Mike Johnson wins his toughest battle yet – and shows he’s here to stay

Mike Johnson pulled it off.

Wednesday’s session in the House was a marathon, even by congressional standards. What began as a 1:30 a.m. Rules Committee hearing the night prior stretched into a day of negotiations between GOP leadership led by Johnson, the SALT caucus, and the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus.

At just before 7:00 a.m. Thursday morning, the budget package — “one big, beautiful bill” — passed the House, 215-214. Two Republicans voted against it, one voted “present”, and one slept through the vote entirely after pulling an all-nighter.

In the end, it wouldn’t have been possible save for the deaths of three Democratic members of the House in office since January, which pushed the margin in Johnson’s favor. The process is also far from over, given that the Senate is going to spend at least the next month rewriting it and potentially carving the legislation up into multiple bits. But what was once considered an impossible task was still accomplished on Thursday: the bill passed through one of the thinnest House margins in recent memory.

Two people can take credit: Mike Johnson and Donald Trump.

White House officials were intrinsically involved in the process of cobbling together the GOP’s often conflicting factions through the week, just as was GOP leadership. The bullying-into-line of the moderates and conservatives occurred over the course of two meetings between lawmakers and Trump, as well as subsequent discussions that occurred throughout Wednesday between Johnson and his members.

At one point, Trump resorted to a furious tirade against one of the leaders of the holdouts, House Freedom Caucus chair Andy Harris. NOTUS reports that the Maryland Republican was subject to expletives hurled at him by the president during a meeting Wednesday afternoon — after which Harris was still a “no”. He’d finally go on to vote “present” against the legislation, leading to the president and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt to accuse him of “grandstanding”.

The House speaker, meanwhile, worked quietly behind the scenes over the course of several days. First, he cut a deal with moderates in the SALT caucus to raise the cap on state and local tax (SALT) deductions to $40,000 for taxpayers making less than $500,000 annually. Then, he set to work corralling the hardliners, a group led by vocal critics of his leadership in the past, like Chip Roy, and others who fumed about the bill’s provisions that are set to add to the deficit.

“I’m just going to be very blunt about it: There was a few moments over the last week when it looked like things might fall apart,” Johnson told reporters at a press conference after the vote Thursday morning.

But regardless of what happens in the Senate from here, there is one clear winner today: the House speaker. Mike Johnson likely just cemented his place in House leadership for some time; presumably for as long as he wants it. It’s a hell of an outcome for a speaker who assumed the role after being pulled from virtual obscurity to serve in the position after his party ousted former Speaker Kevin McCarthy in 2023 and kicked off an extended leadership fight that paralyzed the chamber. Johnson won the job over established members of House GOP leadership and others including whip Tom Emmer, Elise Stefanik and Jim Jordan.

A failed revolt led by Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie proved last year that there’s little to no appetite for another House leadership fight. That reality was established long before Johnson proved an ability to unify a divided Republican caucus in a way that his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, decisively could not do and gave Republicans a clear reason to keep him in the job beyond just their inability to find someone else to do it.

The speaker’s clean re-election to the position in January, again with Trump’s backing, was a sign that a moment when the GOP’s backbenchers looked upon the motion to vacate favorably had passed.

Going forward, Johnson has every advantage at his back. He remains a firm ally of the president, who will be in office another three years, and now has a firmly conservative winning record to point to. Members of his caucus, in conversations with reporters, do not speak of the same kinds of trust issues they highlighted with McCarthy before the former speaker’s downfall.

With a single-digit margin in the chamber, Republicans may well end up losing control of the House in the midterms. In times past, that could endanger a party leader if members blame the party’s strategy for their defeat. But Johnson can likely rest assured that his position is safe for some time to come, given how increasingly unlikely it is that anyone in the GOP caucus could win the votes to replace him.