In a matter of just a few hours on Wednesday, Mike Johnson’s funding bill fell apart, Democrats claimed they wouldn’t accept anything but the current deal, Donald Trump said he wanted a debt ceiling extension added to the agreement and Johnson’s grip on the speakership started to feel looser than ever.
“This is sort of the final straw, the red line,” Rep. Thomas Massie said of the spending deal Wednesday.
He told NOTUS that Johnson didn’t have his vote even before this latest continuing resolution fiasco — “I’ve never said I’ll vote for Mike Johnson” — but he suggested the ordeal had solidified his position.
Rep. Cory Mills, another staunch opponent of the deal, told NOTUS Wednesday afternoon that he expected Massie wouldn’t be alone.
“I would be wagering to bet that he won’t be the only one,” Mills said. When reminded that it would take just three Republicans to strip Johnson of the speaker’s gavel, assuming perfect attendance, Mills told NOTUS he was aware. “Even I can count,” he said.
Yet another House Republican told NOTUS that “the only thing that saves him at this point is if Donald Trump steps in and endorses him,” adding that there were conversations about replacing Johnson already taking place and other names floating around the GOP conference on Wednesday, including Reps. Tom Emmer, Byron Donalds and Jim Jordan.
By Wednesday evening, even some of Johnson’s allies wouldn’t commit to backing his speakership in January. When NOTUS asked Rep. Kevin Hern whether he planned to support Johnson’s speakership, Hern was noncommittal. “We’ll see what transpires,” he said, though he later said on X he was talking about the continuing resolution.
“I support Mike Johnson for Speaker,” Hern said.
While Johnson hadn’t officially pulled the current spending deal from consideration by Wednesday evening, Republicans did announce there were no additional votes for the night and Elon Musk was already claiming on his social media app that “the terrible bill is dead.” The Republican revolt in the House, just weeks away from a floor vote on whether Johnson should be reelected to the speakership, seemed to indicate that Musk had indeed gotten his way.
For some House Republicans, the latest spending meltdown is just one of many grievances they have against Johnson.
The spending deal, Rep. Nicole Malliotakis told NOTUS, “underlines a much larger problem with leadership that they do not work to help rank-and-file members secure legislative victories, no matter how small they may be.”
“That’s my issue,” she said, though she declined to say whether Johnson is the best person to lead the conference. “I’m not going to have these conversations now,” she said.
Although Johnson secured unanimous support from the conference in a closed-door meeting last month, other lawmakers suggested they were now open-minded about a Johnson challenge.
Rep. Andy Biggs, one of the lawmakers who tanked Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s speakership, told NOTUS he hadn’t made “any commitments.”
Rep. Nancy Mace, another such lawmaker, also sounded open to someone else. “I take my days hour by hour,” she said.
And frequent Johnson critic, Rep. Chip Roy, told NOTUS he also wouldn’t commit to voting for Johnson as speaker.
“Right now, we have a job in front of us,” Roy said, “and then we’ll figure out our organization for next year.”
Even if Johnson hangs onto the speakership — plenty of Republicans raised the point that it’s possible no member of their conference could win a majority on the floor — the spending chaos puts in stark relief the challenges he will face next term.
“It’s pretty crazy,” Hern told reporters. “I think what we’ve seen today is that the speaker tried to get the votes and the necessary votes weren’t there. And then we saw what happened on social media, and a lot of folks have, you know, had second thoughts. And so now we got to recalibrate.”
Even senators raised concerns about their ability to govern with the current House leadership. Sen. Josh Hawley, who has fumed about his Radiation Exposure Compensation Act’s exclusion from the spending deal, told NOTUS that House Republicans have “a lot of thinking to do over there about their current leadership.”
“And this level of execution, or lack thereof, is really startling,” he said, calling it “embarrassing.”
With an even slimmer GOP majority than Johnson already has, the next speaker will not only have to satisfy all but a couple members of his conference, he will also have to keep Trump, Elon Musk and whomever else has the president’s ear on a given day at bay. And the CR drama was already illustrating the challenges that person will face next year.
For Johnson’s proposed 1,547-page “continuing resolution,” it was death by a thousand tweets. Or, more specifically, several dozen tweets from Musk.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, Musk repeatedly ripped the legislation, which would have extended government funding for three months, added $110 billion in disaster aid, transferred the abandoned RFK Stadium from federal control to Washington, D.C., given members of Congress their first pay raise in more than 15 years, extended the expiring farm bill for one year and required pharmacy benefit managers to pass on the full amount of drug rebates to customers.
The sprawling bill was the product of months of negotiations between lawmakers, as well as some last-minute dealmaking between Johnson and Democratic leaders.
Johnson, knowing he didn’t have the votes to pass a government funding bill with just Republicans, was forced into the waiting arms of Democrats. And with every concession he had to make to win over Democrats, he seemed to have to make another concession in anticipation of losing more GOP votes.
By the time the legislation was finally released on Tuesday, it looked more like a year-end omnibus bill — often referred to as a “Christmas tree bill” because of the time of year and the fact that members decorate it with all sorts of priorities they couldn’t otherwise pass during the year — than a simple extension of current funding.
The threat of lawmakers attaching those sorts of provisions and using a Christmas deadline as a means to pass the legislation was the very reason conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus didn’t want a CR to go until late December anyway, having seen this exact scenario play out before.
But Johnson opted for the December deadline, only to advocate for extending the deadline into March, after the speaker vote will have taken place and Trump will have taken office. The problem is there were still a number of legislative issues members wanted to solve before the end of the session. And the CR was the natural home for many of those issues, given that it’s likely the last legislation Congress will pass before lawmakers leave for the year.
The fact that it was loaded up with so many Democratic priorities, however, just exacerbated Johnson’s problems with Republicans — both with passing the CR in the first place and getting reelected to the speakership in January.
Facing a Republican rebellion on both fronts, it looked inevitable as of Wednesday evening that Johnson would pull the bill and opt for something more pared down. But even before that decision was official, Democrats were signaling that anything less than the current bill would be a problem.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries tweeted that if you “break the bipartisan agreement, you own the consequences that follow.”
The ranking Democrat on the Rules Committee, Rep. Jim McGovern, also told reporters that “a deal is a deal.”
“Johnson’s got to grow a fucking spine,” McGovern said.
No. 3 Democrat in the House Pete Aguilar told NOTUS that “it’d be very hard to imagine a lot of House Democrats” supporting a bill that ignored disaster aid, eliminated the health provisions and ignored “the people that need support.”
But it may be difficult for Democrats to vote against a clean — or mostly clean — CR just because they had a better agreement with Johnson before. Democrats have traditionally resisted shutting down the government, particularly when the alternative is voting simply to extend current policies.
Of course, all of the dynamics are complicated by Trump. On Wednesday afternoon, as the CR was falling apart, Trump threw an additional wrench into the mix by issuing a statement that Congress should raise the debt ceiling now on this spending bill — a bill that he told Fox News he is “totally against” — so that it happens under Joe Biden’s watch, not his.
He later said that “any Republican that would be so stupid” as to pass the CR without extending or eliminating the debt limit now “should, and will, be Primaried.”
But such a move would only depress the Republican vote more, forcing GOP leaders to further rely on Democrats and giving Democrats even more leverage.
“This is more of a reflection of Trump’s and Musk’s ignorance,” a GOP lawmaker told NOTUS. “Trump just shot himself in the foot.”
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Riley Rogerson and Reese Gorman are reporters at NOTUS.
Katherine Swartz, who is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow, contributed to this report.