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When the House returns from recess next week, Speaker Mike Johnson is widely expected to resume his duties without immediately filing a motion to remove him.
Just such a motion to vacate the speaker's seat was filed against Johnson in March by Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. However, Green still has the motion as a “privilege,” and according to the rules, it would need to be voted on within two days.
Mr Green had vowed to press ahead with his challenge after Johnson announced a strategy earlier this month to provide $95 billion in aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. About two-thirds of that money went to Ukraine, an issue Greene called a “red line” to oppose the speaker.
Two of her colleagues said they would join Ms. Greene in such a vote, saying that if Democrats in all chambers voted similarly, they would give Ms. Greene enough money to defeat the speaker. expressed. Democrats did the same thing last fall when a motion to vacate the chair ousted the last Republican speaker, Kevin McCarthy. He had been in the position for less than nine months.
But this time, several Democrats have indicated they intend to frustrate Green & Co. by crossing the aisle and supporting Mr. Johnson when the vote comes. Democratic leaders are open to it, essentially repeating the strategy that enabled Johnson to pass the Ukraine portion of the aid bill earlier this month.
So Green may have missed the moment. Mr. Johnson raised his profile and won bipartisan praise for pushing the aid package to a vote across the House of Commons. He also has strong support in the Senate, where an absolute majority of Republicans voted in favor of aid on Tuesday. The package was signed into law by President Biden the next day.
But, as Green said, the existence of her motion serves as a warning. Ms Johnson needs to realize she is skating on thin ice, as she can make her vote count at any time.
And it's true, he should. A quick glance at the history of post-World War II Republican speakers reveals this.
The current state of House Republican politics is so volatile that something could happen at almost any time.
As Shakespeare wrote, “He who wears a crown rests his head with anxiety,” but in recent history that goes double for speakers who are also Republicans.
Johnson will be the sixth Republican to become speaker since 1994, when Republicans first won a House majority and elected their own speaker for the first time in 40 years. The hard truth is that all five before Johnson (McCarthy, Paul Ryan, John Boehner, Dennis Hastert, and Newt Gingrich) ended their terms with a relative degree of defeat or setback. And you have to go back to the mid-1920s to find a Republican chairman who voluntarily resigned in a moment of victory and moved on to another position.
There is also a history of hard landings.
The 30-year story began with Georgia's Gingrich, the first party member to win the gavel since the early 1950s and Dwight D. Eisenhower's presidency. Mr. Gingrich has been a backroom mob activist since arriving in the House in 1978, building a cadre of supporters until he won the party's second-most powerful position as minority leader in 1989. He quickly overtook party leader Robert Michel. Retirement is approaching.
In 1994, two years after Democratic President Bill Clinton took office, Gingrich organized a campaign around a 10-point agenda called the “Contract with America.” This provided a unifying message for the party's candidates, which flipped more than 50 seats to emerge as a majority.
Although Mr. Gingrich succeeded in restoring many of the speaker's powers, he repeatedly clashed with Mr. Clinton and even the Senate's Republican leadership. In 1997, his second Congress as speaker, he narrowly survived a mostly secret challenge from within his own leadership team. Then, in December 1998, just shy of his fourth anniversary in office, he was defeated by the entire House Republican conference.
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With Gingrich gone, the line of succession was no longer clear. At the time, the No. 2 Republican had no votes, and the No. 3 Republican declined to run. The chairman of the Appropriations Committee was nominated at the party convention, but he withdrew after being accused of infidelity in a magazine article.
His position was Deputy Chief Whip Hastert of Illinois. Like Johnson a generation later, Hastert was a relatively quiet member of the leadership and generally enjoyed goodwill from the public. Mr. Hastert served as chairman through the last two years of the Clinton administration and the first six years of President George W. Bush. However, after the Republicans suffered a landslide defeat in the 2006 midterm elections, which President Bush called a “smashing defeat,” he resigned voluntarily.
