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House Republicans Send Eviction Warning To Speaker Mike Johnson

Mike Johnson's time as House speaker could be coming to an unceremonious end.

House Republicans and their real leader, Donald Trump, are furious with Johnson over the government funding mess that unfolded last week. Multibillionaire Elon Musk and Trump scuttled a deal Johnson made with Democrats to fund the government for three months, threatening a government shutdown just before the holidays.

The ultimate deal that was passed barely differed from the initial legislation—only it slashed money for childhood cancer research and did not include a provision raising the debt ceiling that Trump hypocritically demanded.

Politico reported on Monday:

Not only is Trump unhappy with the funding deal, he’s unhappy with Johnson, too. He’s unhappy that he didn’t get the debt ceiling hike he made clear he wanted. He felt blindsided by the initial deal Johnson struck with Democrats. And, in the end, he was unimpressed with the entire chaotic process, which left the incoming administration questioning whether Johnson is capable of managing an even thinner majority next year.

Now, discussion is picking up about whether to dispose of the Louisiana Republican and replace him with a new speaker when the new Congress is sworn in on January 3, 2025.

With a slim two-seat GOP majority, Johnson can afford to lose just one vote if he wants to remain speaker.

But at least three Republicans have already said they are not committing to voting for Johnson for speaker, and one has said he will actively support someone else.

“Since President Trump’s historic election to bring down spending, deficits, and inflation, the ‘Republican’-led House has INITIATED $300 billion in unpaid for new spending, without even ATTEMPTING offsets to prevent skyrocketing the deficit and debt. Future generations deserve better,” Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland wrote in a post on X on Monday. “I am now undecided on what House leadership should look like in the 119th Congress.”

On Friday, just hours before the government was set to shut down, GOP Rep. Nicole Malliotakis of New York expressed frustration with Johnson over his “unacceptable” lack of communication.

"I don't know what's going on and really that's part of the problem,” Malliotakis told reporters on Capitol Hill. “The fact that there is zero communication from leadership to the membership, it’s very frustrating. Something should change before Jan. 3 here."

Axios reported that fellow GOP Reps. Tim Burchett, Victoria Spartz, Andy Biggs, Troy Nehls, and Josh Brecheen are also undecided on who to vote for.

And Rep. Thomas Massie is a firm no.

"I don't plan to enter it as a negotiation. I plan to just not vote for him,” the Republican from Kentucky told CNN, saying there is nothing Johnson can do to earn his vote.

Democrats, meanwhile, are not going to bail Johnson out.

" There will be no Democrats available to save him, or the extreme MAGA Republicans from themselves,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said on MSNBC on Sunday, adding that Johnson’s job is at “risk.”

It's unclear who, if anyone, will challenge Johnson for the speaker role.

Republicans have floated Musk as a possible speaker—which would be a lot for Musk to take on as he has never been a legislator and already has a big job as Trump’s co-president.

But even if there is no one challenging him for the job, if just two Republicans hold firm against voting for Johnson, then there will be no winner and the House will have to keep voting until someone can amass a majority of votes. In 2023, it took 15 rounds of voting for Kevin McCarthy to win the gavel. And in October 2023, the House was in a state of paralysis for 22 days after now-former Rep. Matt Gaetz ousted McCarthy from the role without any plan of who to replace him with—a chaotic mess that ended with Johnson rising from relative obscurity to become speaker.

If Republicans can't coalesce around someone on Jan. 3, when the new Congress is set to be sworn in, the House could devolve into chaos. The legislative body is powerless without a speaker, and if Republicans don't figure it out by Jan. 6, then the House can't call a joint session to certify Trump's 2024 win.

Politico reported:

Congress is legally required to convene on Jan. 6 to certify the election results. But without a speaker, the House won’t be able to establish rules governing how it operates. And members who would need to vote on any successful objection can’t be sworn in until after those rules are adopted.

No one really knows if Republican chatter about Johnson’s future is just bellyaching or real grievance.

