How Mike Johnson doused a GOP dumpster fire

Yahoo

23-05-2025

Speaker Mike Johnson bet it all on 'one big, beautiful bill.' With a heavy assist from President Donald Trump in the final hours, he delivered.
The bill's House passage early Thursday morning was at least temporary vindication for a series of strategic decisions championed by the Louisiana Republican — chiefly, that packaging a massive suite of tax cuts together with other sundry GOP priorities would make it easier to move ambitious legislation with his tiny governing majority.
Johnson had to battle for months with factions of his own conference, and with the Senate, at multiple key junctures. But he plowed through and moved a host of Trump's campaign promises closer to the president's desk after a final flurry of negotiations and a rare, overnight session on the House floor.
'There was a few moments over the last week when it looked like the thing might fall apart,' Johnson told reporters shortly after the vote, adding he visited the House chapel to pray on it.
In essence, Johnson spent months fighting fires. His job, in conjunction with other GOP leaders, was to manage flare-up after flare-up as various groups inside the House ranks battled over trillions in tax cuts and politically explosive reductions to social safety-net spending.
Johnson might not have succeeded in putting out every blaze, but he kept them from growing into a conflagration that even Trump couldn't extinguish. He'll probably have to do it again later this year after the Senate sends back revisions to the megabill.
The outlook for the legislation looked bleak throughout the past week, as various bands of holdouts resisted coming aboard.
On Wednesday night, for instance, Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) — a conservative hard-liner — suggested the bill would potentially 'have to fail' on the floor for leaders to realize it should be reworked. Moderate Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.) said he was 'not happy' with changes the conservatives had secured to more quickly eliminate clean-energy tax credits he'd been working to defend.
Neither ended up voting for the bill. Davidson was one of two House Republicans who voted 'no' Thursday, and Garbarino missed the vote.
But Johnson had spent the week peeling off almost every other member — moving methodically between holdout groups, patiently working through a seemingly endless litany of issues.
On Monday night, after tentatively approving some key demands from fiscal hawks who had delayed a key Budget Committee vote, Johnson faced ire from the other side of the conference in a closed-door meeting.
Several Republicans in the Main Street Caucus told Johnson they were frustrated that he was once again appearing to entertain politically explosive cuts to Medicaid — cutting the federal share of funding to states, known as FMAP — after the speaker had seemed to rule them out.
Some of the centrist-leaning Republicans in the room pressed the speaker to publicly take the proposal off the table for good this time — and send a message to the hard right not to push further.
Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio), a former Trump aide, spoke up to air his own irritation with how Johnson had managed the whole megabill process.
Indeed, the speaker and his team's tactics had grated on many GOP members. They believed he had unwisely delayed settling the biggest battles until the final hours and had given disingenuous assurances to some at-risk Republicans that the Senate would intervene and block some of the bill's most unpalatable provisions.
Johnson jotted down notes as members spoke. A few minutes later, as he walked back to his office, he told reporters, 'FMAP has not been on the table — it's been off the table for quite some time.'
He had extinguished another fire. But it was time for Johnson to call in backup.
The next morning, Trump made a rare journey to the drab, poorly-lit Capitol basement to make his wishes clear. It was uncertain if he'd stanch the disputes or toss more fuel onto them.
The visit came just a few days after the hard-liner rebellion had blocked the bill in the Budget Committee vote over concerns that the megabill would add trillions of dollars to the national debt.
Before he even walked into the meeting, Trump appeared to be looking to stoke conflict — dismissing the hard-liners' deeply held beliefs.
'I'm a bigger fiscal hawk — there's nobody like me,' he told reporters alongside Johnson, in response to a question about some of the hard-right concerns.
Inside the meeting, the president took on a kind of Rodney Dangerfield persona, House Republicans said — telling barbed jokes at lawmakers' expense.
He laced into the fiscal hawks and 'SALT Republicans' pushing for the expansion of a key tax break — calling out 'grandstanders' by name who sought to stand in the way of his 'one big, beautiful bill.'
'He insulted several people with a great intensity,' said one bewildered House Republican, who like others was granted anonymity to speak candidly about private meetings and conversations.
Trump's tongue lashings and Johnson's hardball approach to muscling the bill through this week rattled some even long-time GOP lawmakers. It was clear there was no room for dissent.
'I could never have imagined when I started in politics that we would have this kind of a scenario,' one House Republican said of the our-way-or-the-highway approach. 'But who else do we turn to, besides Johnson?'
Near the end, the speaker needed to douse one last blaze: The hard-line House Freedom Caucus was balking and pushing for concessions on Medicaid that other Republicans simply would not accept.
A White House meeting was arranged with the holdouts, and Johnson sat in with top lieutenants as Trump unleashed the fire hose — pressing Reps. Chip Roy of Texas, Andy Harris of Maryland and other hard-liners to vote for the bill.
'It was tough. There was no back and forth,' said one Republican briefed on the meeting. 'He let them have it.'
Johnson returned to the Capitol triumphant. 'The plan is to move forward as we expected,' he told reporters.
Roy and Harris then huddled through the night with White House officials including Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair and Legislative Affairs Director James Braid. The hard-liners pushed for, and said they secured, promises for executive orders to address Medicaid and other items on their wish list.
Meanwhile, as night turned to morning over the course of a nine-hour vote series, Johnson huddled one-on-one with several previously balking members on the floor.
Rep. Michael Cloud of Texas, a fiscal hawk who a few days earlier had said the bill 'fell short,' spoke to Johnson around 3 a.m. Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia, who won a key concession ending the taxation of gun silencers, sat with the speaker later in the morning.
And just before Republicans passed the massive bill a little before 7 a.m., the speaker and Miller spoke for several minutes, ending their conversation with a handshake.
Unlike several prior high-stakes votes during Johnson's speakership and predecessor Kevin McCarthy's, there were no dramatic scenes wrangling last-minute votes from the assembled hard-liners.
His team was confident the tough tactics had worked. 'They always fold,' one senior GOP aide said.