In fact, during those eight years, Mr. Hastert became the longest-serving Republican chairman in history. However, what remained of his brilliance after 2006 was lost when he went to prison for bank fraud stemming from paying hush money to a former student who admitted to sexual abuse decades earlier. It happened.
The next two Republican chairmen will be John Boehner, who was elevated to the job after Republicans took back the House in the 2010 “Tea Party” election. Mr. Boehner worked hard to finalize a budget deal with both Democratic President Barack Obama and the Democratic Senate. But his efforts alienated some in his ranks, who formed a rebel group known as the House Freedom Caucus in 2015. Mr. Beyner became increasingly exasperated by his intolerable predicament and resigned abruptly in October of that year.
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Again, the order of inheritance was not as clear-cut as it seemed. Respected Republican No. 2 Eric Cantor of Virginia lost the 2014 primary. Mr. McCarthy, who came in third, quickly ran aground over his comments in a television interview and lacked the votes to become speaker. The parties settled after Wisconsin Ways and Means Chairman Paul Ryan did not ask for the gavel but agreed to accept it.
Ryan, then just 45 years old and the party's youngest chair in nearly 150 years, had already been the party's vice presidential candidate in the 2012 election. But once Mr. Beyner took the job, he experienced similar infighting. Ryan also had a strained relationship with then-President Donald Trump, with whom he had a falling out during the fall 2016 campaign. In April 2018, Ryan said he would not serve another term as his party was losing its majority in the fall of that year, and he left the party.
more distant memories
Before the Republican Party was sentenced to 40 years as the minority party, several Republican speakers rose to the top primarily through their personal popularity among their colleagues. One was Joseph Martin of Massachusetts, who led his party in the House of Representatives for two brief periods of majority status after World War II. Both lasted a minimum of two years, with the first ending in 1948 with Democrat Harry S. Truman's surprise victory in the White House. Martin returned four years later, in 1952, when Eisenhower was elected president for the first time, but his career at the top was cut short by his presidency. Two years later, the party suffered a major defeat.
Prior to that, the last Republican chairman was Nicholas Longworth of Ohio, who died in 1931. Technically, he died as Speaker, but his party lost its majority before the next Congress convened and elected a Democrat to the position.
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Although Longworth served as chairman for just over five years, he was highly regarded during the era of Teddy Roosevelt (his father-in-law) and during the heyday of the Republican Party in the 1920s, and symbolized the prosperity of the Republican Party. Shortly after Longworth's death, in 1931, Congress authorized the construction of a new House building, which was named after him and still bears that name today.
His predecessor, Frederick Gillette of Massachusetts, also held the top job for less than five years. But when he left after the 1924 session, his party was still firmly in control and had just elected President Calvin Coolidge to a full term. Gillette himself moved to the Senate.
Longevity is not a characteristic of Republicans. The list of the 10 longest-serving speakers includes only one Republican (in the ninth slot). That speaker was Joseph G. Cannon of Illinois, notorious as the autocratic “Emperor's Cannon” for a two-year, three-term speaking career that ended with the party's historic defeat in 1910.
Democratic Party and Endurance
The Democratic Party also concluded its short speech period. In 1989, Texas Speaker Jim Wright resigned under pressure following revelations about a book deal that the House Ethics Committee deemed circumvented fundraising rules. Mr. Wright had been in the position for just over two years at the time. Longworth's successor, John “Cactus Jack” Garner of Texas, left office after just over a year to become Franklin Roosevelt's first vice president.
But in general, the balance between the Democratic Party's succession structure and regional politics, long known as the party's “Boston-Austin axis” (and vice versa), has helped provide stability.
On the list of the 10 longest-serving speakers, seven are Democrats. Most of them served in government during a period in which their party held a majority for 40 years. But the most recent Democrat is Nancy Pelosi, who remains a member of the House of Representatives and is also Speaker Emeritus of the House. She served less than one day in eight years from 2007 to 2011 and from 2019 to 2023, ranking her fifth on the longevity list.