House GOP Gives Mike Johnson (Some) Leeway in Averting a Shutdown
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From the Uphill on The Dispatch
Happy Friday! Let’s get right to it.
The Congressional Record
Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the centrist Democrat who often stymied progressives’ plans during the first two years of President Joe Biden’s term, announced Thursday he will not seek reelection in 2024. As the only Democrat who holds a statewide office from West Virginia, Manchin’s departure imperils his party’s hopes of retaining the Senate majority.
A group of Senate Republicans introduced an immigration plan this week that would limit the number of people eligible for asylum, require more evidence that migrants face threats in their home countries to approve asylum claims, and restrict requests for protection to migrants who go through official ports of entry, among other provisions. Democrats quickly dismissed the plan. The two parties are continuing to negotiate potential immigration changes as part of a broader push to approve separate funding for Ukraine as it defends itself from Russia.
House Republicans elected Rep. Blake Moore of Utah as vice chair of their conference this week, replacing the leadership gap left by Rep. Mike Johnson’s succession to the speakership. He’ll now participate in leadership meetings and help schedule members’ speeches on the House floor.
Rep. Derek Kilmer, a Washington Democrat, will not seek reelection. In a statement Thursday, he cited sacrifices he has made by being in Congress, like missing childrens’ recitals and family dinners. Rep. Brad Wenstrup, an Ohio Republican, also announced this week he will retire from Congress at the end of this year. Wenstrup, too, expressed a desire to spend more time with his family.
Rep. Brian Higgins, a New York Democrat, is also reportedly stepping down soon to become president of a local performing arts center.
In a letter this week, Rep. Chris Smith and Sen Jeff Merkley—the top lawmakers on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China—urged President Biden to bring up several topics in his upcoming meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping. They asked the president to raise cases of political prisoners in China, demand an end to China’s efforts to repress dissidents abroad, and act as a voice for Uyghurs, who face genocide in China’s northwest region of Xinjiang.
Rep. Mike Gallagher, who chairs the House select committee on competition with the Chinese Communist Party, will also try to focus the administration on human rights concerns. He’ll hold an event with prominent Chinese dissidents in San Francisco on Saturday, ahead of the summit.
Johnson Is in a Jam
With a government funding deadline next Friday and a fractious Republican conference struggling to pass its own spending bills, House Speaker Mike Johnson now faces the same dilemma former Speaker Kevin McCarthy grappled with before he lost his job: figuring out a way to fund the federal government before it shuts down.
Johnson will have to either propose his own way out—potentially a “laddered” continuing resolution as my Morning Dispatch colleagues explained this morning—or consider a stopgap plan passed by the Senate.
But hardline House Republicans are seemingly giving Johnson more room to maneuver than they offered McCarthy. They appear much more receptive to passing a stopgap continuing resolution than they were with the former speaker, largely because Johnson is new to the gig.
“Obviously, we’ve got a very, very diverse group, and it takes a little bit of fine tuning in order to get everybody on the same page,” Rep. Matt Rosendale, a Montana Republican who voted to oust McCarthy, told The Dispatch on Thursday. He added that Johnson is “playing catch-up.”
“You have to keep in mind that he entered this process in the middle or two-thirds towards the end of it,” Rosendale said of the spending negotiations. Asked whether another effort to oust the speaker could be on the table if Johnson doesn’t win enough conservative priorities in spending talks—or if a stopgap measure that keeps the government funded at current levels passes—Rosendale brushed off such an effort from the far right as preposterous, even though it just happened last month. “That’s ridiculous,” he laughed. “Really, that’s just ridiculous.”
“That’s a shiny object for you guys to talk about,” he told The Dispatch. “No one else is even discussing it.”
And Rep. Ben Cline—a House Freedom Caucus member who considered supporting McCarthy’s ouster before ultimately voting to keep him in the job last month—said he is confident Johnson will be able to row past next week’s rapids since he has been meeting with “all corners of the conference” to get their thoughts. Republicans hold a slim majority, though, and Johnson has only a few votes to spare on any bill Democrats oppose. That’s why leading the GOP conference is a difficult job. “I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, and Mike Johnson is one of my best friends,” Cline told The Dispatch. “I sympathize with what he’s going through, but I can’t think of anybody better to lead us at this critical time.”
Conservatives, Cline added, have been “understanding of the challenges facing him as he gets up to speed, and we will continue to be.”
Republicans reminded The Dispatch of Johnson’s newcomer status often Thursday, when party leaders delayed an expected vote on one of their own spending bills amid policy disputes among members—the second time they pulled a bill from the floor this week.
