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\n

Mike Johnson managed to avoid a drawn-out battle for the speakership on Friday. His headaches are just getting started.<\/p>\n

While Johnson ultimately secured enough votes to remain speaker on the first ballot \u2014 after two members switched their votes after further lobbying from Johnson and phone calls with President-elect Donald Trump \u2014 the aftermath of his victory made it clear that conservatives see this as a tentative truce.<\/p>\n

Hardliners said they have certain expectations for the speaker going forward, and signaled that forcing a vote to oust him is on the table if Johnson doesn\u2019t meet them. The newly adopted rules package requires the support of nine GOP members, up from the current threshold of one, to trigger an ouster vote.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s always going to be there. I think our founders wanted it there for a reason as a check,\u201d said Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.),who backed Kevin McCarthy\u2019s ouster last year, when asked by Blue Light News if a motion to vacate is on the table. \u201cI really hope it never has to be used again. But we’ll see.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet Johnson\u2019s allies are hoping the speaker\u2019s race is an early glimpse of things to come \u2014 that Republicans will ultimately get in line on party priorities, even if the process is messy and chaotic. And they\u2019re encouraged by Trump\u2019s repeated support for the speaker, after the incoming president made it clear he\u2019s willing to lobby members and keep them in line, even when Johnson isn\u2019t able to do so.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just hope President Trump pounds them into submission,\u201d said Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.).<\/p>\n

Regardless, the speakership episode is a reality check about what the next two years have in store for Johnson. His margin is only set to shrink in the near-term as some members leave for positions in the Trump administration, and he can currently only afford to lose one GOP vote on partisan legislation. He\u2019ll need near, if not complete, unity to pass Trump\u2019s agenda on the border, energy and taxes \u2014 or anything else. If he relies on Democrats to move must-pass items like spending legislation now that the GOP has total control of Congress, he\u2019ll risk a severe backlash from his right flank.<\/p>\n

Johnson\u2019s critics are already drawing lines in the sand. Eleven members of the Freedom Caucus, who comprise the group\u2019s board, circulated a letter to all of their colleagues just as Johnson won the speaker\u2019s vote. It laid out what they believe Johnson should have agreed to and what they want to see in legislation moving forward, including lowering inflation, ending stock trading by members of Congress and other provisions.<\/p>\n

And they notably included an indirect salvo at Johnson\u2019s leadership in the letter, saying that \u201cthere is always room to negotiate on so-called \u2018leadership\u2019 positions under the rules.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.), one of the signatures on the letter, demurred when it was suggested that it seemed like a warning: \u201cIt is what it is.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s there for a reason. It\u2019s about accountability. Mike has laid out a plan and a vision and now he\u2019s got to execute it,\u201d Ogles said about early mentions of speaker-ousting measures, known as the motion to vacate. \u201cAnd if he doesn\u2019t, you have \u2026 some members that will be willing to pull the pin on the hand grenade.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), who had declined to publicly support Johnson up until the speakership vote, brushed off questions about the motion to vacate immediately after the speaker\u2019s vote but hinted at \u201cconsequences\u201d if Congress couldn\u2019t deliver on certain priorities.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s make no mistake about it. There will be things that are, in fact, red lines that we need to deliver. We can have no more of the nonsense that happened before Christmas,\u201d Roy said.<\/p>\n

The warnings are a flashback to the McCarthy era. Though the former speaker managed to win the speaker\u2019s gavel after 15 ballots, eight Republicans joined Democrats to boot him just 10 months later. Many of those rebels said it was because of his handling of government funding, though the Californian\u2019s allies believe some, namely former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), just had a personal ax to grind.<\/p>\n

Johnson has a better relationship with his right flank than McCarthy, as someone who was widely known as a conservative himself before taking the gavel. And he spent the back half of the year working to shore up his relationship with hardline conservatives after a failed ouster effort against him last May. He focused the conference largely on GOP messaging bills, criss-crossed the country helping reelect his members and put some of his critics on key panels, including the Intelligence Committee.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t want to sound the alarm. This is not what it was after Speaker McCarthy was vacated. That situation has built lines of communication because we don\u2019t want to go through that again,\u201d said Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.).<\/p>\n

Jennifer Scholtes and Nicholas Wu contributed to this report.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mike Johnson managed to avoid a drawn-out battle for the speakership on Friday. His headaches are just getting started. While Johnson ultimately secured enough votes to remain speaker on the first ballot \u2014 after two members switched their votes after further lobbying from Johnson and phone calls with President-elect Donald Trump \u2014 the aftermath of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4426"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4426\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}