Democracy is messy sometimes, but it is our system, this conference that you see. This House Republican majority is united.
After twenty two days of complete turmoil in the US House of Representatives, with Republicans unable to find a candidate they could agree on to replace the House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, on Wednesday, Republicans finally settled on someone they could accept, and its representative, Mike Johnson of Louisiana. He's a staunch ally of Donald Trump, and he was a leader in pushing to overturn the results of the twenty twenty presidential election.
His selection as Speaker reinforces the right word shift of the Republican led House, and now Johnson has to act quickly to try to get his splintered party to agree to a spending package to avoid a government shutdown, and to decide on funding for Ukraine in Israel. I'm wes Kasova today on the Big Take. Are intrepid Congress editor Meghan Scully is here short on sleep, but still sharp
of mind to tell us where things go from here. Meghan, I think a lot of people, even here in Washington yesterday afternoon, we're saying Mike who, And in fact I actually, in preparation for this interview, just googled him and when I hit them in the search box, two results popped off. The verse was major League Baseball, which you'd expect, and the second was Mike Johnson.
So tell us about Mike Johnson.
I think we were all googling him yesterday, even those of us who cover Congress for a living. You know, he has one of those very generic names, and it was like, which one is that he was a very sort of junior member of the House leadership team. But as the House Republicans sort of went through speaker nominee after speaker nominee after speaker nominee, you know, he ultimately was the last man standing, and he ended up getting two hundred and twenty votes on Wednesday on the first round.
If you remember back in January, it took former Speaker Kevin McCarthy fifteen rounds and four or five very painful days to finally claim the speakership.
And the other candidates who came forward after he was unceremoniously shown the door also couldn't get it through, and Representative Jim Jordan went three rounds trying to get votes, and on every round he lost ground with his fellow Republicans.
Yes, yes, he had like an incredibly shrinking fan base. And then the two other nominees, Steve Scalise and Tom Emmer, never even made it to the floor for a vote. They gave up before they even got there. And you know, we're now measuring time in Washington as Tom Emmers. How many Tom Emers can you last? It's one Emer is about four hours and fifteen minutes.
So what is it about Mike Johnson that let him get the votes where other Republicans couldn't.
I think he was unknown outside of Washington, so he wasn't somebody who you know back home. Voters didn't have a sense one way or another about him. Either you love Jim Jordan or you hate Jim Jordan, but you sure know who Jim Jordan is, right, We all had to google who Mike Johnson was, so he didn't come with all the baggage that some of these other candidates came with. But really, I think the thing that helped him the most was sheer exhaustion and frustration of the
House Republican caucus. They just wanted to get this over with.
So Johnson, even though he's not well known outside Washington, is very well known among Republicans. And we mentioned Jim Jordan before, he was unacceptable to Republicans, and yet Johnson's views on many of the issues are very much in line with the Jim Jordan right wing of the party.
Is that right?
It is? So it's interesting. The right wing of the Republican Party sort of separates itself into these two different caucuses, the Republican Study Group and the House Freedom Caucus. The House Freedom Caucus is sort of what grew out of the Republican Study Group, and Jim Jordan was one of the founders of the Freedom Caucus. They're sort of the more bomb thrower types of the party, the ones who get on x and other social media and really you know,
vent their frustrations. Many of them were the one among those who ousted Kevin McCarthy in the first place. So that's the House Freedom Caucus. Mike Johnson is the former chair men of the Republican Study Group, which is kind of the more sedate conservatives. You know, make no mistake about it, Mike Johnson is incredibly conservative economically, he believes in very small government, and also culturally, he is very much against abortion rights. He argued in two thousand and four.
As an attorney, he argued against same sex marriages, So there is not a lot of moderate that runs through him.
Also, one important thing is that Johnson was one of the leaders of the effort to question the results of the twenty twenty election in order to keep Donald Trump.
In office after he lost to Joe Biden.
He helped write some of the legal arguments for the case in Texas that would have overturned some of these outcomes.
He was the one who actually drafted the House Republican legal brief signed by one hundred and twenty six Republicans that supported the Texas lawsuit to try and overturn the electoral results of four states. Not only did he ask members to play a role in it, he actually is the name on the amicus brief that was submitted.
And he was one of many Republicans who voted not to certify the twenty twenty election results.
And that's the same as say Jim Jordan. So is it the case that it wasn't so much that Republicans didn't accept Jim Jordan's views, it was that they didn't like Jordan himself.
I think that was a big part of it. I think Jordan also was toxic in areas like the Hudson Valley in southern California, these very purple districts, districts that Biden actually carried in twenty twenty and Republican House members won in twenty twenty two. So Jordan, remember, as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, is one of the lawmakers leading the impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, and that doesn't fly so well in these more Biden friendly districts.
So you know, Jordan brought that baggage into this. He's also just known as being extremely close to former President Trump and just being very much an antagonistic member of the House Conference.
And Johnson too is a very strong supporter of Trump and in fact got his strong endorsement as speaker. Yes, so tell us a little bit more about Johnson himself. How long has he been in Congress and what's he known for as a legislator.
