Headed into this week's vote, is Mike Johnson relieved to have Donald Trump’s backing? Yes. Will it guarantee the Republican speaker’s success? No.
https://bsky.app/profile/stevebenen.com/post/3lekcztfu622p
Headed into this week's vote, is Mike Johnson relieved to have Trump's backing? Yes.
Will the endorsement guarantee the House speaker's success on Friday? No
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-backing-speaker-mike-johnson-sort-matters-rcna185794
After nearly a dozen sentences of hysterical nonsense, however, the president-elect managed to actually write something relevant. NBC News reported:
President-elect Donald Trump backed House Speaker Mike Johnson in his campaign to hold onto the gavel, writing on his social media platform that the Louisiana Republican has his “Complete & Total Endorsement.” “Speaker Mike Johnson is a good, hard working, religious man. He will do the right thing, and we will continue to WIN,” Trump said on Truth Social Monday.
To a certain degree, the endorsement might’ve seemed redundant. After all, the president-elect effectively endorsed Johnson’s hold on the gavel the week after Election Day, signaling that the GOP would stick with its status quo in the lower chamber.
A month later, however, Trump sang a different tune. After the Louisiana Republican struck a bipartisan agreement to prevent a government shutdown, sparking a divisive intraparty fight, NBC News asked the president-elect whether he still had confidence in Johnson. “
We’ll see,” Trump replied......
For another, the idea that GOP members will blindly obey Trump’s directive is belied by recent events. In
fact, it’s a well-kept secret that congressional Republicans have repeatedly ignored Trump’s instructions in recent years, including in leadership races.
When he told Senate Republicans to replace Mitch McConnell as the Senate GOP leader, they didn’t. When he told House Republicans last year to elect Rep. Jim Jordan as House speaker, that didn’t happen, either.
In other words, Johnson is in a better position now than he was before Trump’s online tirade, but he’s not entirely out of the woods, at least not yet......
As things stand, one GOP member, Rep. Thomas Massie, has declared publicly that he will not back Johnson. If the Kentucky Republican sticks to that position, it wouldn’t be fatal to the incumbent speaker because it would leave him with 218 votes from his own GOP conference. If, however, Massie follows through and picks up one additional ally from his own party, Johnson will be short of the support he needs — at least, that is, on the first ballot.
I won’t pretend to know what will happen, though it’s worth keeping in mind that if Johnson hopes to get some Democratic support to prevent an even more extreme Republican alternative from becoming speaker, Democratic leaders have said that this will not happen. Watch this space
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