Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) presides over a session in the House chamber at the U.S. Capitol, January 3, 2025, in Washington.
In the end, Mike Johnson was elected Speaker on the first ballot. But this requires a rather loose definition of the word “first.”
After the full roll was taken, Johnson had exactly nine holdouts: three who voted for other members for Speaker, and six who withheld their vote entirely. That number nine is actually significant. Under the new House rules (which will be voted on later today), instead of one member of the House being able to call a motion to oust the Speaker, it will take nine. The fact that nine members held out was a subtle hint to Johnson that his future is in the hands of the far-right rump faction.
One by one, the six who didn’t vote decided to go to Johnson, leaving three final holdouts: Reps. Tom Massie (R-KY), Ralph Norman (R-SC), and Keith Self (R-TX). Massie was a hard no (he joked on Twitter that he wouldn’t be sworn in today, he would be sworn at), but before the first ballot was called, Johnson took Norman and Self into a back room off the floor and emerged a few minutes later. The two congressmen then went to the well of the House and changed their votes to Johnson, giving him a 218-215 victory over Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
It is unknown what Johnson told Norman and Self to get them to change their vote, and that’s the key information. By one account, “verbal commitments” to spending cuts and process changes were discussed. But verbal commitments are not really commitments at all, made to be changed as circumstances proceed.
This non-concession concession would align with what Speaker Johnson posted on Twitter shortly before the vote. It was all about proposals to cut federal spending, seemingly designed to win over Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-IN), who posted her demands for the next Speaker publicly.
But look at what Johnson actually promised. After some boilerplate about “fiscal responsibility” and “meaningful spending reforms” to “reduce the size and scope of the federal government,” Johnson says he will: (1) create an outside working group with no formal power to work with Congress on implementing spending reforms (which Congress doesn’t do; the executive branch provides implementation); (2) require the working group to produce a report that would really just review existing audits from the Government Accountability Office; and (3) make “requests” to House committees to investigate the weaponization of government, which they are already doing (there’s literally a committee on weaponization).
This is less than nothing, useless as a matter of law and congressional procedure. If this and some verbal commitments are all the holdouts got, they didn’t get anything.
There are claims that Donald Trump called Norman and Self and got them to change their votes, but that just seems like mythology. Either the nine holdouts were a warning to Johnson that he had a short leash, or they got some real assurances. If you look at what Rep. Chip Roy, one of the nine, said after the vote, it seems like it’s the former: “Everything we do needs to set the Congress up for success and to deliver the Trump agenda for the American people. Speaker Johnson has not made that clear yet, so there are many members beyond the three who voted for someone else who have reservations.”
In a letter released after the vote, Roy and ten other members (including Norman) say that they only voted for Johnson to avoid any delay in the certification of electors for Trump, and they follow that up with a list of demands for the new Congress. These include demands that any reconciliation bill reduce the deficit (an almost impossible task considering that there are $5 trillion in tax cuts Republicans want to extend, though there’s a hint about “dynamic scoring” whereby tax cuts pay for themselves), that members get to offer amendments, that all votes be withheld for 72 hours after a bill is introduced, and that the debt limit not be increased until “real” spending cuts are in place, along with a host of policy demands on immigration, health care, food stamps, student debt, Inflation Reduction Act investments in clean energy, voter ID, and more. That’s essentially the entire agenda, and the hard-liners are making an uncomfortable series of demands.
Ultimately, this seems like a skirmish in a wider fight that will go on for the next two years. Johnson has the gavel, but he doesn’t really seem to have full control of his caucus, and once Reps. Michael Waltz (R-FL) and Elise Stefanik (R-NY) enter the Trump administration, he’ll have just a 217-215 majority until at least April. There’s a major reconciliation bill focused primarily on the border set for the opening weeks of the session, but what transpired today in the House shouldn’t offer a ton of confidence that such a bill will get to Trump’s desk without a hitch.
