Electing a Speaker Isn’t the Hard Part

The governing slog for Mike Johnson begins.

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The white smoke billowed from atop the Capitol Rotunda, informing the masses that we have a Speaker of the House. Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) was elected on Wednesday on a party-line vote.

Amid the jubilation that the 22-day grinding halt of the House of Representatives has now ended, it’s worth remembering that electing a Speaker is the easy part. The decision of who will lead the majority caucus in the House has mostly never been in doubt for the entire history of the Republic. What that leader does is the more fraught question, and the situation Johnson faces is in no way easier than what now-backbencher Kevin McCarthy had to deal with in the first nine months of the year.

The House’s first official act will be the passage of the bipartisan McCaul-Meeks resolution averring unconditional support of Israel in the wake of the October 7 attacks, something only 13 Democrats have opposed. But resolutions are low-hanging fruit. The bigger item regarding the Middle East is the $106 billion funding request from the White House that pairs $14 billion in aid for Israel with a full-year request of $61 billion for Ukraine, along with border security, humanitarian aid, and measures to counteract China in the Indo-Pacific region. There is then a second $50 billion request for domestic aid, which includes backfilling recently expired funding for child care, natural disaster and wildfire assistance, and high-speed internet money.

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The impetus for sacking McCarthy was his agreement to maintain baseline levels of funding for six weeks in a continuing resolution. These supplemental requests go $150 billion above and beyond that, and will surely be a nonstarter among some factions in the Republican Caucus. In particular, fiscal conservatives will point to last fiscal year’s $1.7 trillion deficit to reject the domestic spending.

Foreign military aid is usually seen as magic spending with no budgetary impact, but Speaker Johnson has stood with Ukraine skeptics in his caucus, voting against two separate appropriations in the past year. Johnson does appear to support Israel funding. Even the Senate is negotiating changes to the request, though ultimately they likely want to get to yes. That’s not the unilateral case on the House side.

The White House wants to keep the Ukraine and Israel funding together, using border funding as a sweetener. There would be strong bipartisan support for such a bill; a smaller supplemental request for Ukraine received over 300 House votes recently. (Johnson was one of the 117 voting against it.) But the sword of Damocles in the form of a motion to vacate the chair still hangs over the head of any Speaker. Johnson cannot just bring a foreign military aid supplemental to the House floor without blowback, lest he face the wrath of the hard-liners, just as McCarthy did. There’s potentially a way through with some fig leaf of accountability on the Ukraine funding, but it’ll be a bitter fight.

The bind is even deeper on government spending, which runs out in just 23 days. Two days ago, when Johnson launched his Speaker campaign, he issued one of the most preposterous proposed schedules I’ve ever seen for the House, claiming that it would pass two of the 12 annual appropriations bills this week. (It is now Wednesday afternoon.) The other six outstanding bills would all pass in the following three weeks, just in time for full passage of a budget before the deadline. Presto!

Cutting against this is the lack of unanimity within the Republican Caucus on spending, to say nothing of their fights with the Democratic Senate and White House. That lack of consensus is the reason these bills aren’t passed already, months into the Republican House majority. Even hardliners like Chip Roy have admitted that there’s no way to get the spending bills passed before the November 17 deadline. They’ve even uttered the dreaded O-word (omnibus) to suggest that the final resolution may involve pairing all the unpassed bills together in one final budget, something that the Freedom Caucus abhors.

Even Johnson’s silly schedule outline has negotiations on FY24 spending going into next year, meaning he’s going to need to pass a short-term stopgap continuing resolution before Thanksgiving. His proposal was for either January 15 or April 15. But remember, hard-liners were opposed to a full continuing resolution at current funding levels; that was the dispute that cost McCarthy his job. The far right has in general not been interested in pushing off negotiations to later in the fiscal year, preferring to have all the fights at once.

And this is not the only deadline out there. As I wrote in September, outstanding government programs include a multiyear farm bill; reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration, flood insurance, a bevy of health-related programs like funding for community health centers and pandemic preparedness, and the global anti-AIDS program known as PEPFAR; and the aforementioned child care cliff, with thousands of programs struggling in the face of pulled funding.

This all falls on the shoulders of a fourth-term congressman who has never held a committee chairmanship, never been in leadership, and never had to negotiate among factions of his caucus, let alone with Democrats.

Good luck, buddy.

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