Johnson is just fifty one years old, which in a Congress where most lawmakers are in their sixties, seventies, and even eighties, he is quite young in this bunch. He's also from Louisiana, he comes across as incredibly folksy. One of our reporters likens listening to him to listening to a Republican Jimmy Carter. He's very affable and is soft spoken and very eloquent in his speech. He's Christian and deeply religious, and his beliefs have been an undercurrent throughout
his political career. He's very opposed to abortion rights. He's opposed to same sex marriages. He has spoken personally about the abortion issue, saying that he himself was the product of an unplanned pregnancy. He was elected in twenty sixteen, the same year that Trump was elected president, and has been in the House ever since. He is a member of the House Judiciary Committee, so he's on Jordan's committee, but he'sn't known for being quite as as I said,
antagonistic as Jordan and some others on the panel. He also is on the House Armed Services Committee. He has significant military interests in his district, and he's very much a hawk, which sets him apart from some of the fierce ultra conservatives who have really pushed for even cutting defense spending. He's a very strong believer in small government.
He's actually even in a local radio interview called government a monster that should be starved, which is an interesting position to have considering he's going to be the one negotiating government spending. Remember, we have a November seventeenth deadline when federal government spending will run out without some sort of an agreement with Democrats to keep the doors open.
And he's only in his fourth term, elected in twenty sixteen. Usually speakers have much more experience than that.
Yes, he is definitely the most inexperienced speaker in generations. I've seen some estimates going back one hundred and forty years. But he also is very telligenic and comes across well
on TV. And among the many things that we heard, you know, working in his favor when House Republicans were meeting behind closed doors earlier this week, was that he could really get out, get on TV and sell the Republican message in ways that some of these other Republicans who had run and who had been in Congress for a much longer period of time could not.
After the break, can Mike Johnson actually lead this fractie Republican caucus? Megan, you mentioned earlier that Republicans have another deadline facing them to keep the government open, and now that Mike Johnson has the Speaker's gabble, he's going to have to try to get Republicans to agree in a way we've seen they simply haven't been able to do.
Yeah.
So Johnson is sort of in an unusual position here where he's walking into these negotiations that are going to involve finding an agreement within the Republican conference. But then the House does not have the last stand spending, so he's going to have to negotiate with the Democratic controlled Senate and with the White House. So Johnson, going back four weeks ago, voted against the temporary starf gap spending bill that kept the government open.
And although this bill originated in the republic controlled House, it was actually bought to the floor by Speaking McCarthy and in the end supported by more Democrats than it was Republicans.
Today wasn't the choice we wanted to have. We tried to pass the most conservative stop gap measure possible. We had members from all sides of the aisle work on it, we put it on the floor, but unfortunately we didn't have two hundred and eighteen Republicans that would vote for that.
This was the deal that McCarthy orchestrated with Democrats to keep the government open, and that really served as the last straw for hardliners who had been opposed to McCarthy since his election back in January, and they had had it with him. And then by October third, two days after the start of the new fiscal year, McCarthy was out of a job as Speaker and out of the office. He's still in the House. Now we have Mike Johnson as Speaker. Johnson voted against that short term spending bill.
At the time, he was just a low ranking member in leadership. He didn't carry this weight of responsibility that he does now as Speaker. So he's bringing to this job this voting record that was very much in line with conservatives in the party. But now he is this responsibility to try to come up with something that could pass both chambers of Congress and make it to President Biden's desk for signature, otherwise the government's going to shut down.
And while he was trying to rally support for his bid to be speaker, he gave a hint of where he now stands on that issue.
Yeah, So on Monday, he circulated this memo to House Republicans, and in the memo he talked about being supportive of a continuing resolution that's what we call these stopgap temporary spending bills that would run until either January or April.
What was done about this is that many ultra conservatives, particularly the eight who voted Kevin McCarthy out of office, did so because they are adamantly opposed to these crs as we call them, because it holds government spending at prior year levels, and what they want to do is cut government spending from prior year levels. So they don't want to be spending any more in the current fiscal
year than they absolutely have to. So the fact that he floated this plan, it was very vague, It did not get into detailed specifics on items like Ukraine and Israel funding, but it did lay this marker down that he was now pro continuing resolution and he still got elected, which is pretty surprising considering where we were just a few weeks ago.
And so why are these very hard right members who were furious at McCarthy for doing this accepting Johnson who says he'll do the same thing.
I think there's a couple of things going on here. One I think that these hardliners never trusted McCarthy in the first place. They balked at his election in January. They were the ones who drove the fifteen rounds of painful voting that we all remember. And also they were furious with McCarthy for doing a deal with Joe Biden in May to avert a debt default. And with that came some strings in terms of government spending and cuts to government spending, but it went nowhere near as deep
as these ultra conservatives wanted to go. They are hoping, in terms of looking at where Mike Johnson is on the political spectrum, that he's more like them than Kevin McCarthy was, so he they feel, is going to fight harder for these cuts. They might be more tolerant of what Mike Johnson comes back with in terms of a deal with the White House than they ever were with what Kevin McCarthy came back with.
