WASHINGTON — With his job on the line, House Speaker Mike Johnson plans to travel to Florida on Friday to meet with the only man who could save his precarious speakership: the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, the former President Donald Trump.
Trump and Johnson, R-La., plan to make remarks about “election integrity,” said multiple sources, one of whom said the two Republicans will talk about legislation focused on preventing noncitizens from voting. This is already illegal – it’s very rare – but Trump and many of his allies falsely claimed that undocumented immigrants affected the 2020 election and warned they could do so this year.
“Congress has a role in relation to federal elections. We want to be absolutely sure that anyone [who] vote is actually an American citizen,” Johnson told reporters on Friday. “We need to make sure that federal law is clear on this issue and make sure that we actually have election integrity because it is the biggest concern of the American people right now.”
Johnson is making a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Palm Beach golf resort, while facing an ongoing threat to his work from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Georgia firebrand and Trump loyalist who intensified attacks against him less than six months into the job.
If Trump remains silent, Greene may see that as enough of an opening. But she is unlikely to challenge Trump if he pushes for Johnson to keep his job and pressures her not to force a vote to remove him, known as a motion to vacate office.
“Obviously, it would help” Johnson if Trump reiterated his support for him, conservative Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., who has sometimes criticized Johnson but does not support the push to remove him, said in an interview.
“Trump has followers; he’s our candidate. … Now it’s Trump and Biden — there’s no other choice. So it’s good that they’re getting together,” Norman continued, saying he hopes Trump impresses Johnson that his focus number 1 should be the approval of new immigration restrictions.
Asked what Johnson has to gain from visiting Trump, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., a Johnson critic, said: “President Trump has been a great negotiator, but he also has a very good view of what the people American wants,” adding that she eagerly awaits their announcement.
Johnson’s visit to Palm Beach comes just three days before Trump is scheduled to stand trial in New York on charges of falsifying business records in connection with hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
It will be the first face-to-face meeting between the two men since Trump became the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee. Such a meeting would not be unusual between a Republican Party president and a presidential candidate, as the party unifies behind its candidate. But it comes exactly three weeks after Greene introduced her motion to oust Johnson and as other conservatives complain about his handling of a range of thorny issues.
Fueling the threats to Johnson’s job are two controversial issues in which he is embroiled: the approval of aid to Ukraine and the renewal of a warrantless surveillance program under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. In both cases, Johnson faces pressure from his party’s committee leaders, centrist Republicans and the Senate to act – against the wishes of a group of far-right members who oppose both issues.
Greene, who released her motion last month before a two-week House recess, has not yet acted on it. If it does, a vote will be required within two legislative days. After the Chamber returned, and despite calls from colleagues to leave, she only intensified her attacks on Johnson.
Greene issued her threat over the sweeping government funding bill passed last month, claiming Johnson gave President Joe Biden and Democrats “everything they wanted” in the spending package. controlled by the Senate and the White House.)
“I will not tolerate our Republican president-elect, Mike Johnson, serving the Democrats and the Biden administration and helping them carry out their policies that are destroying our country. He is throwing our own majority into chaos by not serving his own Republican conference that elected him,” Greene wrote in a letter to colleagues this week, while calling on Johnson not to fund aid to Ukraine or renew Section 702 without a new “warrant requirement”.
No other Republican said they would vote for Greene’s motion to vacate, and Greene downplayed Friday’s meeting, saying, “President Trump meets with people all the time.”
Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., a Johnson ally and Trump supporter, said he did not believe the threat to the speaker was real: “Johnson is in a very strong position here, despite all the noise.”
And some Democrats said they would vote to protect Johnson if Republicans tried to remove him for approving aid to Ukraine. Democratic leaders, who unified the conference last fall against the patronage of his predecessor as House speaker, Kevin McCarthy of California, are keeping that door open with Johnson.
“If the Speaker of the House did the right thing and allowed the House to exercise its will with an up-or-down vote on the national security bill, then I believe there are a fair number of Democrats who would not want to see the President of the House falling as a result of doing the right thing,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., told reporters on Thursday, adding that he was making an “observation, not a statement, because we need to have a conversation”.
Friday’s meeting is reminiscent of McCarthy’s flight to Mar-a-Lago to make peace with Trump, just weeks after McCarthy publicly castigated him for inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. After Republicans regained control of the House, Trump endorsed McCarthy for Speaker and helped him win the gavel amid a week-long standoff.
But last fall, when Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., a Trump ally, forced a vote to oust McCarthy, Trump remained silent and made no effort to save him.
Johnson’s fate could be different given his role in Trump’s efforts to overturn Biden’s 2020 election victory. amicus brief signed by more than 100 House Republicans who supported a lawsuit in Texas that sought to invalidate the election results in four swing states that Biden won.
This story originally appeared on NBCNews.com read the full story