But either way, the chaos within the GOP ranks is not a good sign for the party’s ability to govern next year.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

5 Reasons Barack Obama Isn’t George W. Bush

October’s jobs report — which estimated that 271,000 Americans found work last month — left Republicans befuddled or dredging up statistics that they did not know existed a few months ago, mostly showing Baby Boomers are finally able to retire.

After years of demanding, “Where are the jobs?” we’re in the middle of what could be the second best year for job creation of this century — after 2014. This relative boom in employment has come after taxes have risen on the rich and as over 17 million Americans have gained health insurance through the Affordable Care Act.

Still, Republican candidates for president are torn.

Most of them think America should go back to 2008 before all of Obama’s economic stimulating, health insuring, and regulating of Wall Street ruined everything. Others think it is 2008 with America’s economy, foreign policy, and image cratering around the world. Only Donald Trump seems to agree that both now and 2008 were terrible. Apparently the billionaire racist would like to bring America back to the mid-1980s, when our deficit was skyrocketing and we were about to face a record stock market crash. (By the way, Trump was trumpeting a slightly different varietal of his xenophobia as he blasted Reagan in the 1980s. But back then his target was the Japanese.)

Regardless, Republicans are all running for president based on the premise that Barack Obama is a failure on the magnitude of George W. Bush.

This argument makes sense to Republican voters, who tend to shield themselves from science, facts, and basic anatomy lessons. But it is simply insane to anyone else.

In early November 2007, Bush’s Gallup approval rating was 32 percent. At this comparable moment in his presidency, Barack Obama’s approval is at 49 percent, reaching toward the 50 percent mark he hasn’t hit since just after his re-election.

Eventually, Republicans will have to speak to people who think an America that’s safer, stronger and has better access to health care than at any time in our existence in history isn’t all that bad. To prepare them, here are a few charts that show clearly why Barack Obama isn’t George W. Bush.

1. Job Growth under Obama has come entirely from the private sector. Job growth under W. came entirely from the public sector.

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Click to enlarge

These charts from The Washington Post‘s Philip Bump reveal that George W. Bush was a much better socialist than Barack Obama.

2. Unlike W., Obama has made extraordinary leaps toward making America energy independent.

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A lot of those gains have come from increased oil drilling and fracking. But thanks to the green energy revolution sparked by Obama’s Stimulus, America’s solar industry now exists and is growing like “kudzu,” explains Politico‘s Mike Grunwald, who wrote the seminal book on how the Obama Adminstration prevented a depression while remaking our economy.

3. People are actually gaining health insurance under Barack Obama.

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Now Republicans may think this is bad thing. But many Americans actually prefer 17.6 million people gaining health insurance to 7.9 million losing coverage.

4. The deficit is actually falling under Barack Obama as government spending is growing at the slowest rate since the 1950s.

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Click to enlarge

The deficit just hit an 8-year low. As the creator of these charts — OurFuture.org‘s Dave Johnson — notes, government spending shouldn’t be this low. Not when we could be borrowing money at incredibly low interest rates and rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. But it is. So attacking the guy who cut the deficit every year of his presidency to the guy who blew the surplus to deliver the first decade without any net job growth since the Depression, probably isn’t a great idea.

5. Barack Obama hasn’t had any 9/11s yet.

Click to enlarge

I hope I didn’t jinx us. I know this is a horrible thing to brag about, and President Obama never would. But with Jeb Bush making the ridiculous boast that his brother “kept us safe,” we should consider this a key metric.

We should also consider this:

There are plenty of reasons to criticize President Obama. But as usual, none of them are heard from Republicans.

For instance, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan are definitely disasters — as they were when Obama came into office. The difference is only a few Americans are dying in these disasters each year, rather than the dozens of casualties a year that the president inherited in 2009.

But by almost every measure, America is better positioned now than it has been in this century. Of course, that leaves us with much to improve. Yet Republicans should try to understand that comparing the guy who dug us into a ditch to the guy who dug us out makes them appear craven and delusional. Which is possibly why the Republican base enjoys it so much.

‘Checkbook’ Websites Shine Light On State Spending

By Jenni Bergal, Stateline.org (TNS)

WASHINGTON — Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel was mortified when a consumer watchdog group last year gave his state a D-minus for transparency in providing online access to information on government spending.

