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Hi, I'm Tara Palmieri, Unpuck's senior political correspondent, and this is Somebody's Gotta Win. We are in a weird time right now in Washington. The Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, just passed a large foreign aid package with the help of Democrats. You would think this is a kumbaya moment, a moment of bipartisanship.
But more than 100 Republicans voted against the bill, and it's exposing very deep rifts in the party. If you want to see them for yourself, just look on Twitter, on cable news. There's lots of mudslinging. Marjorie Taylor Greene is calling for a motion to vacate against Johnson, who at one time was just like Marjorie Taylor Greene, a conservative malcontent who made the speaker's job very hard. Will she actually follow through on her threat and call for a vote?
She says she will. But when she does, will Democrats bail Johnson out after he passed one of their top agenda items? Or will they let him die on the vine and see it as an opportunity to make the case that Republicans are just not worthy of leadership in 2024? My sources tell me that Democrats are inclined to help him out. They actually like and trust Johnson more than the former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who lost his head a few months ago for doing a similar deal with Democrats.
They just couldn't trust McCarthy. To break it all down and make some predictions on the chaos ahead, I have Puck's congressional correspondent, Abby Livingston, on the line. Abby, thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. So how did we get here? It feels like we're in a coalition government, which is something we don't see in America ever.
And this was obviously after months of indecisiveness from Speaker Mike Johnson over whether to put the Ukraine bill on the floor. But he finally did it this weekend, right? And now we know his speakership is in jeopardy. Can you give the listeners a rundown of how we got to this place right now? Yeah, so...
Ukraine has been this very strange issue since the Russian invasion when it comes to the House of Representatives. And since this war began, I've lost track of time, but I guess it was 2022. It feels like a lifetime ago.
There's been a slow erosion of support within the Republican House conference. And this goes counter to the generation of Republicans who have been coming up and taking power from the 1980s Reagan Republicans. We've seen this isolationist
America first. J.D. Vance. They were like, we gave money when the war started. We're good now. Yeah. That's the thinking. So the neocons and the hawks have been growing increasingly frustrated. And I have to say, even before Kevin McCarthy was ousted, there were very strong concerns about Ukraine and not in the House. A small minority.
relatively small minority being able to block this from coming to the House floor. Now, that calculation was contingent on a speaker recognizing if he put it on the House floor, he would be in very serious jeopardy of losing his gavel, as you mentioned. And so this has been...
A very slow, grim conversation that's been in the background of everything else that's been going on on Capitol Hill. And there was a sense of hopelessness by December. And I was being prepared by sources on the Hill that we could see some very bad footage coming out of Ukraine. And in fact, we are. But there is some...
angst over how long it took Johnson to get to this point. Patrick McHenry said something to CNN along the lines over this weekend that this could have been passed in December. And the House GOP conference has been going through a lot of division and a lot of pain as this fight has been prolonged, not to mention many, many Ukrainians dying on the war front.
But it just seems like in the last couple of weeks, Mike Johnson made peace with this and did something we don't see often, which is he went ahead for it and he moved it. And he seems to know there are going to be consequences to this. So more Democrats than Republicans voted for this bill.
Absolutely. And the key thing to remember in all of this, the votes have always been there to pass this funding. It was the minority within the majority who wanted to block it from getting to the floor and threatening the speaker. But the ultimate tally was 311 votes for Ukraine, 112 against Ukraine.
All 112 were Republican. And within the Republican majority, it was 101 for, 112 against, which violates something we know in Washington to be called the Hastert Rule, which was named after the speaker from the early aughts who had a de facto, not literal rule that he didn't want to put anything on the House floor that didn't have the support of
a majority support of the majority. Because if you start passing too many bills with a minority of your party in a coalition with Democrats, that puts you on very treacherous political ground among Republicans. Interesting.
So you would think bipartisanship voters love this, but really Republicans are terrified right now, right? This is just so incredibly strange. Now, I come back to the point that you pointed out that coalition governments don't really work over here. And this if you told me that something like this.
could happen. If you told me six months ago, I would have laughed and thought that's like a very bad circa 2001 West wing spec script that somebody was circulating around Hollywood. It's just too fantastical. And yet it's happened. And I think that is a symptom of just how far the house of representative system has been pushed to the brink. But the other,
thing, I have to say Democrats and you've written well, you've written very insightfully about this. They clearly have a higher regard for Mike Johnson than Kevin McCarthy. But even today, I had Democrats saying genuinely nice things about Mike Johnson. It's very reluctant. That's probably a bad thing for him though, right? I had a senior House Democrat compare him to Indiana Jones and Indiana Jones in the last crusade and that he chose well and I had to go pull up that clip. But
The reason coalition governments don't really work over here is that we are back in recess. And I think it's a pretty safe assumption. The speaker is out fundraising to help defeat Democrats. And Hakeem Jeffries is out fundraising to take the gavel from the Republicans. So these things don't really feel sustainable. But I think that this was a significant issue. I think it was such a...
heartbreaking concept for a lot of Republicans that this was just one thing they could not do in the name of Trump and the isolationist caucus and just to get people off their back. I think the Republicans who went for this felt very sincerely about it and are ready to suffer the consequences. The political atmosphere is so toxic. How do you really work together when you're also killing each other half the time?
