“Members will be members”: House Dems grow tired of rogue colleagues ahead of Johnson removal vote
As Marjorie Taylor Greene moves forward with a plan to boot the second GOP-elected speaker in seven months, rank-and-file Democrats tell OUAH that they wish their freelancing colleagues would chill.
Before Hakeem Jeffries became the top House Democrat, he had a mantra: “Democrats are a coalition, not a cult.”
It’s one that’s been on display in the weeks since Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) filed a motion to vacate Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) in late March and her announcement on Wednesday morning that she would force a vote on the motion next week.
The sequel to the House’s successful try to remove former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) carries less intrigue after Jeffries and his top two lieutenants, House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) and House Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.), released a joint statement broadcasting their intention to support a procedural vote to kill Greene’s motion before it received floor consideration.
“The time has come to turn the page on this chapter of pro-Putin Republican obstruction,” the leaders said. “If she invokes the motion [to vacate], it will not succeed.”
Several House Democrats had been waiting for a signal from leadership on how to proceed, while others—including Reps. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) and Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.)—were outspoken about their intentions to block a motion to vacate before leadership made an official announcement, according to conversations with a half dozen members and aides this week.
Other members had hoped leadership would extract Republican concessions from Johnson, such as a commitment to prioritize bipartisan bills on the floor schedule, like legislation to extend the Affordable Connectivity Program over conservative messaging bills that will die in the Senate and have no chance of President Joe Biden signing them into law.
“I’ve said from the beginning I don’t think we give these things away for free,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told reporters Tuesday afternoon. “I do think that the vote on Ukraine aid has weighed heavily on many members of the caucus. I also think the fact that the person bringing the motion is Marjorie Taylor Greene, which has also felt like, ‘Who are we going to throw our support for?’ [and] is a rock and a hard place for a lot of members.”
Ocasio-Cortez added that she viewed the imminent motion to vacate as an opportunity for House Democrats to assert their priorities given the narrow majorities at play. (Democrats won a special election in Western New York on Tuesday, so Johnson can momentarily only lose one vote on partisan bills.)
“That’s a very delicate thing to negotiate,” she said. “But I think it’s something that we attempt to.”
Sources close to Jeffries dismissed the armchair quarterbacking and said that he could negotiate Democratic priorities at any time because of the House’s slim majority and inability to consistently bring bills to the floor under regular order.
“This is Hakeem putting a stake in the ground for sanity,” one person familiar with Jeffries’s thinking told OUAH. “This is him saying we should govern with regularity, even it means bailing out the other side.”
A senior House Democratic leadership aide told OUAH that members were discouraged from freelancing but that Jeffries is unbothered by it.
“Members will be members,” the aide said. “He embraces the exuberance of the caucus.”
But two House Democrats expressed frustration to OUAH with members getting out in front of leadership to negotiate in public and announce their individual intentions to save Johnson before the caucus came to a consensus. They both said Jeffries deserved the caucus’s trust because of how he’s effectively navigated each of the previous major moments of truth of this Congress—from McCarthy’s motion to vacate to government funding to the recent passage of an emergency national security funding package.
Spokespeople for Moskowitz and Suozzi did not respond to a request for comment.
In his statement, which dropped while House Republican leadership was holding their weekly press conference, Jeffries said his decision to effectively kill her efforts to remove Johnson before Election Day is part of his caucus’s efforts to push back against far-right extremism. (Another senior House Democratic leadership aide told OUAH the timing of the statement’s release was coincidental: “Our meeting ran over because there was a lot to discuss,” the aide said. “We sent the statement as soon as the meeting was over.”)
Greene, who has been unable to assemble a coalition in support of her motion beyond Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), responded to the House Democratic leadership’s statement within an hour and characterized their decision to prevent Johnson’s removal as an endorsement of his speakership.