And then the other big question on the table is foreign policy and funding for Ukraine and also for Israel, and funding for Ukraine has been very unpopular among these right wing members, and.
Even Johnson himself has been not particularly supportive of continuing funding to Ukraine. There's going to have to be some kind of give here though, because there is no way that the White House is going to move forward, and the Senate Democrats or and even Senate Republicans, senators like Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, are very supportive of
continuing funding to Ukraine. So Johnson's going to have to give here somewhere, and where we might see that happening is perhaps, you know, in the total size of the package and also in terms of oversight of where this money is going and accountability in terms of how Ukraine is spending it. I'm guessing that that will be sort of the bone that he throws to the hard right,
and so of where we go from there. In terms of Israel, there's wide bipartisan support for funding one of our staunchest allies.
Turmoil and violence of rock to Middle East and Eastern Europe. We all know what intentions continue to build in the Indo Pacific. The country demands strong leadership of this body and we must not waiver. Are our nation's greatest ally in the Middle East is under attack. The first bill that I'm going to bring to this floor in just a little while we'll be in support of our dear friend Israel, and we're overdue and getting that done.
When we come back. How long can Mike Johnson last is speaker.
Began?
You mentioned earlier that one of the things that did in Kevin McCarthy was this deal to keep the government open, which the hard right did not like and therefore used to get rid of him. And they were able to do this because of a rule that allows just a few members to essentially call the speakership into question. Does Mike Johnson have the same sword hanging over his own head?
He does, and it's actually just one member, and in this case it was Matt Gates from Florida, who is a very very much a hardliner and very much in
the camp of former President Donald Trump. The way the rule works, and this was negotiated actually by Kevin McCarthy during his lengthy election to be House Speaker, and this was one of the concessions he made to hardliners was that it would take only one of them to offer a petition to overthrow the speaker, considering that Republicans hold a narrow narrow majority of the House, and if Democrats all all vote in unison against the speaker, Republicans cannot
lose more than four votes. So basically, the way I keep describing it as is that the coalition to overthrow a speaker could all fit into a Honda Civic. So that's what you need. And Mike Johnson certainly is walking into this job knowing that he could face the same fate as his predecessor. However, he does come into the job with right now there's a lot of feelings of
goodwill and relief on the Hill. You know, we saw him after being nominated going to the microphones with half the Republican conference behind him cheering him on and very happy, very glad to have this behind them. And in the past he has the support of people like Matt Gates who never supported Kevin McCarthy, who may have begrudgingly voted present to allow him to claim the speakership back in January,
or who continued to vote against him. But Mike Johnson has sort of won the hearts and minds of that camp for now. That doesn't mean that they're not going to change their minds, or it also doesn't mean that that he might not lose at some point. The moderates, the Biden district Republicans who I talked about earlier. However, they have been much less willing to really go against Republican leaders and are just by nature more of a
go along, get along bunch. I think a lot of it, too, stems from the fact that, aside from the exhaustion that I cited earlier, is that Johnson comes across, whether you agree with his very conservative views on society and on the economy, on government spending, and the size and shape of the government, he comes across as somebody who is very likable, which was not the case with Kevin McCarthy. Even Kevin McCarthy's supporters would sometimes bristle at his approach
or comments that he made in the hallways. He always looked much more opportunistic. All politicians are opportunistic, you know, to some degree. But I think that for many Republicans who were perhaps on the fence with Mike Johnson, or who like you and I were doing googling him, he just comes across as a more earnest person, somebody, as as one Republican said, is just good on TV.
Megan.
Being likable, as you say, will get you pretty far in Washington. But these days it won't necessarily protect you for long. You've been covering Congress for a long time. Do you think Mike Johnson will last for years in this job?
So I'm stopping making predictions right now. Because I thought the Phillies were going to be in the World Series, so I thought the government was going to shut down on October first. So clearly my barometer is broken. I will say that goodwill will get you pretty far. It'll at least get him several months into this job and through these initial hurdles over government spending, Ukraine funding and
aid for Israel. Remember, we have an election coming up, so there's no guarantee that Republicans are going to hold onto the House anyway, So we could be seeing a speaker Hakem. Jeffries come January of twenty twenty five. So this is a debate that gets us up to essentially November twenty twenty four, to election day. I do think that what we're going to see, given his level of experience, is that the rest of the Republican leadership team is
going to be much more active here. Interestingly, his number two, the House Majority Leader, is Steve Scalise, who is one of the failed speaker nominees. It never even made it to the floor, but is actually widely liked within the Republican Caucus. He is also from Louisiana, so you have this sort of home state relationship that is built in here, and I think we're going to see Scalise really sort of helping guide the agenda in the coming weeks and months ahead.
Mean hope you can look forward to getting a little bit of sleep now.
Thanks so much for being here. Thanks thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. For more shows from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Vergalina. Our senior producer is Catherine Fink, and they produced this episode.
Our original music was composed by Leo Sidron. I'm West Kasova. We'll be back tomorrow with another Big Take.