Johnson’s Rules for Radicals

Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, I’m Tina Nguyen.

Before we get started on my excavation of Congress’s dysfunction, some breaking news: Late Wednesday, Marjorie Taylor Greene finally made good on her motion-to-vacate threat on the House floor, with the aim of ousting Mike Johnson as speaker, for a nebulous set of reasons that I’ve written about before. It did not go as she’d hoped: 196 Republicans voted to table the motion, as they said they would, as well as a staggering 136 Democrats, who had already promised to vote against any attempts to get rid of Johnson. (My texts are blowing up with Republican insiders telling me variations of I told you so.)

There will certainly be consequences for Greene, who’d been getting signals from Trumpworld to please drop the M.T.V. distraction during a tight election season. But it’s not clear whether there will be any consequences for the 10 other Republicans who joined her, especially since there’s a handful of lesser-known names on that list I have not associated with the House hardliner/contrarian bloc over the course of this Congress: Warren Davidson, Eric Burlison, and Alex Mooney. If I were House leadership, I’d be sending people to them immediately to ask why they’re so mad.

Of course, the drama in the House is bigger than Greene. As I report tonight, the real source of conflict can be traced back to the Rules Committee, a formerly stupor-inducing assembly that’s recently been hijacked by a trio of hardliners set on leveraging their power to make Johnson’s life hell. More on all that, below the fold.

But first, here’s Abby Livingston’s dispatch from the campaign trail…

Postcard From Indy

Last night, all eyes were on the Indiana primary, featuring a slate of open-seat races that might provide clues to future control of both houses of Congress. By the end of the night, the warring wings of the Republican Party had both picked up wins. Here’s the nitty-gritty…

The incumbent edge: Rep. Victoria Spartz was seriously outraised, and ran an erratic reelection campaign, but she defeated a crowded field to win her primary in Indiana’s 5th District. It was a dogfight: Spartz, a native Ukrainian (who voted against Ukraine aid earlier this month) won a contentious race against her top challenger, state Rep. Chuck Goodrich, who mostly self-funded and outraised her tenfold, according to recent campaign finance reports.
Spartz is just the latest House Republican incumbent to win a contested primary—that there are so many is surprising given the scale of party infighting. So far, only one incumbent in all of Congress has lost their reelection bid—Alabama’s Jerry Carl, which was a special case because he lost in a member vs. member race to Barry Moore. However, he might not be alone for long. Texas Republican Tony Gonzales is facing a serious threat from right-wingers heading into a May 28 runoff.

Stutzman’s support squad: There were three open-seat races last night, all in safely Republican districts, which means that the winners are all but certain to come to Congress. Ex-Rep. Marlin Stutzman, a former Freedom Caucus member, won the 3rd District primary; it’s likely he’ll rejoin the conference’s rabble-rouser constituency. But his member-donors featured a wide spectrum of Republicans, and included Mo Brooks, Jeff Duncan, Andy Harris, Bill Huizenga, Jim Jordan, Doug LaMalfa, Thomas Massie, John Moolenaar, Roger Williams, as well as former reps. Kevin Yoder and Mark Meadows.
Across the G.O.P. divide, the establishment won in the 8th District, where Mark Messmer secured the nomination with help from AIPAC, the Republican Main Street Partnership, retiring incumbent Larry Bucshon, and House Armed Services Chairman Mike Rogers.

Meanwhile, Sen. Mike Braun easily won the Republican gubernatorial primary, which wasn’t much of a surprise. He’s likely the next governor of Indiana. Jefferson Shreve won the 6th District nomination, almost single-handedly self-funding his campaign, and Jim Banks ran uncontested for the Republican Senate nomination to succeed Braun. He will probably end up on the more pugnacious end of the Senate G.O.P. spectrum.

Johnson’s Rules for Radicals

The once-sleepy Rules Committee, previously a glorified rubber stamp for the House speaker, has instead become an unlikely flashpoint in the G.O.P.’s ongoing civil war.

