Politico has an article up this morning that summarizes my thinking: What if Mike Johnson is actually good at this? He was elected as the lowest common denominator Republicans could grudgingly agree to after exhausting themselves for weeks on the Speaker’s race. No one thought much of him, nor expected much from him.
But he’s now passed the federal budget and supplemental assistance for allies with strong majorities. He dared the FC to do anything about it, and they showed themselves powerless. He’s apparently gotten MTG to back off her motion to vacate without offering anything in the way of concessions. Such a contrast to McCarthy, who progressively caved more and more to the FC for it to ultimately profit him nothing. Johnson’s taken the risks and let the FC put up or shut up – well they haven’t shut up, but they certainly didn’t put up either.
He’s employing my old tactic for running things. “If you don’t like the way I did it, you do it.” No one else actually wants this job in this congress, and so no one will call him on that threat.
McCarthy’s big problem was that he really, really wanted the job, was willing to do or say anything to get it, and everyone around him knew that. Hell, everyone just watching that shit-show knew that. So the FC knew they had all the advantage, and that he’d give them anything they wanted.
Not being desperate gives you a lot of staying power, if you want to use it.
They voted against Johnson. It’s absolutely normal for the opposition party to do this. The vast majority of Democrats voting for a Republican speaker is what’s atypical, at best.
My take would be they knew Johnson would get enough votes from other D’s so they voted how they felt about him or how they expect their constituents would want them to vote. Most of them are in the more Progressive wing such as Ocasio-Cortez.
I imagine those Democrats voted against the motion to table because they think the Johnson has been a bad Speaker. For as much as he’s ultimately been willing to allow fairly “clean” votes on must-pass items like the federal budget, he’s also rammed through highly partisan measures like the Mayorkas impeachment. From their perspective, a motion to vacate might not be able to put someone better in the Speaker’s chair but they couldn’t do much worse.
Also, as mentioned, this was a procedural vote on a tabling motion so some of the Nays would signal “I want to force an up or down ‘hard’ vote”. So yeah, safe votes to brag about principle to their constituencies.
FWIW the nutjobs went into this themselves knowing they’d fail, just not exactly by how much.