Republican members of the House of Representatives emerged from their caucus meeting on Wednesday with their moods bolstered by the successful retention of their majority – but with clear signs that a post-election unity period may be short-lived.
There’s clearly no appetite among the GOP’s party elders for another drawn-out leadership fight similar to the one that consumed the party in the fall of 2023, or the more than a dozen votes required to elect Kevin McCarthy as speaker at the beginning of that same year.
But that isn’t likely to stop the party’s rowdy and camera-ready rank and file members, who indicated to reporters on Wednesday that Speaker Mike Johnson had yet to consolidate the kind of support he would need to avert such a conflict in January.
“I’m sure…yeah, I think there will be some opposition [to Johnson],” Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna told reporters as she departed the meeting. She declined to name any possible challengers to the speaker, or say whether or not she’d be supporting Johnson on a secret ballot.
She and other members including Marc Molinaro described a jovial, light-on-policy vibe in Wednesday’s meeting, which was attended by President-elect Donald Trump and members of his incoming administration, including Elon Musk, who is set to lead a likely White House advisory council called the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE.
“Elon won’t go home. I can’t get rid of him. Until I don’t like him,” Trump said, jokingly, according to members in the room. He would also joke that he planned to poach a few more members from the chamber for his Cabinet, a prospect GOP leadership has looked at with chagrin.
Molinaro, who recently conceded his House race in New York, told reporters of the president’s remarks: “The President was relaxed and funny today, and it was refreshing… He was being funny. I think that we all spent far too much time [parsing his words].”
But while Paulina Luna predicted that Johnson would suffer “less” defections than McCarthy did on the secret ballot, she still expected that the speaker would see some support drop off. She hinted that Johnson could do much to earn back trust with backbenchers by negotiating with them on House rules for the upcoming term.
[I]t’s a big game of trust, and there’s not a lot of trust in Washington,” said Paulina Luna. “So hopefully, though, everyone can unify behind the President’s agenda.”
House members will convene at the beginning of next year to select a new speaker for the chamber; traditionally, the two parties determine their respective nominees in private conference meetings like the one Wednesday.
In 2023, however, Republican backbenchers mounted a resistance to the confirmation of McCarthy, who had previously won his party’s private ballot. The result was an embarrassing dragged-out fight, after which McCarthy prevailed through sheer attrition.
He’d go on to last less than a year in the job, eventually ousted by a handful of conservative members voting with the chamber’s Democratic minority in unison to unseat him. Johnson was installed after the rise and fall of several alternatives, including Jim Jordan, Steve Scalise and Byron Donalds, only to face another attempt to unseat him led by Marjorie Taylor Greene the following year.
Greene’s bid to kick Johnson out of the speaker’s chair over his support for Ukraine aid was defeated when Democrats, who supported the Ukraine aid package too, voted to protect the GOP speaker.
Thomas Massie was the lone House Republican supporting that second bid to oust Johnson alongside Greene. He declined to say on Wednesday how he’d vote in the speaker’s race, but blasted the speaker for holding a “neocon” worldview and Johnson’s reversal on support for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which libertarians and progressives have argued constitutes severe government overreach into individual privacy rights — Massie called the speaker’s flip-flop a “betrayal.”