“He’s getting up to speed,” centrist Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick said of Johnson.
The new speaker is “still settling into managing his position,” Rep. John Duarte, a California freshman, said.
And Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, told The Dispatch he hasn’t noticed a difference between Johnson’s and McCarthy’s leadership styles yet: “He’s still, you know, booting up.”
While the details of a potential stopgap spending bill aren’t yet clear, Republicans do know they want any such bill to stretch into the new year, rather than butting against holidays in December. “If there is a laddered CR, I don’t think any part of it can expire in December,” Massie told reporters Thursday. “My colleagues resent having the pressure of Christmas vacation held over their head in order to vote for something.”
That’s what Senate Democrats are reportedly considering, though: A bill to fund the government until shortly before Christmas, with the goal of passing spending for the rest of the fiscal year by the end of 2023. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Thursday teed up consideration of a vehicle that could become a stopgap spending bill in his chamber next week, although Democrats haven’t decided the details yet and want to see which approach Johnson chooses. (“It would be fair to say that right now, the options for next week are pretty fluid,” Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden summarized.)
Whatever happens, Massie said, the eight Republicans who voted to remove McCarthy are “on thin ice” with the GOP conference and have already “overdrawn their political capital.” Even if they aren’t ready to consider another ouster for that reason, Massie added, he could envision conservatives slowing down floor action or voting against rules that set parameters for debate if Johnson takes an approach to government funding they don’t agree with. When asked, Republicans were reluctant to describe a stopgap bill they’d support, although some suggested it could include aid for Israel.
In the meantime, a different group of Republicans is feeling emboldened. Moderates shut down consideration of a GOP spending bill Thursday. They took issue with a provision—supported by social conservatives—that would have blocked implementation of a 2014 measure in the District of Columbia barring employment discrimination for reasons such as undergoing an abortion or taking birth control.
Centrist Republicans also raised objections to a GOP transportation spending bill earlier this week for its cuts to Amtrak subsidies. Their opposition led Republican leaders to pull that measure from floor consideration at the last minute Tuesday night, after hours of debate on amendments.
“We’re tired of taking crappy votes,” Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska said Thursday, pointing to potential layoffs if the Amtrak cuts were passed into law. “I’m not going to vote for that.”
For the first nine months of the year, Bacon told The Dispatch, centrists were trying to help former Speaker McCarthy. After the speakership fiasco last month pragmatic Republicans “decided we’ve had enough.”
“We’re not just going to get walked over. We tried for nine or ten months, and it wasn’t even good enough,” he said. “So we’re going to stand our ground.”
Ceaseless Censures
Forcing a vote to oust the speaker of the House. Holding up hundreds of military promotions. Introducing censure resolutions to punish members of the other party. What do these recent congressional news stories have in common?
Lawmakers are increasingly using their procedural powers to compel votes they aren’t even sure will succeed—or to claim leverage in unrelated policy fights. It’s not a new dynamic by any means, but at this point, it’s the defining feature of the 118th Congress.
Some members have blamed national political incentives for the dysfunction: Picking these fights raises lawmakers’ profiles and boosts their own fundraising.
But according to Molly Reynolds, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, it may also simply give members something to do in an institution where opportunities to actually legislate are few and far between. “Members are looking at the ways that they can use the floor to their advantage that aren’t controlled by leadership,” Reynolds told The Dispatch in an interview this week.
The Senate only rarely votes on legislation these days and almost exclusively considers judicial and executive nominees instead. And trying to advance priorities in the House is a Sisyphean task. In a divided government, the bills the House considers often have no chance of becoming law, and members can spend months to years working to simply bring their ideas to the floor for a vote.
Take the recent slew of censure resolutions in the House, for example. After a censure is filed, the chamber has to vote on it within two legislative days. Censures can’t be rejected by the Senate or the White House. Any one member can introduce one without buy-in from congressional leaders.
At their best, censures hold members accountable. At their worst, they waste time and sow bad will among lawmakers. Members have introduced both varieties in the past two weeks.
Twenty-three Republicans first helped Democrats reject Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s attempt to censure Rep. Rashida Tlaib last week for her comments condemning Israel for imposing “apartheid” and her defense of a motto used by Hamas to call for the destruction of the Jewish state. Even though they found Tlaib’s remarks abhorrent, those Republicans felt Greene’s resolution exaggerated events by claiming Tlaib was party to an insurrection and sympathized with a terrorist group. Democratic Rep. Becca Balint then readied a censure targeting Greene, but she later pulled it from consideration after Greene’s effort failed. Indicted Rep. George Santos—who, much like David S. Pumpkins, is his own thing—also survived a separate attempt to expel him from the House.