She and Massie held an early-morning press conference that felt like a campaign speech for former President Donald Trump to announce her intention to trigger a removal vote. The two conservatives cited what they believed were four irredeemable betrayals. First, Johnson allowed a trio of short-term funding extensions to come to the floor to prevent a government shutdown. Then, he decided to package the 12 full-year funding bills into two “omnibus” measures instead of scheduling individual votes. Next, he voted against a provision that would require the government to obtain a warrant to spy on Americans. And finally, he supported the comprehensive foreign bill with $61 billion in Ukraine aid, which congressional conservatives oppose. (For added dramatic effect, Greene held up a “MUGA”—Make Ukraine Great Again—hat as she railed against the Washington establishment.) Each of these instances required Democratic support. And while bipartisanship is a necessity to governing in a divided Congress, cooperation with the other side is political blasphemy for members like Greene and Massie.
“I find it very satisfying that [House Democrats] are ready to vote for Mike Johnson,” she said. “And you want to know something? I want to see it happen.”
Greene said she hasn’t decided if she will continue to trigger votes if the first fails, as expected, and declined to name whom she would support to replace Johnson. Jeffries said House Democrats would take each vote as it comes when asked if his members would support a motion to table in perpetuity.
As for Johnson’s response to Greene’s announcement: “This motion is wrong for the Republican conference, wrong for the institution, and wrong for the country,” he said in a statement following her press conference.
The press has framed the House Democrats’ support for killing Greene’s motion as “saving” Johnson, an observation members bristled at.
Aguilar told reporters on Tuesday morning following a closed-door meeting that the caucus did not discuss the underlying motion to vacate and the procedural vote to dispense with it altogether.
“We’re not asking individuals to take a position that is opposed to their values. Each member is going to vote their district and their conscience, guided by the Constitution,” Aguilar said. “We would be inclined—and many members indicated that they would be as well—to table the motion to table the motion to put this behind us and move on.”
But some members like Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) still harbor distaste for Johnson after he led the movement to overturn the 2020 presidential election results as a backbencher and could be responsible for ensuring a peaceful transfer of power in January.
“There is a distinction not lost on me the role that Mike Johnson played in the lead up to January 6th,” Aguilar, who served with Lofgren on the committee former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) established to investigate the US Capitol attack, said. “We saw that in our work and it has not been forgotten by our members.”
That said, Lofgren added that she didn't want to see the House devolve into chaos as it did in the three weeks that legislative business ground to a halt while Republicans searched for a new speaker.
“[Lofgren] is a very distinguished member of the House Democratic Caucus, who, in those very remarks, made clear that she also is a team player,” Jeffries said Wednesday afternoon. “And you can ask her directly what that means in terms of how she ultimately decides to vote.”
It’s worth remembering that the House faces this mess because House conservatives exploited McCarthy’s well-publicized ambitions to be speaker to increase their power.
For proof, look no further than the rules package the House adopted last January, which set the chamber's governing parameters for the 118th Congress. The package included several changes affecting the budget and the authorization process for various federal programs, including the NDAA, which sets policy for the Pentagon. It also ended proxy voting—a pandemic-era practice that enabled members to vote on behalf of absent colleagues.
But perhaps the most notable change was the threshold to remove the speaker.
Under previous Democratic majorities, the motion to remove the speaker could only be offered if a party caucus of conference voted for its leader to do so; McCarthy agreed to remove this provision and allow any member to move to vacate the chair in order to secure conservative votes for his speakership.
“She is a legislative arsonist and she is holding the gas tank,” Aguilar said of Greene. “And Kevin McCarthy allowed that to happen. It’s not lost on anybody.”
Regardless of which party wins the House in November, members from both parties seem warm to raising the threshold in the next Congress.
In the meantime, the number-three House Democrat indicated his GOP colleagues were on their own for the remainder of this Congress.
“If they want, they have the ability to change the rules. We all voted against this Republican rule that would allow one person to bring it,” Aguilar said. “If they are concerned about the rules that they all voted for, then it is completely within their right to revisit that and to bring something to the House floor. If they want to make changes in a bipartisan way, I think they know where to find Leader Jeffries.”