threat to make it true.
“I will actually let my colleagues go home and hear from their voters,” Ms. Greene said after the vote, predicting that Republicans would join their bid to get rid of Mr. Johnson after hearing from voters upset about it , drew attention to the bill on foreign aid. Instead, many of them heard the exact opposite and returned to Washington expressing skepticism about Mr. Johnson’s removal.
If she had been successful on Wednesday, Ms. Greene would have prompted only the second vote in the House to remove the speaker in more than 100 years. When Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida moved to oust Mr. McCarthy in October, such a spectacle had not occurred in the chamber since 1910.
But this time, Ms. Greene had a harder time garnering support for the speaker’s removal. House Republicans have been wary of plunging the chamber into another bout of chaos that paralyzed the House for weeks after McCarthy’s ouster, and are privately grumbling about the public unrest that Ms. Greene’s threat has sown.
Even ultra-conservatives like Mr. Gaetz expressed concerns about firing another speaker, suggesting that the move risked handing control of the House to Democrats as Republicans’ margin of control is rapidly shrinking.
Former President Donald J. Trump also defended Mr. Johnson and called on Republicans on social media minutes before the vote to derail Ms. Greene’s efforts from the party.
“If we show DISUNITY portrayed as CHAOS, it will negatively impact everything!” he wrote.
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2024-05-08 23:38:33
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