Absolutely, that's true. And I think that is exacerbated by 8,000% in this conference. It has gotten silly. It has gotten stupid. And...
It's not both sides. There are some inelegant arguments made by the Democrats. But what we're seeing out of the House Republican conference is just mayhem and it's mean spirited. And what is exceptional about this week is that the mean spiritedness is now turned on each other. We are seeing members fight on Twitter. I've used this comparison too many times, but I feel like this is.
Mean Girls, this was Katie versus Regina. And what we're experiencing today is just the burn book has been unleashed and mean high school is going wild. And so that is sort of how I see the House Republican conference right now. I had a senior House operative tell me today everything is painful.
What are you seeing on the internet that makes you think that? I mean, I saw one member say like, oh, Matt Gaetz is a pedophile, right? Like, I saw that. What else are you seeing that's really like remarkable to see intraparty fighting? Well...
Tony Gonzalez, a congressman in South Texas who is in a really tough primary fight. He's more of an establishment guy. He went on CNN yesterday and on Sunday and said that some in his party are some real scumbags. Yeah. Moreover, there's a battle royale type Twitter fight going on between Andy Barr, who I believe is from Kentucky, Corey Mills of Florida, and Eli Crane. We are seeing...
pent up outrage. And what has been expressed to me is that waiting period of four months from December on this has just allowed so much division. And now that it's being taken up now, it's mixed in with this FISA, which is about warrants for anti-terrorism efforts. The TikTok bill. Basically,
Basically, Mike Johnson pushed through a whole lot of controversial things all at once. And the conservative right is furious. But I still have sources in my ear saying...
All that aside, it took a lot of guts to do what he did. Okay. So it's basically the House Freedom Caucus, conservative right-wing MAGA going against the establishment, right? And it's kind of crazy because Mike Johnson was once the House Freedom Caucus, conservative discontent right alongside them. Maybe he wasn't as mouthy, but it was his role to really make life difficult for the speaker. And here he is.
almost falling on his sword because Marjorie Taylor Greene, our girl, kidding, she decides to pull the motion to vacate, casually known as the MTV around Washington, and says, I will, I mean, what exactly did she do? So she called for one, but it hasn't gone to a vote yet? We're in the waiting period to see what happens. She tabled it, right? Is that the word? Is it a tabling? What will happen?
What will happen... And I hope I get... I'm not a procedure expert, but... Neither am I, clearly. She did not fast track it. And so it is going to come up eventually. I assume it will. The vibe right now, which is always must be caveated with these things change sometimes even before these podcasts or stories get published. But...
Republicans seem to have a pretty good handle on the fact that if they decapitate their speaker again, it's going to be much worse than October. I refer to it today in our political newsletter letter as postured to go full on Lord of the Flies. And the other thing is Democrats seem they're very careful what they say and they don't want to make any mistakes.
clear, concrete promises, but they've seen posture to help Johnson out. And by help Johnson out, they mean have a few members vote present or not show up. So it lowers the majority number, right, for the Republicans. Like they wouldn't actually vote for Johnson on the floor.
They'll vote to table the effort to get him on, like, to keep it from going to the floor. And I think it would probably... My sense is it would probably not even be that close, that enough Democrats would step in that it wouldn't. I think it would be hard to watch them vote member by member for a Republican speaker. But... Right. So it seems...
more stable than you would think right now. But the question is, how long is that sustainable? I would think that the Democrats right now are just really racking their minds. Like, should we let them eat themselves? Should we let Johnson die on the vine? We got the thing that we wanted passed. There's not much else coming up except like
like another funding bill right in the fall. I mean, what is it to them if the Republicans just look like a bunch of losers that can't actually lead? Maybe they want to have another crazy Kevin McCarthy part two speaker defenestration. I don't know. I have not gotten the sense of bloodlust to take him out. I haven't either personally from my sources, but I just don't know if that's going to change and what the calculation is on that.
My sense at the time of McCarthy and McCarthy has portrayed it completely differently than my read of it, which was he views it as there was some sort of calculation that Democrats have learned their lesson of how bad this was and they'll never do it again.