TINA NGUYEN

For all the media attention lavished upon the Mike Johnson-Marjorie Taylor Greene drama, the true source of the chaos that has engulfed House Republicans might be H-312, a cramped, fluorescent-lit hearing room near the top of the Capitol Building. That’s the meeting place of the House Rules Committee, the occasionally stupor-inducing assembly that determines the parliamentary procedures under which laws are actually passed. It is also, technically, one of the most powerful committees in Washington—which is why hardliners Chip Roy and Ralph Norman, aided by Thomas Massie, were more than happy to accept the posting, back in January 2023, in exchange for their votes to elevate Kevin McCarthy to speaker. “I thought it was a punishment,” a senior G.O.P. advisor told me. “I thought they’d cornered themselves and that they’d bore themselves to death.”

In fact, it was a prescient and calculated move. For decades, arguments among the nine members who constitute the majority of the Rules Committee, typically close allies of the speaker, rarely escalated beyond pleasant disagreements over when to break for dinner. But from the moment that Roy, Norman, and Massie were appointed, it was evident that they had a very different agenda. Rather than simply rubber-stamping the edicts of leadership, the triumvirate transformed the former “speaker’s committee” into an ideological battleground—a perch from which to challenge the G.O.P. establishment and demand concessions, impeding budgets proposals meant to avert government shutdowns, national security bills that need renewal, etcetera. Indeed, much of the House’s recent pandemonium can be traced back to their presence on the committee.

Naturally, this new parliamentary gamesmanship chafed the old guard. “What McCarthy did was just so unfortunate and just so wrong,” David Dreier, a former Republican Congressman who chaired the Rules Committee for over a decade, told me. “They joined the Rules Committee, in large part, with an agenda of blocking the leadership.”

Alas, while it was McCarthy who made this uncomfortable bed, it’s Johnson who is now sleeping in it. Over the past few months, in response to a (frankly legitimate) sense that Johnson, just like McCarthy before him, has attempted to circumnavigate the trio—pushing time-sensitive bills onto the floor using procedures that bypass the committee altogether—Roy, Norman, and Massie have radically intensified their crusade.

The feud reached its apex last month, when the trio voted against a package to send three urgent foreign aid bills to the floor, including support for Israel and Taiwan, simply because one of the bills benefited Ukraine. (As I wrote last week, the notion of Republicans impeding aid to Israel was previously unfathomable.) “They just have a totally different concept of something that we thought had one gear: forward,” the senior G.O.P. aide said of the committee. “Nobody ever thought to slam the car in reverse while they were on the freeway.” (Roy, Norman, and Massie’s offices did not return requests for comment.)

“Institutionalized Chaos”

In happier times, Dreier told me, a functioning Rules Committee allows leadership to hear out unhappy members and adjust bills accordingly before scooting them onto the floor—all without their intraparty mess spilling into full view on C-SPAN. But this only works if members of the Rules Committee are aligned with the speaker’s interests. “From the very get-go, the notion of appointing people who undermine the nine-to-four majority-minority ratio on the Rules Committee is something that I just find to be very, very, very unfortunate,” he told me. “And I put that mildly. I mean, I was horrified when that decision was made.”

Of course, prior to the 1960s, that’s exactly how the Rules Committee operated: It was ground zero for bitter intraparty fights, where ideologies and interests clashed in the open. That changed when Sam Rayburn became speaker and increased the size of the committee by three seats to break the gridlock preventing John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier agenda from moving forward. To hear members like Roy and Norman tell it, the committee subsequently became a vehicle for the speaker to steamroll the minority—but also to squash dissent from their own party members.

By conceding those seats to Norman, Roy, and Massie, McCarthy allowed the committee to return to those chaotic, pre-Rayburn times. I’m told that McCarthy saw a silver lining in the concession, hoping it would potentially cut down on the televised floor drama of the Freedom Caucus era. “The thought at the time was that by having H.F.C. or very conservative members on Rules, you’d figure out about problems and hopefully solve them before things moved to the floor,” a G.O.P. aide familiar with the negotiations told me.

