Less than three months into Mike Johnson’s tenure as speaker of the House, some House Republicans are already experiencing buyer’s remorse.
Texas Representative and Freedom Caucus member Chip Roy on Monday publicly raised the possibility of dumping Johnson as speaker.
I also assume it’ll never happen, but just bear in mind that the people looking to oust Johnson would be different from the people who might hypothetically be convinced to work with the Democrats.
The republicans have a very slim majority, needle thin. The reason why the vocal MAGA republicans can wield all this power to remove someone from the speaker position is that they can initiate a vote to remove a speaker for being too cooperative with democrats, while the democrats themselves will support any move to remove a republican from being the speaker. A somewhat ironic situation given that the MAGAs are basically working with the democrats to make this happen.
If the democrats can work with a group of moderate republicans to elect their preferred speaker, however, the MAGA republicans lose a lot of their power. They’d no longer have support from the democrat half of the house to remove the speaker and would instead need to somehow convince the moderate members of their party to follow their lead on any further attempts to oust the speaker, which they likely would not accomplish.