My sense at the time was Democrats, Hakeem Jeffries walked into the room and the Democrats were all pretty much on the same page of throwing McCarthy out. And so it wasn't like Hakeem Jeffries made this huge decision. He read the room and it sounds like he personally supported where the room was.
Um, so there were years and years of slights that had built up with Kevin McCarthy. And then he went and further antagonized the inciting incident of the vote that brought him down happened on a Saturday, Sunday morning, he went on a Sunday show and blame the Democrats. And that just sort of tipped everything over. Um, I don't sense that sentiment now. And, you know,
I think Democrats are feeling pretty good just sort of getting their priorities through. They're getting a lot of legislative wins and just focusing on the mid or excuse me, the election, the House races in the fall. But wouldn't it help them if Republicans looked even more dysfunctional and lost another leader? Like, wouldn't that help them in the fall? I don't get that. I'm being cynical, by the way. I know. That's my job as a journalist. And I tend to be a little rose colored glasses on these things. But
The thing that I get in sort of living in the House of Representatives world is things are really unstable. And Democrats are generally institutionalists, and I just don't get the sense that they're really willing to play with that kind of fire this close to the election. I think they feel good about the trajectory of everything headed in the direction, and they're
a point where we get to national security or if there's an economic collapse and it's really not good for the House of Representatives to go three weeks without a speaker. And I think that's where the institutionalist streak of the Democrats comes in. They're being adults, basically, is what you're saying.
I think Democrats as a whole have been marching in unison. There are fights and there are squabbles. Israel and Gaza is a different issue. But generally speaking, since Trump has taken office, Democrats in the House of Representatives have been pretty much aligned together. Okay. So I heard that, you know, they may wait the Republicans a few more weeks till they have some more members, right? So they have a handful of members. I think the majority now is like two or three members. They won't...
They want to wait until Kevin McCarthy's seat's filled. There's another seat that's going to be filled. And so that they have at least a majority of five. So if they do have this motion to vacate vote, that they won't end up giving the House over to Hakeem Jeffries by accident. I mean, that is a real scenario. I mean, we're getting into... We've been in this position since February, but Republicans are in a lot of trouble. And, you know, an outbreak... That's a risky move, yeah. And I don't think...
This is going to be such a real deliberation that we're now kind of getting the counter to that logic, which is, do Democrats actually want to take the speakership at this point? You know, it would probably serve them better in the election to have Republicans continue to be in control.
and flailing in this way and, you know, make the argument, do you want this chaos or do you want us rather than being in charge? And the little secret of being in the House of Representatives is it's generally more fun to be in the minority because you're not responsible for anything, except Democrats are kind of now. This episode is brought to you by Vitamin Water. Food, entertainment, sports,
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So Brendan Buck, friend of both of ours, I'm sure, used to be chief of staff to Paul Ryan. He's had experience in the Speaker's office. He wrote for The New York Times that Johnson has fallen on his sword. But at the same time, this whole fight has shown the weakness of the House Freedom Caucus and that really they think that they have so much power on the fringes, but they don't. Do you agree with him? I think Brendan is one of the smartest people about Capitol Hill. Yeah.
the Freedom Caucus is only as powerful as their ability to take out the Speaker. And so I think that there are, as it's been described to me, enough normies left in the Republican Party who've had it along with Democrats to protect him. But the other thing to think about though is after November, this is going to be a different House Republican conference. And we've seen a lot of institutionalists retire and a lot of them are going to be replaced by
you know, more Freedom Caucus type. So they're not out of the woods yet. I think we can all agree that Mike Johnson, if the Republicans win back the House, will probably not be the speaker. I just don't want to make predictions. But I think it's a very long time away. And I think it doesn't look good for him right now. But I've learned how difficult it is to make predictions on the House. So I'll keep my powder a little dry on that one.
Yeah. I mean, it doesn't sound like Steve Scalise is number two or Tom Emmer, his number three, are very interested in the position right now. They also don't seem to be wanting to body block him from all these blows. Well, you had a prescient point about how they weren't standing behind Johnson when he delivered his remarks last week. But the thing to remember is if the Republicans lose the House, there are two...
fresh factors going on. Most people have not paid attention to a leadership race until Kevin McCarthy's trouble in January 2023. But the difference is if Republicans lose is they'll lose the speaker slot at the leadership table. So the cliche is it's musical chairs. There's too many people in one less seat.
And the other thing is, it is so much easier to secure the votes to be minority leader. You just need a majority of the majority. You do not need to get a majority of the entire U.S. House of Representatives, which is where McCarthy and Pelosi. Well, Pelosi was able to pull that out, but that's where McCarthy could have been elected minority leader any day of the year. So speaker is just a zillion times harder. So minority leader may be a pretty enticing thing to run for in November. Can I just say two things that I learned today?
