The Motion to Vacate Mike Johnson Seems Pretty Darn Motionless

It wasn’t looking good for Mike Johnson. Marjorie Taylor Greene, his chief antagonist, was threatening his job—and predicting others would join her cause. As he navigated the foreign aid package through his narrow House last week, with Democratic support and Joe Biden’s backing, the Georgia representative seemed to be right: Hardliners, including some who forced out Kevin McCarthy, were loudly registering their disapproval with Johnson. “It is surrender,” Matt Gaetz said of the speaker’s foreign aid plan. And Donald Trump, who had met with Johnson only days earlier in a show of support, seemed to waver last week as the potential groundswell grew: “We’ll see what happens with that,” the former president told reporters at the time.

The threat to his gavel isn’t gone, but Johnson may be able to breathe a little easier: So far, only Thomas Massie and Paul Gosar have joined Greene’s motion to vacate—and even some who are frustrated with Johnson have indicated they aren’t mad enough to get into another brawl over the matter. “I think a motion to vacate right now would almost certainly turn the House over to Democrats, and that’s why I won’t support it,” said Gaetz, who led the McCarthy ouster. “I think we do the best we can with the speaker that we have…and have a contest to see who the conference can coalesce around as the best option in November,” added Freedom Caucus Chair Bob Good.

Making matters worse for Greene: Though Steve Bannon claimed that Trump was “furious” with Johnson for pushing through aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, the former president himself maintained Monday that he supports the speaker—a sign, it seems, that he also wants to avoid a messy battle for the gavel in the lead-up to the election. “I think he’s a very good person,” Trump told right-wing radio host John Fredericks Monday, after spending the day in a New York courtroom. “I think he’s trying very hard. And again, we’ve got to have a big election.”

Johnson, the ex-president said, had “stood very strongly with me on NATO,” of which Trump is a critic, and had followed his advice to structure Ukraine aid partly as a loan. “We have a majority of one, OK?” Trump said. “It’s not like he can go and do whatever he wants to do.”

Greene, a leading MAGA acolyte in the House, continues to show Johnson less understanding than her party leader: “Mike Johnson’s leadership is over,” she said Sunday on Fox News after the $95 billion aid package passed, including the Ukraine aid she said would cost him his job. “He needs to do the right thing and resign and allow us to move forward in a controlled process.”

“If he doesn’t do so,” Greened added, “he will be vacated.”

By whom, though? Trump doesn’t seem to want him gone, which indicates that most who take their marching orders from him won’t, either. And even if she does add to her numbers, many Democrats have already signaled they would throw Johnson the lifeline they wouldn’t for his predecessor: “He deserves to keep his job till the end of his term,” progressive Ro Khanna said. Again, that doesn’t mean Johnson is completely in the clear; he still leads a chaotic conference in which a single member could put his job on the line. But after all of this, it could be Greene who finds herself all alone in the MAGAverse—facing mockery even from conservative media that has long propped her up: “The score in Congress,” the New York Post jeered after the aid package passed, “is now ‘Jewish space lasers lady 0, common sense 1.’”

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