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01-01-2025
United States President-elect Donald Trump has endorsed the continued leadership of Mike Johnson in the House of Representatives, in an apparent attempt to limit Republican discord in the New Year.
In a post to his online platform Truth Social on Monday, Trump appealed to his Make America Great Again (MAGA) base in rallying support for Johnson, who currently serves as speaker of the House.
“Speaker Mike Johnson is a good, hard working, religious man. He will do the right thing, and we will continue to WIN. Mike has my Complete & Total Endorsement. MAGA!!!” Trump wrote but the path ahead for Johnson is likely to be a fraught one. On January 3, a new Congress convenes, following November’s general election. And Republicans are gearing up for a tense showdown over who will be voted the next speaker, the highest officer in the House of Representatives.
Johnson is the most likely candidate, as the incumbent speaker but his role in passing a last-minute budget bill earlier this month revealed fractures in the Republican caucus and a possible backlash to his leadership.
A representative from Louisiana known for socially conservative policies, Johnson will need every Republican vote he can muster to hold onto the speaker’s gavel.
When the 119th Congress convenes, Republicans will claim one of the smallest majorities in the House in modern history. They will have 219 House seats out of 435 total, giving them barely more than 50 percent of the chamber’s votes.
Democrats traditionally cast their ballots for a House leader from their own party. As a result, even a handful of Republican holdouts could cost Johnson the speaker’s gavel.
Already, several Republican members of the House have come out in opposition to Johnson’s leadership. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, for instance, has been vocal that he will not cast a vote for the Louisiana representative.
“I will vote for someone other than Mike Johnson,” Massie wrote on social media on December 27. “A weak legislative branch, beholden to the swamp, will not be able to achieve the mandate voters gave Trump and Congress in November.”
Part of the reason for the discord lies with Johnson’s support for the bipartisan budget bill that was ultimately signed into law on December 21, averting a government shutdown over the holiday season.
Several Republicans opposed the measure for failing to rein in spending. Others, including Massie, expressed concern that an early version of the bill contained provisions that went beyond the budget. They called for a “clean” budget bill instead.
And then there was the omission of a key priority Trump himself had advanced. Trump had called on the budget bill to contain language extending or abolishing the debt ceiling, which limits how much the federal government can borrow.
Traditionally, the federal budget is negotiated separately from the debt ceiling. But on social media, Trump called for debt ceiling negotiations to happen under outgoing President Joe Biden, a Democrat, rather than during his incoming administration.
Under the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, the debt ceiling has been suspended until January 1, 2025 but Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has already warned that the federal government could hit its borrowing limit by the middle of that month, limiting its ability to pay its bills and potentially denting the country’s credit score.
Trump himself is slated to take office for a second term on January 20. He has called the debt ceiling a “guillotine” hanging over his administration.
Ultimately, the Johnson-led budget bill passed without the debt ceiling legislation Trump had demanded. (Int’l News Desk)
