House Republicans spent this week venting about Mike Johnson, questioning the speaker’s hold on his tenuous House majority. Next week, he has to prove he’s capable of governing.
The annual Pentagon policy bill is due on the floor just in time to test Johnson’s ability to command and cajole his conference with must-pass legislation at stake. Already GOP leaders have had to delay release of bill text as they deal with a host of 11th-hour intraparty flare-ups that show just how hard it will be for the speaker to lead ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
Johnson is already bruised from a high-profile fight with Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), a member of the GOP leadership team, over a surveillance provision she wanted attached to the sprawling defense package. She got her way after publicly accusing the speaker of lying and sandbagging conservatives.
Other deeply divisive issues remain, ranging from cryptocurrency policy to in vitro fertilization, that could threaten to further splinter the House GOP and imperil the typically bipartisan Pentagon bill. The brouhaha threatens to complicate Johnson’s effort to hammer out a still-brewing Republican health care plan he’s promised to unveil by early next week.
“I think there’s a lot of members that are frustrated that we’re not doing the things that we said that we were going to do,” said Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) when asked about Johnson’s leadership. “His response to that would be, we only have a [three] vote majority, but I think if you govern conservatively, Republicans will show up and vote for it.”
Steube, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said he was “not happy” that Johnson initially excluded Stefanik’s legislation allowing for congressional notification of counterintelligence probes concerning candidates for federal office — part of an annual intelligence authorization legislation that, he said, included “a lot of conservative reforms.” The speaker argued he didn’t know about the measure and that Stefanik’s accusations were “false.”
Top GOP leaders are scrambling to douse the remaining fires and release text of the massive bill as early as Saturday, but it could slip into Sunday, according to four people granted anonymity to comment on internal planning. The negotiations are complicated, they say, because the final product must not only pass the GOP-controlled House but also withstand a possible Senate filibuster — meaning it needs to have Democratic buy-in.
“Getting an agreement right now between Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate’s not easy,” Majority Leader Steve Scalise said. “But we’re getting close, and we want to get it done.”
Johnson played down the internal turmoil Thursday, saying Republicans “are exactly on the trajectory of where we’ve always planned to be.”
“Steady at the wheel, everybody,” he said. “It’s going to be fine.”
But the pending fights over the Pentagon bill — or the National Defense Authorization Act, as it is formally known — serve as a mini-preview for the turmoil Johnson is likely to face for the remainder of the 119th Congress as he tries to tackle health care, government funding and other flashpoints.
For instance, he is risking a showdown with conservative hard-liners if the final package doesn’t include a provision they favor that would ban the Federal Reserve from issuing a digital currency. Johnson promised House Freedom Caucus members he would include the provision in the defense bill amid a toxic intra-GOP row during the House’s shambolic “crypto week” this summer.
If the so-called central bank digital currency ban is missing, “it is a big deal,” said one House conservative who, like others quoted for this story, was granted anonymity to speak frankly about conference dynamics.
The fate of that provision is currently tied up in talks over another matter — one that highlights how Johnson is facing pressure from another influential corner of the House GOP: his committee chairs.
GOP leaders are taking steps to add a scaled-down version of a Senate housing proposal to the package. But Financial Services Chair French Hill (R-Ark.) opposes the move and wants to advance a slate of House housing bills through his committee later this month.
Johnson and Hill, normally low-key operators, had an intense conversation on the House floor Wednesday night as House and Senate GOP leaders went back-and-forth, including at the White House’s behest, over how to add some housing affordability measures to the defense bill.
“French is very logical and measured, but he’s very stern in what he believes and what he wants,” said a senior House Republican.
Johnson, a staunch social conservative, is also facing pressure from women and others in the House to add a measure expanding coverage for in vitro fertilization and other fertility services for military families under DOD’s Tricare health system. He’s also caught between big business and China hawks — two major GOP blocs — on whether to add in new restrictions on U.S. investments in China. Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), who chairs a select committee on China, said he was hopeful the provision would make it in but pointed to opposition from the “financial community.”
The NDAA is “a train that comes around once a year,” he added. “We’re hoping to include it.”
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