Okay. Jim Clyburn, Lieutenant of Nancy Pelosi and Nancy Pelosi in their 80s are running for re-election. These people just don't stop. I mean, they're not really in leadership anymore. I guess Jim Clyburn is technically in leadership, right? But like, I just can't get over this. They're in their 80s and they just want to keep running for Congress over and over again, even just be rank and file. I will just say, like, it seems like Pelosi is having the time of her life. She's at the
this point in her congressional career, it reminds me of like spring break after you've already gotten into college. Like you can just kind of relax and have fun. Right. Wear white suits, some stilettos, you know, drop in for a cameo or two. I've been covering both of them for a very long time and it does clog up the farm team in their home states. You know, I've heard of contenders to replace them for well over a decade. Including her own daughter. Yeah.
Christine Pelosi does come up quite frequently in that context. Yeah. I think what they would argue is they're still pretty good at their jobs. Yeah. But we are seeing generational change. It's happening more and more. But it has been an astonishing thing to watch. OK, just to like loop back around, even if the Democrats take back the House, it's probably going to be by a very small margin.
So they're going to be in the same situation. Their Freedom Caucus could be the squad, right? Basically, we're just existing in these worlds where like a very slim majority can hijack a whole party. So how do you lead? How do you govern? Well, the other thing is, this was explained to me today by a Republican consultant, that
The 2026 midterms are going to be rough for the out of power party with the presidency. So there are a lot of possible candidates on the Republican side. And I think it's fair to say the same is true on the Democratic side who are not interested in making a decision about running in 2026 until they know who the president is going to be. So I think there is already a consensus there.
that the 2026 midterms will probably not be fun for whoever's in power. So we are in such a strange moment, which I guess will just continue to contribute to the chaos that we're watching. I know you don't like making predictions, but let's just do it. Who cares? Okay. Mike Johnson, does he hold on to the speakership or is there a motion to vacate and he is ousted? Or do the Democrats save him? I think he'll serve out this term. Okay.
Beyond that, I don't know. But I think he will get through to November. Okay. Would Trump ever save him? You know Trump far better than I do. Yeah, I know. I was told they're not that close. Yeah.
That's what I, that's the message I got from Mar-a-Lago. I also just wonder, and you would know better than I, how much he's paying attention to this, given that he's literally in court all day long. Yeah, he doesn't want to give up his own political capital for Mike Johnson. I defer to you on that one. Yeah, court. That one looks sad.
there with watching the OJ trial. Like you're just sort of in disbelief that this is actually happening. No, but like, it's not the same because we can't actually watch the trial. That's what's so annoying. I know. We don't have a judge, you know? No, it sucks. And I need to get in that courtroom though. Well, I'm counting on Maggie Haberman. Yeah. But you know, they have line standards, probably the New York times, New York magazine, all those people that are in there. They probably have somebody they're paying to get up at like three in the morning. Well, I just want Maggie in the room. Yeah.
She can tell us every time Trump falls asleep. She can like hit a button. So yeah, this has been fun. Thank you for the full overview of the chaos of Congress. They're in recess right now, right? This is Passover recess. So actually what's happened is the Senate is scrambling to pass the House bill. So they've written up
wrapped up their Passover recess. So that's sort of the context of this. And that I will be curious whether the few days off will be a cooling off period or as what is usually happens is the house GOP conference is 10 times worse when they come back from a recess. It's like they go to their first meeting on Tuesday morning and everything explodes. Oh, probably because they went home and everyone's like,
first of all, Congress has like the lowest approval rating of all time. Their constituents are probably like, screw them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know how popular the Ukraine bill is actually among the grassroots and just voters in general. I haven't seen any recent polling, but a Republican today did encourage me to look at the Breitbart website. And Ukraine was not leading, just to get a sense of what that world was, how they were digesting it. And Ukraine was not
even remotely prominent on their website. So I thought that was intriguing. Happy to have you on. Somebody's got to win. I'll have to have you back. I'm so glad to be back. For the motion to vacate roulette game. She wants her MTV. Exactly. MTG wants her MTV. What a mess. Okay. Thanks so much. Thanks, Tara.
That was another episode of Somebody's Gotta Win. I'm your host, Tara Palmieri. I want to thank my producers, Christopher Sutton and Connor Nevins. If you like this podcast, please subscribe, rate it, and send it to your friends. If you like my reporting, please go to puck.news.tara.palmeri and sign up for my newsletter, the best and the brightest. You can use the discount code Tara20. I'll be back on Thursday.