Speaker Johnson faces year of tight votes and acrimony: 'A lot of expectations'

While the high-stakes fight to lead the House of Representatives is over, Speaker Mike Johnson’s politically perilous year is just beginning.

Winning the speaker’s gavel was no easy feat considering Johnson, R-La., had no Democratic support and could only lose one fellow Republican, thanks to the House GOP’s razor-thin majority.

All House Republicans except for Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., voted for Johnson on Friday afternoon. Two GOP lawmakers who had initially voted for someone other than Johnson, Reps. Keith Self, R-Texas, and Ralph Norman, R-S.C., were eventually persuaded to switch their votes after speaking with Johnson and President-elect Trump.

Johnson will have to navigate a similarly slim margin over the next few months as he helps carry out what President-elect Donald Trump promised would be a very active first 100 days of his new administration.

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"There’s a lot of expectations and potential pitfalls," Marc Short, who served as director of legislative affairs during the first Trump administration, told Fox News Digital in an interview late last month. 

Just the first half of 2025 alone is expected to see at least three separate fiscal fights.

Johnson, meanwhile, is set to lose two House Republicans – Reps. Elise Stefanik of New York and Mike Waltz of Florida. Both members are joining the Trump administration at the end of this month.

It will reduce his House GOP majority to just 217 seats, compared to 215 for Democrats, which means Republicans will need to vote in lock-step to pass any bills on a party-line vote. 

Special elections to replace Waltz and retired Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., are set for April. An election to replace Stefanik has not yet been set.

Meanwhile, Republicans are gunning to pass two massive conservative policy and spending overhauls via a process called "reconciliation," which lowers the threshold for passage in the Senate from 60 votes to a simple majority for certain budgetary issues.

Both Republicans and Democrats have tried to use reconciliation to pass significant fiscal policy changes that the other side normally opposes, meaning it takes extraordinary levels of intra-party cooperation in both the House and Senate.

"There’s huge expectations on budget reconciliation, and that’s really hard, even when you’ve got wide margins. To think you’re going to do it twice in a year with those margins, I think is an enormously high expectation that seems to be unreasonable," Short told Fox News Digital.

"And add onto that another funding bill in three months, plus a debt ceiling fight."

Along with reconciliation bills – which are unlikely to get much, if any, Democratic support – Republicans will also have to grapple with the government funding deadline they just punted to March 14.

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House and Senate lawmakers passed a short-term extension of fiscal year (FY) 2024’s government funding levels in December to give negotiators more time to hash out the rest of FY 2025.

Congress will risk plunging the government into a partial shutdown if the House and Senate does not pass another funding extension or set new priorities for the remainder of FY 2025 by then.

The next government funding deadline will come at the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30.

That’s not all Johnson will have to focus on during those months, however.

A bipartisan agreement struck in 2023 suspended the U.S. debt limit through January 2025 – after which the Treasury Department will be forced to take "extraordinary measures" to avoid a national credit default.

The debt limit refers to how much debt the U.S. government can accrue while making expenditures it has already committed to. As of Christmas Eve, the national debt — which measures what the U.S. owes its creditors — fell to $36,161,621,015,445.57, according to the latest numbers published by the Treasury Department. 

Raising the debt limit is also traditionally a fraught political battle, with both Republicans and Democrats seeking any possible leverage to attach their own policy goals to the negotiations.

A recent model produced by the Economic Policy Innovation Center (EPIC) projects the Treasury’s "extraordinary measures" will carry the U.S. through mid-June or earlier, giving Congress potentially six months to act.