A rare outbreak of sanity in Washington: House Speaker Mike Johnson will hang on to his job. Democrats say they’ll help defeat the GOP malcontents trying to oust Mr. Johnson, and to call this episode from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene a stupid and futile gesture would be unfair to Bluto.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and his leadership colleagues said on Tuesday they’ll vote to table Ms. Greene’s procedural move known as a motion to vacate the chair. “If she invokes the motion,” a Democratic statement said, “it will not succeed.” As California Rep. Pete Aguilar put it: Democrats have decided they don’t want to let Ms. Greene “dictate the schedule and the calendar.”
This is good news on the merits and will allow the House to work for the rest of the year, notably on bills to fund the government in 2025.
Ms. Greene predictably tweeted that “Mike Johnson is officially the Democrat Speaker of the House,” even as she and the GOP’s chaos caucus are the ones weakening the Republican majority. Mr. Johnson has the unenviable task of herding the narrowest Republican majority in modern memory, but a conference that hung together could at least extract discrete policy victories in spending bills.
But conservative policy victories aren’t the aim of Ms. Greene or her running mates, Reps. Thomas Massie and Paul Gosar. They have no candidate who could govern the House if Mr. Johnson departed, no agenda that can pass the lower chamber, and no plan for anything other than to disrupt the proceedings and use social media to raise money for their personal political brands.
“I have to do what I believe is right every day and let the chips fall where they may,” Speaker Johnson said on Tuesday, and most of the country will be relieved to skip another episode of House GOP failure theater.
Mr. Johnson was right to put his post on the line to pass a consequential weapons bill for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, and it looks like he’ll survive the gamble. The term for his handful of GOP critics with no fixed principles is Republicans in name only.
