The chaos in Congress came to an end with this week’s election of Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House. House Republicans were unable to rally around three previous picks for Speaker after several votes. However, Johnson, a relatively unnoticed fourth term representative from Louisiana, was elected in just one.
Earlier this month, Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy was removed from the Speakership in an unprecedented move.
Alongside all 208 Democrats, just eight Republicans voted against him, meaning “the vast majority of the conference did not want to replace him,” according to Villanova political science professor Erinn Lauterbach. Ultimately, this unusual ousting contributed to the chaotic nature of future elections.
“By breaking the norm and going against the party, it opened a can of worms which led to other factions within the Republican Party standing their ground and not following norms when, for example, they didn’t want Representatives Scalise, Jordan or Emmer to win,” Lauterbach said. “Party loyalty has definitely been tested this year. Though it is worth mentioning that McCarthy knew all of this was a possibility when he agreed to change the rules for the Motion to Vacate in order to become Speaker in January.”
When McCarthy was removed, Representative Patrick McHenry of North Carolina was the acting Speaker with limited power.
“Some of the chaos came out of this decision because it meant that the House was not working on funding bills that need to be passed by Nov. 17 to prevent a government shutdown or another short-term funding resolution,” Lauterbach said.
Villanova political science professor Matthew Kerbel also commented.
“It’s unusual for a majority party to have difficulty selecting leaders, but factional divisions within the Republican conference coupled with their small majority have made it a challenge for Republicans to select and hold on to a speaker,” he said.
Even back in January of this year, these divisions were showing when it took an unbelievable 15 votes to elect McCarthy, himself. In order to be elected in the first place, McCarthy agreed to a concession that would allow a single House member to initiate a vote against him.
However, these disagreements continued to deepen over the past months and “contributed to Republicans going through three failed nominees before agreeing on the relatively unknown Mike Johnson on Wednesday,” according to Kerbel.
The implications of Johnson’s election on Congress as a whole are still unclear, as it depends on what kind of leader he will ultimately prove himself to be.
“In the modern Congress, the Speaker has been powerful, but when we look across the history of the institution, that power has waxed and waned at different points in time,” Lauterbach said. “Strong leadership has some advantages, especially because it can solve collective action problems around priorities and organization, but it requires a majority of the members (at least of the majority party) to agree on what to prioritize and how to organize. Right now, I think we are seeing disagreement in the Republican Party in these areas and that, in part, leads to the chaos we have been seeing this month. One potential consequence of the events this month is that the House moves back into a time of less centralized power. Only time will tell.”
Furthermore, it’s still uncertain just how in agreement the Republican party is with Johnson. He’s generally been on the extremist side of the party, with extremely conservative views on abortion and gay rights. This includes likening abortion to “a holocaust that has been repeated every day for 32 years, since 1973’s Roe v. Wade,” and his work as a lawyer for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a group that has been designated an LGBTQ+ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Johnson has also been called out for his support to overturn the presidential election results in 2020. As a constitutional lawyer who created many of the well-known arguments against certifying the election results, he backed the ridiculous idea that a voting software system was untrustworthy “because it came from Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela.”
Whether this kind of extreme conservatism will actually be reflected in Congress remains to be seen. It is still unknown “if Representative Johnson was truly the person that could get unanimous support, or whether some people caved to get the chamber back up,” Lauterbach said. “Governing, and doing things like passing hotly contested funding bills during divided government, requires that a majority of people in the chamber continue to come together to compromise and pass legislation. What that will look like under this new leadership is something that we will have to watch unfold.”
While Johnson’s election may have seemingly put an end to the chaos, the new Congress under his leadership is facing extreme internal polarization and has the potential to be anything but normal.