This week, Greene introduced a revised version of her Tlaib censure, only to withdraw it after Rep. Rich McCormick won support for a more matter-of-fact version. Democratic Rep. Sara Jacobs of California, meanwhile, introduced and then backed down from a separate resolution to punish Rep. Brian Mast of Florida for recently comparing Palestinian civilians to Nazis during World War II.
The censure that finally stuck was McCormick’s of Tlaib, which passed Tuesday night by a vote of 234-188. Four Republicans opposed it alongside most Democrats, and 22 Democrats joined Republicans in voting for it.
Lawmakers who voted to censure Tlaib argued it was how the system should work. “I don’t think there’s any doubt that congresswoman Tlaib crossed the line in a very bad way,” Rep. Chip Roy, who backed McCormick’s measure but opposed Greene’s earlier attempt, told The Dispatch on Tuesday night. But he said the chamber has to avoid turning censures into frequent tit-for-tat feuds.
“The question becomes: When is this venturing into a political back and forth, versus reserving censure for that moment when we all take a step back and go, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you doing?’” he said.
The censure resolution cited Tlaib’s statement on October 8—one day after the horrific Hamas terror attack that left more than 1,400 people in Israel dead—in which she condemned Israel for imposing “an apartheid system that creates the suffocating, dehumanizing conditions that can lead to resistance.”
“As long as our country provides billions in unconditional funding to support the apartheid government, this heartbreaking cycle of violence will continue,” Tlaib said at the time. She also later defended a slogan—“from the river to the sea”—that Hamas has used to call for the annihilation of Israel. Tlaib argued it can be interpreted as “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence.”
Many of Tlaib’s own Democratic colleagues disagree: “Echoing slogans that are widely understood as calling for the complete destruction of Israel does not advance progress toward a two-state solution,” wrote House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries. “Instead, it unacceptably risks further polarization, division and incitement to violence.”
Yet Democrats largely voted against the censure resolution, citing the need to preserve free speech. Rep. Ruben Gallego told The Dispatch Tlaib’s statements have been “both abhorrent and incorrect at times,” but protections exist for free speech. And Rep. Jim Himes argued sanctioning members of Congress for what they say is inconsistent with free expression. “Let’s not let cancel culture into our House,” he wrote. (Read my colleague Michael Warren’s piece on Democrats’ approach to Tlaib here.)
Censures are a symbolic form of institutional punishment, although they lay clear markers for what House members consider acceptable behavior. Members who are censured must stand in the well of the chamber while the resolution is read aloud. Of the now 26 censures in the House’s history, several were related to insulting colleagues, one was for describing post-Civil War reconstruction legislation as a “monstrosity,” a couple were for physically assaulting other lawmakers, several were for selling military academy appointments, and two were for sexual misconduct, among a slew of other transgressions.
So even though censures have been used for behavior as serious as criminal activity, it’s no departure from precedent that lawmakers would consider a censure related to a member’s speech. And there’s a recent example of Democrats (and two Republicans) censuring Rep. Paul Gosar for his own expression, which Democrats argued could incite violence: In 2021, Gosar posted an altered anime video that depicted him killing progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacking President Joe Biden. It prompted the first censure in more than a decade. Earlier this year, House Republicans censured Rep. Adam Schiff for saying evidence existed that former President Donald Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia.
Roy said that if the House turns into a battleground for more frequent censure resolutions, members might consider raising the threshold for passage from a simple majority to a higher percentage of the chamber. He doesn’t support that change, he told The Dispatch, but “if we see this happening a lot, then the institution will respond.”
Reynolds, the Brookings Institution scholar, said it has the potential to turn into a vicious cycle. Legislating is difficult, so members use their individual procedural powers to offer censures or block nominations, for example. Those fights then take up floor time and slow down legislation—and they deepen divisions among members, eroding the goodwill needed between the parties to collaborate on bills in the first place.
Rep. Ritchie Torres, a New York Democrat who voted to censure Tlaib and would have also voted to censure Mast if that resolution had come forward, said he worries about the situation getting out of hand.
Leaders in both parties need to come together and “restore some stability” to the censure process, he argued.
“There needs to be an understanding that we have to stop politicizing and weaponizing the process of censures, because it has spun out of control,” Torres told The Dispatch.