So he decided to do something about it.

In December, Mandel’s office launched a user-friendly, cutting-edge financial transparency website that this year earned Ohio the only A-plus in a national review of state websites that tell the public how state government spends taxpayer money.

Every state now runs some kind of public accountability — or “checkbook” — site. The goal is to increase transparency and accountability. But while many states have been ramping up their efforts to make their sites accessible and comprehensive, some still have a long way to go. Eighteen states were graded between C and F in an annual evaluation of the sites this year by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG).

State checkbook websites vary considerably. Some are easy to use and provide lots of information with one click, making it easy for users to unearth individual payments to a person or company. Others are difficult to navigate or don’t contain as much information.

“There is a lot of variation. If you were to compare Ohio with Alaska or Idaho, you’d see huge differences in how user-friendly it is,” said Phineas Baxandall, a senior analyst at U.S. PIRG, which published this year’s ratings in March.

Every year, states spend hundreds of billions of dollars contracting with private vendors and nonprofits, handing out subsidies, such as tax credits, to companies to spur development and making other expenditures. States created the checkbook websites to open up information about that spending to the public. The sites tell taxpayers who is getting the money, and what for.

“It’s extremely important because you have a new set of eyes on this information, not just those of someone in government,” said LaVita Tuff, a policy analyst at the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes open government.

State financial officials say that checkbook websites can help save money by identifying inefficiencies and reducing the amount of time spent by staff filling information requests. Posting contract information on the websites can result in more competitive bidding and lower bids. For example, interested vendors might see that they could win a contract by offering a lower price, and state agencies might see that they could consolidate contracts to get a better deal.

Massachusetts saved $3 million by eliminating paper, postage and printing expenses related to information requests by state agencies and paperwork from vendors, according to U.S. PIRG. Texas was able to renegotiate its copier machine lease and save $33 million over three years. And in South Dakota, a reporter used the website to launch an investigation into subsidies that led to the state saving about $19 million by eliminating redundancies.

“I think these websites are very important,” said Kinney Poynter, executive director of the National Association of State Auditors, Comptrollers and Treasurers. “More transparency provides better information for all of those involved, whether they be citizens, contractors or legislative bodies.”

The U.S. PIRG report, in its sixth year, evaluates and grades states on their online transparency initiatives and how well they provide access to spending data. It examines whether checkbook sites offer comprehensive, one-stop, one-click access to users and make large sets of data easy to download.

A growing number of states are doing a better job, the report found. Fourteen got an A this year, up from eight last year. Louisiana and Illinois were among those that got bumped up.

Other states that made strides included Colorado, which got a B-plus after it re-launched its portal, now easier to use, and Kansas, which vaulted from a D-minus to a B by overhauling its site to make information more accessible and easier to download.

Connecticut, which got an A for the first time this year, recently launched OpenCheckbook, an easy to use, comprehensive site that allows users to search real-time information about payments to vendors, nonprofits and others.

“You not only have direct access to micro and macro information about the operation of state government, but you can search it, compare it, trend it and download big data sets,” said State Comptroller Kevin Lembo, a Democrat. “I’d like to think that we’re pushing the envelope in this area.”

Lembo said that because government officials “like to keep information close,” checkbook websites are especially important for transparency.

“We don’t like other people telling us we’re doing things wrong,” he said. “The result of pulling information in and holding it tight is that public confidence continues to erode.”

Lembo said he was so pleased with OpenCheckbook, which was paid for with existing funds in his budget, that last month he launched OpenBudget, a new feature that will let users compare what was budgeted to what was actually spent.

But not all states have improved their websites enough, according to the U.S. PIRG report.

Fifteen got a C or a D. And California, Alaska and Idaho were graded an F in 2014 and again in 2015. Two of the three don’t have a central one-stop database for searching or viewing details on spending, the report found. Not one of the three provides information on economic development subsidies.

“These three are not user-friendly,” said U.S. PIRG’s Baxandall, who co-authored the report. “It’s like finding a needle in a haystack.”

