‘Divided us with a smile’: GOP groaning over Mike Johnson reaches a fever pitch

Speaker Mike Johnson faced down a bruising “hell week” and ultimately pulled several key GOP bills across the line. But it came at a cost.

Republicans say Johnson’s habit of making last-minute, often contradictory promises to keep his tiny majority functioning is starting to catch up with him. Frustrations over his leadership, they say, are at an all-time high.

“I think this guy has divided us with a smile,” said Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio), a longtime Johnson skeptic who has grown more vocal with his criticism and now says “without question” he will vote against keeping Johnson as top GOP leader in the next Congress.

This week’s chaos came to a head late Wednesday, with multiple members of key Republican factions yelling and swearing at Johnson on the House floor and in closed-door meetings.

Johnson tried to quell a rebellion among conservative hard-liners by privately reneging on an agreement with a group of midwestern Republicans that would have tied legislation allowing year-round sales of an ethanol fuel blend to the must-pass farm bill.

When some of the ethanol provision’s backers ran back to the floor to try to figure out what happened, they were too late. Some later confronted Johnson, who is now promising a future vote on the matter.

“Bullshit,” Rep. Ann Wagner (R-Mo.) yelled at the speaker as he tried to explain what happened later in the day, according to three people who participated in the huddle and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

This week’s floor chaos was just the latest example of Johnson leading crisis by crisis, ultimately pulling off GOP priorities but leaving a trail of disgruntled members and staffers in his wake, according to more than a dozen Republicans interviewed for this story.

It all comes as rank-and-file lawmakers grow increasingly worried about their ability to govern over the coming months and retain their majority in November — and amid quiet conversations about who else might be capable of leading the House GOP. While Johnson successfully managed this week to end the record shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security and fend off the lapse of a key surveillance program, more challenges loom.

A long-term deal to maintain those spy powers remains elusive, the Senate is expected to reject the farm bill House Republicans approved Thursday and members are agitating for yet another party-line reconciliation bill that stands to continue surfacing the GOP’s internal divides.

Johnson told reporters Thursday that complaints about his leadership style amounted to “fake news.”

“No one in this conference can say that I went against my word on anything,” he said. “You had requests and demands on opposite sides of the conference that were literally irreconcilable. If you meet one group's demands, you can't meet the other. And so it takes a lot of time to get people to a consensus and an agreement on that.”

“Everybody's very happy with their work,” Johnson said. “It's all smiles."

Wagner hardly appeared thrilled as she recounted Wednesday’s events in an interview Thursday.

“We were promised a vote on this,” she said of the ethanol measure. “We went back to do our work in our offices, and then a deal was cut on the floor. … And once we became aware of it, we needed to extend those discussions.”

The ethanol measure, allowing year-round sales of a fuel blend high in corn-derived alcohol, vexed a coalition of Republicans who saw the measure as harming petroleum and refiner industry interests in their districts as well as ultraconservatives who had ideological objections.

The result of the infighting was that a Wednesday vote on the budget blueprint for a planned immigration enforcement funding bill stayed open for more than five hours as dozens of Republicans withheld their votes until they got a satisfactory response.

To placate them, Johnson ultimately agreed to delay consideration of the farm bill for a time — only to reverse himself again after livid ag-state members demanded a vote on the farm bill before the scheduled weeklong recess, leaving the ethanol issue for later.

That in turn enraged hard-liners like Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), who accused Johnson of going back on his word from only a few hours earlier.

In a closed-door meeting just off the House floor Wednesday night, Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa) complained about how farm-state members always vote in line with GOP leadership only to get jilted on their own priorities.

During a separate “family meeting” in Johnson’s office, Rep. Michelle Fischbach (R-Minn.), who sits in a Johnson-appointed slot on the Rules Committee, asked why they should believe the speaker when he promised a future vote on the ethanol issue. Johnson had already promised the group a vote in late February that did not materialize.

Miller, a former White House aide to President Donald Trump, said he ultimately agreed to vote for the budget measure out of his support for Trump and after Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin personally asked him to. But he said the episode demonstrated why he thinks Johnson is unfit to lead Republicans beyond this Congress.

“It’s pretty debilitating when you're supposed to follow a guy into battle, and I wouldn't trust him to get out of a wet paper bag with an M4,” he said.

Johnson was happy to put the 76-day DHS shutdown behind him Thursday, telling reporters that “sometimes it's an ugly process” but that he has “never broken my word to a single person in this building.”

But the instances of disarray on the floor have piled up in recent months, and not all of them can be attributed solely to the GOP’s tiny majority. Last week, Johnson and other leaders appeared unaware of serious concerns in his conference’s ranks about legislation curbing Endangered Species Act protections. They were forced to postpone consideration of the bill.

The week before that, the House cleared an extension of temporary immigration protections for people from Haiti — the latest instance where a Democratic-led discharge petition had succeeded in commandeering the GOP agenda.

Many Democrats have been happy to watch the internal drama and gloat, mocking the GOP’s disarray and papering over the pains their own caucus experienced when they were in power. But they have insisted the drama of the past few months stands alone.

“First reaction is: ‘Oh, my God, this would never happen under Nancy Pelosi,’” Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) said in an interview, harking back to speakers of the past. “In fact, it probably wouldn't have happened under John Boehner or Paul Ryan or even Kevin McCarthy.”

Johnson has defenders inside the GOP ranks, such as Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), who said “he’s doing fine” and “the bills are moving.” He also continued to enjoy the support of the most important Republican — Trump — who has shown no outward sign of dismay with Johnson’s leadership.

“These are complex issues, and sometimes they take more than five minutes to work through,” Lawler said.

Johnson will be tested as soon as lawmakers return from recess. The pro-ethanol Republicans say Johnson pledged to orchestrate a standalone vote on their measure the week of May 12, according to six people involved in the talks. Many Republicans expect it to fail since it will no longer be attached to a must-pass bill.

“Do I believe him? Probably not,” one of the House Republicans involved said about that timeline.

Wagner, when asked whether she had confidence in Johnson and GOP leaders, singled out House Majority Leader Steve Scalise for having “really stood up in the pack” and “gave his word in terms of how we would move forward.”

Even the members who weren’t part of the back-and-forths over ethanol blends or surveillance safeguards or budget priorities this week were dismayed by how it all went down.

Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.), a veteran House member who announced his retirement earlier this week, parked himself on the House floor during part of the meltdown. Asked later what he thought of the interactions, he said, “I just thought we got to get it together.”

“We probably didn't have it together when we started voting,” he said. “Probably should have waited until we were sure. It's a lot of wasted time.”