In some ways, that assumption proved correct: Plenty of bills were blocked in Rules, sent back to their originating committees, adjusted, and returned. But the expectation was that, when push came to shove, the hardliners would vote with leadership on critical bills—which, obviously, has not happened. Instead, the Roy-Norman-Massie troika has “institutionalized the chaos,” as a Republican insider put it. During his short tenure, McCarthy failed three rules votes on major bills that he tried to bring to the floor—primarily due to the trio, as well as members allied with them. (For context: Prior to McCarthy, only eight rules votes had failed in the House in 27 years.)

Though Johnson was presented as a sympathetic conservative ally, he failed to reverse the trend when he became speaker. This bloc continued to obstruct much of his legislation at every turn, either at the committee level or on the floor, forcing him to use the suspension-of-rules procedure on bills as massive as a government funding omnibus, or as small as a border bill that was never going to become law (but would have checked a box for Republicans looking to get some sort of yea vote on the books). Making matters worse was that the hardliners were pressing Johnson to accept a power-sharing agreement that they’d struck with McCarthy—a deal that he himself had never agreed to.

Theoretically, Johnson has the discretion as speaker to remove people from the committee, though he flatly ruled out that possibility in an interview with Hugh Hewitt late last month. “If I start kicking people off committees right now, it’s likely that I cause more problems than I solve,” he noted. That’s true. Were Johnson to reassign members now, in the middle of a session, he would almost certainly infuriate the hardliners and incite another motion-to-vacate threat. Also, the bar for removing a member has historically been limited to serious misconduct—indictments, blatant racism, etcetera—and kicking members out simply because they’re annoying is frowned upon. Then again, one Republican insider noted, “‘frowned upon’ is quaint, considering it’s frowned upon to kick out your current speaker.”

The Terrible Three

Unfortunately, this may simply be the new normal for a razor-thin Republican majority. In Rayburn’s day, the Rules Committee was reshaped to reflect the will of an 86-member majority, whereas Johnson is working against a Senate and White House held by Democrats, with a margin of anywhere between one and four potential defectors in the House at any given time. The tactics of Roy, Massie, and Norman are thus hyper-effective, and Johnson is limited by the ever-present M.T.V. threat from remaking the committee in his image. “From where the speaker sits, he can’t really operate within the realm of getting everything he might want,” a senior House G.O.P. leadership aide told me. “He can only operate within the realm of what is achievable, and maybe that’s some of the disconnect.”

Still, Johnson’s position is safer today than it was a few months ago: Not only has he apparently shaken off Greene’s motion-to-vacate threat (in part by securing the putative support of Democrats), and received the blessing of Donald Trump, he’s also proven that he can pass controversial bills to keep the government open and arm America’s allies. Even critics recognize that there’s likely no better backup option, at least for now. And House Republicans will face increasing pressure to rally around the party banner ahead of the November elections, as the focus shifts toward reelecting Trump and growing their majority. Virtually nobody, except for Democrats, benefits from another chaotic leadership fight.

But that doesn’t mean that Roy, Norman, and Massie won’t continue to use their extraordinary leverage to cause problems, or attempt to extract concessions. At this point, they and their allies are attuned to Johnson’s tendency to creatively bend the powers of his office to force legislation past them, and should Johnson continue doing so—especially with bills that are misaligned with their base—their resentment is certain to boil over. It’s not a surprise that in their recent negotiations with Johnson, Massie and Greene reportedly demanded a return to the Hastert Rule, the G.O.P.’s longstanding practice of not allowing any legislation onto the floor that does not have the support of more than half the conference.

The next flashpoint might be the reauthorization of the FY 2025 appropriations, which is slated for September—another fight where Johnson will be forced to cede items to the Democrats, setting up the triumvirate to retake control of the voting process, or, if all else fails, to threaten a shutdown once again. And as long as the trio remains on the committee, Dreier noted, they’ll be fated to clash over and over again—just as they’d planned. “They knew that if they could get on to the Rules Committee, that they would be able to be in a position to defeat the leadership,” he said. “And to me, it’s just absolutely insane.”

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