Photo: Catch up on your state government. RikkisRefuge Other via Flickr

The Gingrich-Adams Lesson

WASHINGTON — Let us now praise Newt Gingrich. Yes, Newt Gingrich.

There he was, the scourge of Big Government, on the op-ed page of The New York Times Wednesday calling for a doubling of the National Institutes of Health budget. “It’s irresponsible and shortsighted, not prudent, to let financing for basic research dwindle,” he wrote, noting that government investments in preventing and curing disease could save the government money in direct health care costs.

Gingrich aficionados know that this is not a new position for him. He’s always favored large-scale spending on medical research, and the former Speaker said he was proud that he and President Bill Clinton agreed on doubling NIH funding in the 1990s.

But his argument raises a larger issue that is clouded by the very anti-government rhetoric that Gingrich and his conservative allies regularly deploy: Throughout our history, the federal government has been one of the country’s most productive investors — in our economy, in research and development, and in the future. Talking about all of Washington’s spending as if it were waste or assuming that private investment is always more productive than public investment is simply wrong, as Gingrich’s own praise for the NIH acknowledges.

Those of us on the progressive side can muddle this point ourselves when we re-label every government expenditure we favor as an “investment.” We can always find ways of defending this habit. For example, public spending on education can fairly be called “an investment in human capital,” even if that’s a rather ugly phrase. Food stamps can be similarly characterized since hungry kids tend to learn less in school.

Nonetheless, I’d be happy to see liberals make a bargain with conservatives: a promise of more restraint about using the word “investment” in exchange for an end to rhetorical broadsides against government that never acknowledge how constructive government spending can be.

My favorite unsung president understood this. In his remarkable and prophetic First Annual Message to Congress in 1825, John Quincy Adams explained how energetic federal action could advance the common good. “Roads and canals, by multiplying and facilitating the communications and intercourse between distant regions and multitudes of men, are among the most important means of improvement,” Adams wrote. “But moral, political, intellectual improvement are duties assigned by the Author of Our Existence to social no less than to individual man.”

Government, he said, could undertake “the progressive improvement of the condition of the governed” by “promoting the improvement of agriculture, commerce, and manufactures, the cultivation and encouragement of the mechanic and of the elegant arts, the advancement of literature, and the progress of the sciences, ornamental and profound.” Adams should be honored as the father of the space program, since he proposed the establishment of our first astronomical observatory.

He lost to Andrew Jackson in 1828, but in his single term, Adams delivered. “By 1826,” Daniel Walker Howe wrote in “What Hath God Wrought,” his history of the period, “the federal government had become the largest entrepreneur in the American economy.”

Journalistic conventions require me to say at this point that our younger daughter (our family’s one scientifically minded member) interned at NIH and plans to do so again. But my point is not primarily about NIH, much as I admire its work, but about following the logic of Gingrich’s argument. He notes that “government is unique” because “It alone can bring the necessary resources to bear.”

There are public goods, including pure and experimental research, in which private industry simply won’t invest, on the prudent grounds that there are no obvious or immediate financial returns. One way to promote public investment is to find new ways to ensure that when government-led scientific efforts eventually lead to private gain, taxpayers get a proper share of the profits, which can be used to support further research.

Fiscal mavens have also suggested that the federal government divide its budget between investment or capital spending and operating spending. Of course we will argue fiercely about which programs belong in which part of the budget. But when Congress can’t even pass transportation bills, such a mechanism might remind us that concern for the next generation encompasses not just how much debt we leave them but also how much we invest today in the world they will inherit.

“The spirit of improvement is abroad upon the earth,” Adams declared 190 years ago. One of government’s most noble purposes is to fulfill our obligation to keep that spirit alive.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne.

Photo: Political Graveyard via Flickr

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Smart. Sharp. Funny. Fearless

House Republicans Send Eviction Warning To Speaker Mike Johnson

5 Reasons Barack Obama Isn’t George W. Bush

‘Checkbook’ Websites Shine Light On State Spending

The Gingrich-Adams Lesson

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