House Dem leaders announce they will block effort to oust Johnson
House Democratic leaders announced Tuesday that they’d block a looming effort to boot Speaker Mike Johnson, an unprecedented development they attributed to the GOP leader's help to pass foreign aid.
“We will vote to table Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Motion to Vacate the Chair. If she invokes the motion, it will not succeed,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) and Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) said in a statement.
During Tuesday’s Democratic caucus meeting, Jeffries gauged where rank-and-file members stood on whether to table any attempt to boot Johnson. House Democrats had seemed inclined to vote to throw out the speaker-deposing motion in a closed-door conference meeting Tuesday morning, according to four people familiar with the discussions. Some voiced their objections, like Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), who was reluctant to help Johnson as an architect of legal efforts to overturn the 2020 election. But even she indicated that she'd be a team player, according to a person in the room.
Although Democratic leadership has made their position clear, Jeffries told his caucus members to vote their own conscience, according to that person in the room. Jeffries did not indicate during their discussion that leadership would send a statement taking a formal position on whether to save Johnson, according to one Democratic member in the meeting who asked for anonymity to speak freely.
Democratic leaders have stressed that their position is not to vote directly to save Johnson; rather, they would approve a procedural vote beforehand that would toss the so-called motion to vacate. It's a more politically palatable option for many in the party.
“None of the discussion that we had in caucus was about saving Mike Johnson,” Aguilar told reporters. “The underlying motion to vacate was not discussed. The motion to table was.”
Dozens of Democrats, specifically centrists, have indicated for weeks they might be willing to step in to save Johnson if he brought the foreign aid package to the House floor — many were just waiting for an official signal from their party leaders.
Meanwhile, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), the architect of the motion to terminate Johnson's speakership, signaled in a Tuesday post on X she’d follow through on her threat: “If the Democrats want to elect him Speaker (and some Republicans want to support the Democrats’ chosen Speaker), I’ll give them the chance to do it.” Still, she did not trigger the effort during a vote series early Tuesday afternoon.