Speaker Mike Johnson cut a deal with Democrats on spending. Will he lose his job over it?

WASHINGTON –Conservative House members are irate about a proposed spending deal with Democrats – but they’re not yet seeking to kick out House Speaker Mike Johnson.

With two weeks left to avoid a government shutdown, Johnson and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced on Sunday that they’d agreed on a spending package in line with the debt ceiling deal struck between former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and President Joe Biden, around $1.66 trillion total.

That deal was one of the reasons eight conservative lawmakers took the historic step of voting McCarthy out of his position in October.

The spending deal struck between Schumer and Johnson enraged the House’s most conservative members, arguing the deal doesn’t sufficiently cut government funding.

But asked whether there was a possibility that Johnson would meet the same fate, most conservative leaders said it wasn’t likely.

“Nobody’s talking about that,” said Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., who leads the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus and also one of the eight GOP members who voted to oust McCarthy.

McCarthy’s ouster led to three weeks of chaos in the House. The Republican majority burned through multiple potential replacements, failing to find agreement, before finally settling on Johnson – then relatively unknown – to lead the chamber. In the interim, the House was unable to pass any legislation without a leader.

“People can say what they want. The reality is nobody wants to go through another speaker’s campaign,” said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., chair of the House Rules Committee.

“You can take somebody down once and say you’re killing a tyrant. You do it twice, you’re becoming the same.”

Rep. Steve Womack, R-Ark., agreed that there’s no “appetite right now to go back through what we went through with Kevin McCarthy.”

“I feel confident that that’s not going to happen,” he said. “It may be the desire on some people’s part to want to float some idea like that. I’d be really surprised if a majority of our conference wants to go back there.”

Could Speaker Johnson's job be on the line?

Removing Johnson from office would require a majority of the House to agree. McCarthy was toppled with a vote of 216 to 210 votes, with 208 Democrats joining with eight Republicans to do so.

On Tuesday, Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, a member of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, wouldn’t rule out firing Johnson over the deal. Roy said he was leaving a motion to vacate “on the table” Tuesday on the Steve Deace Show, a conservative talk show. However, he later told Fox News it wasn’t his preferred solution.

“We’re talking about it,” Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., another member who voted to remove McCarthy, said. Burchett demurred when asked if he would support vacating Johnson and said he would instead “like him to get back to his conservative roots.”

"I'm not concerned about that. We're leading. Chip Roy is one of my closest friends. We agree on almost everything in principle," Johnson told reporters Wednesday. "I'm going to keep trudging forward, look leadership is tough. You take a lot of criticism but remember, I am a hardline conservative."

What would a spending deal look like?

When McCarthy was speaker, conservatives pushed for a different spending deal with lower levels of funding.

After Johnson ascended to the spot, the House Freedom Caucus indicated they would accept the caps agreed to in the deal after all – but opposed any “gimmicks” alongside the $1.59 trillion approved in the Fiscal Responsibility Act, which came out of the McCarthy-Biden negotiation.

The final proposal Johnson unveiled Sunday does include the “gimmicks” conservatives opposed, which drew immediate pushback from the right wing of Johnson’s caucus.

“Apparently the speaker has no plan but to surrender,” Freedom Caucus member Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, told reporters Wednesday.

One thing is clear: It is extremely unlikely Congress will be able to approve all 12 appropriations bills in the timeframe they’ve given themselves.

Funding for agriculture, energy and water, military construction and veterans affairs, transportation and housing programs will expire on Jan. 19. The rest of the government’s funding expires on Feb. 2.

On Tuesday, Senate Republicans called for another short-term extension into March, which would allow them more time to negotiate.

Johnson on Wednesday declined to say whether he would support another extension, instead saying only that House Republicans have “the pedal to the metal trying to get appropriations done."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Could House speaker Mike Johnson lose his job over deal with Dems?