Is Mike Johnson About To Be Dumped As House Speaker?

Over at RedState, our buddy Joe Cunningham has the story of one of the most irritating things ever…

Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has filed a motion to vacate the Speaker’s chair, sources told RedState Friday morning.

The motion comes after the House plans to vote for a government funding bill that is leaving many conservatives frustrated. However, it’s unclear if the motion will pass. According to speculation, it was a motion to vacate the chair against Speaker Mike Johnson, who has been caught in the middle between conservative and moderate Republicans over policies that include foreign aid to Ukraine and securing the southern border.

This is a reaction to the fact that the Speaker, Mike Johnson, has presented the House with a $1.2 billion omnibus spending bill chock full of waste and active horrors within its domestic spending. That bill passed, 286-134.

Conservatives warned Johnson that his speakership wouldn’t survive such a bill.

The problem is that conservatives are not a majority in the House of Representatives. They might be a majority within the Republican caucus, but conservatives do not have the ability to make a majority vote for anything on their agenda.

And this doesn’t change with a different speaker. It only changes with Republicans winning another 20-30 House seats and pulling together a real majority – not this three or four vote nothing they have now.

That victory is available, but there are conditions attached. The most obvious one is that the GOP is going to need to make a showing of organized leadership.

Clearly, this is not that.

Greene is a politician of conviction, and she’s owed respect for that. She’s acting on a well-founded belief that Republican leadership in the House cannot continue going along with a broken budget process which spits out continuing resolutions larded up with Democrat priorities which actively diminish the nation.

She isn’t alone in protesting the bill.

And the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, released a statement which was 100 percent true…

In the middle of the night, Congress released the text of a $1.2 trillion, earmark-filled spending bill that bankrolls sanctuary cities, corrupt NGOs, and Biden’s open border policies. Lawmakers are using arbitrary deadlines and shutdown politics to extort the American people and force lawmakers to vote for a bill they don’t have time to read. The text may have been dropped under the cover of darkness, but nothing can hide the bill’s unbelievable abuse of taxpayer dollars and continuation of Biden’s dangerous border crisis.

Conservatives were told that the days of omnibus spending bills shrouded in secrecy were over. But this process and the bill it produced are indistinguishable from typical Swamp behavior that’s taken our economy and country to the brink of disaster. If we want to change Washington, we have to start by breaking this cycle and rejecting this indefensible bill.

It’s an intolerable situation. It could cost Johnson his speakership, and if it does the result would be unfortunate, and wholly negative, as the House could well find itself without a Speaker until after the 2024 election. But Johnson came to power on the promise that there would not be any more omnibus spending measures only to break that promise this week.

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He can argue, rightly, that he has no choice. That a government shutdown in an election year would break the Republicans’ chances of winning House, Senate and presidential races. That’s arguably correct. But where the argument fails is against the counter-question, which is what good does it do to have a Republican majority if it doesn’t accomplish Republican goals?

Johnson doesn’t want to inflict this omnibus spending bill on the country. He doesn’t have to votes to get a better deal. Neither will his successor, if it turns out he’s removed.

And he’ll need Democrats to save him if this motion goes forward to a vote, which means Johnson’s hard line on wasted money to Ukraine would be a necessary sacrifice.

Everything about this is bad. The cause, the action, and the effect. It’s a train wreck in motion, and a damned shame.

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