Greene faces an uphill battle to unseat Johnson

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is increasing her threat to remove House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) from power, but she faces an uphill climb if she hopes to achieve that goal.

Not only did the Speaker of the House recently receive a glowing review from former President Trump, the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee, but Democrats remain ready to rescue Johnson from a conservative coup. Furthermore, many of the conservatives most frustrated with Johnson’s leadership style oppose a motion to vacate, leaving Greene with only minimal GOP support for her removal resolution.

“My judgment and estimate is that this is not the time to do that,” said Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), head of the far-right Freedom Caucus.

Not that Johnson is out of the woods.

The House Speaker has infuriated conservatives like Greene and Good for months by reaching across the aisle to strike a series of deals with President Biden on key issues such as federal spending, government spying and, most recently, billions of dollars in new military aid to Ukraine – funding opposed by most of its Republican Party conference.

It was precisely these types of bipartisan agreements that directly led to the downfall of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who was ousted by frustrated hardliners in October. And Greene over the weekend called on Johnson to resign or she promises to remove him from power.

“Mike Johnson’s term is over,” she said in an interview with Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.”

“He needs to do the right thing by resigning and allowing us to move forward in a controlled process. If he doesn’t do this, he will be idle.”

However, Greene’s position is a lonely one in the House GOP.

Although his vacancy resolution won the support of two other Republicans last week — Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) — the prevailing sentiment among conservatives is that Johnson should remain in office despite their frustrations with their bipartisan agreement. Those voices include Freedom Caucus leaders like Good, who supported McCarthy’s impeachment but are quick to point out that for Republicans, the political environment has changed in the six months since.

Not only has the GOP majority in the House shrunk — the result of the expulsion of former Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) and the resignation of five other Republicans, including McCarthy — but there is no obvious successor to Johnson, and the timing now it is moving closer to November. Many Republicans are simply not eager to repeat the weeks of chaos that followed McCarthy’s ouster, as Republican lawmakers struggled to locate a viable replacement.

“I think we do the best we can with the president we have – we influence him the best way we can; expose what we believe are the wrong actions of not just the Speaker, but everyone who is voting to support those actions — and hold a contest to see who the conference can rally around as the best option in November,” said Good .

Last week, when Johnson flirted with the idea of ​​changing House rules to make it more difficult to remove a speaker, support for Greene’s recall proposal appeared poised to surge as conservatives like Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) and Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) threatened to board.

Even so, Johnson backed away from this rule change, keeping in place the single vote threshold for launching a motion to vacate. And the number of lawmakers supporting Greene’s resolution — at least publicly — remained at three.

“I think a motion to vacate now would almost certainly hand the House to Democrats, which is why I will not support it,” Gaetz said.

Resistance from fellow conservatives has taken some of the air out of Greene’s threat to remove Johnson, not least because it means it would only take a handful of Democrats — perhaps fewer — to rescue the House speaker if a motion to vacate the House for a term were to emerge. vote.

Already, several Democrats have said publicly that they would vote to kill Greene’s resolution to save the President – promised support that depended on Johnson’s willingness to organize votes to expand federal surveillance powers and provide more aid to Ukraine, much of which passed in the recent days with strong bipartisan support.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (DN.Y.) told The New York Times in February that “a reasonable number” of Democrats would rescue Johnson. Last week, he said the math hasn’t changed.

“That statement still stands,” Jeffries told reporters.

Further complicating Greene’s effort, Trump recently hosted Johnson at Mar-a-Lago, where the former president praised the President’s performance since taking office.

“He’s doing a really good job under very difficult circumstances,” Trump said, just days before Johnson revealed his strategy for approving aid to Ukraine.

None of these factors discouraged Greene – at least not rhetorically. On Monday, the Georgia firebrand doubled down on her criticism of Johnson when she told Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser, that Republican Party voters feel “betrayed” by the Speaker of Parliament over his support for new aid to Ukraine. and they want a new crop of leaders who will fight to advance Trump’s “America First” agenda.

“They are absolutely fed up with Republican leadership like Mike Johnson, who totally sold us out to the Democrats, joined the uni party faster than anyone we’ve ever seen in history and literally made night and day change on a months-long issue.” , she said.

The internal criticism has provoked a backlash from more moderate Republicans, who support Johnson and are incredulous at the idea that such a small minority of disaffected conservatives could determine that he should leave.

“He followed his compass, he did the right thing, and that speaks to three or four people,” said Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.). “You can’t let three people dictate the rest.”