Democrats and Republicans unite to save Speaker Mike Johnson

The House on Wednesday voted overwhelmingly to protect Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) from a conservative coup, torpedoing an effort by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) to oust the GOP leader from the top job for his willingness to cut deals with Democrats on weighty legislation.

The chamber voted 359-43-7 on a motion to table, or dismiss, Greene’s motion-to-vacate resolution, preventing the removal proposal from being considered. 

In an extraordinary move in the deeply divided House, 163 Democrats — more than three-quarters of their Caucus — voted to keep Johnson in power. And in a demonstration of the GOP’s support for Johnson, only 11 conservative Republicans voted to send Greene’s motion to the floor. The chamber erupted in boos on both sides of the aisle when Greene began reading her resolution.

The outcome was not a surprise. 

Democratic leaders had announced last week that they would protect Johnson from Greene’s removal gambit. But it dealt a major blow to the Georgia firebrand, who has alienated a vast majority of the GOP conference — including many like-minded Johnson critics — and, perhaps more significantly, bucked the position of former President Trump, who has gone out of his way to demonstrate his support for Johnson amid Greene’s removal threat. 

Highlighting that division, Trump on Wednesday praised Greene’s “spirit” but urged GOP lawmakers to vote to sink her resolution to unite against Democrats in a statement posted minutes after the vote had already taken place.

“[I]f we show DISUNITY, which will be portrayed as CHAOS, it will negatively affect everything!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. “Mike Johnson is a good man who is trying very hard.”

The vote means that Johnson, who won the gavel in October following the ouster of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), will remain in the top job heading into November’s elections — for now. Greene on Wednesday would not rule out a subsequent vote on Johnson’s ouster.

But the vote puts him in the precarious position of being a GOP Speaker propped up by Democrats, which could earn him the ire of conservatives who have already forecast that he won’t lead the party in the next Congress. 

In brief remarks delivered shortly after Wednesday’s vote, Johnson thanked his colleagues for their support.

“I appreciate the show of confidence from my colleagues to defeat this misguided effort,” he said. “That is certainly what it was.”

“As I’ve said from the beginning and I’ve made clear every day, I intend to do my job. I intend to do what I believe to be the right thing, which is what I was elected to do, and I’ll let the chips fall where they may,” he continued. “In my view, that is leadership.”

The vote came after Greene — joined by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who also backed Johnson’s ejection — had huddled with the Speaker for hours in his office early this week when the pair demanded changes to his leadership approach. The duo wanted assurances that Johnson would bring no more bills to the floor that lacked the support of a majority of the GOP conference. They also wanted to extract a promise that the Speaker would back no more funding for Ukraine. 

On Tuesday, Greene said the ball was in Johnson’s court to respond to those demands. Her move Wednesday to force a vote on his removal indicates he rejected them. 

“We tried to work a process with the Speaker and when it came very apparent yesterday that he wasn’t actually going to put these things into action, that was it,” she said. “It was like why are we gonna keep dragging this out? And so we decided to call the vote today.”

Greene had filed her initial motion-to-vacate resolution more than a month ago, after Johnson had championed legislation to fund the federal government through September. But she escalated the threat on Wednesday afternoon by forcing the proposal to the floor for consideration, which came as a surprise to many lawmakers in both parties after it appeared that the Georgia Republican was backing off her threat. 

“Everything that we had heard was that this wasn’t coming,” said Rep. Austin Scott (R-Ga.). “I’m a little shocked, to be honest with you, that it is.”

But the removal resolution had a very short shelf life. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) immediately motioned to table the measure, setting up the vote that killed it with vast Democratic support. 

Those dynamics marked a sharp departure from the successful vote to remove  McCarthy in October, which Democrats supported unanimously. But Democrats emphasized that their votes were not an endorsement of Johnson’s conservative track record, which includes efforts to ban abortion and deny gay rights, but reflected his willingness to cut bipartisan deals on big-ticket legislation — and their desire to deny Greene a victory. 

“Our decision to stop Marjorie Taylor Greene from plunging the House of Representatives and the country into further chaos is rooted in our commitment to solve problems for everyday Americans in a bipartisan manner,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said after the vote. “We need more commonsense and less chaos in Washington, D.C.”

The vote capped off a weeks-long saga over when — and at times, if — Greene would move to oust Johnson, which had emerged as a parlor game of sorts on Capitol Hill.

Greene filed her motion to vacate in March as the House was voting on a sprawling government funding bill, which the Georgia Republican opposed. The firebrand’s ire with Johnson grew more pronounced after he backed a measure to reauthorize the U.S.’s warrantless surveillance powers. And it hit a boiling point last month when the Speaker muscled through a foreign aid package that included billions of dollars in aid for Ukraine.

Those frustrations led Greene last week to vow to force a vote on Johnson’s ouster this week, putting a timeline on the highly anticipated reference after weeks of waffling.

But upon her return to Washington this week, Greene requested a meeting with Johnson and huddled in his office for hours on Monday and Tuesday, leading many to believe that she may be pulling back the reins on her very public ploy.

At the eleventh hour, Greene made a series of demands of Johnson as a final offramp for the ouster vote, including only bringing bills to the floor that have support from a majority of the GOP conference, a practice known as the Hastert rule, committing to not passing any additional aid for Ukraine; defunding special counsels, including Jack Smith, who is investigating former President Trump; and imposing a 1-percent spending cut across the board if Congress does not complete its regular appropriations process by Sept. 30.

When the Speaker did not give in to the requests — he insisted that his talks with Greene were “not a negotiation” — the Georgia Republican said she decided to plow ahead.

“We’re not going to have a House majority if we keep Mike Johnson,” she warned last week when vowing to bring her motion to the floor.