Drucker: Mike Johnson is an ironic target for Republicans

Mike Johnson, speaker of the House of Representatives, is under fire from all directions — from Democrats, naturally, but also from fellow Republicans angry with him for, well, just about everything.

My bill didn’t pass: Blame Johnson. My bill was ignored: Blame Johnson. The perennially broken appropriations process is still broken: Blame Johnson. The process of vetting legislation in committee before proceeding to a debate and vote of the full House, colloquially referred to as “regular order,” is sporadic to nonexistent: Blame Johnson. Republican leadership refused to circumvent regular order to grant my legislation a floor vote: Blame Johnson. I’m feeling mistreated by Senate Republicans, President Donald Trump and the White House legislative affairs team: Blame … Johnson? That’s right; blame Johnson.

These are just some of the complaints House Republicans are having right now with their day job. That’s what GOP lobbyists and well-placed party operatives tell me, explaining that Johnson is bearing the brunt of that frustration because he is a politically safe target. Republicans on Capitol Hill certainly aren’t going to blame Trump, lest they elicit an angry social media post with GOP primary season right around the corner.

In constant struggle

Meanwhile, Johnson — in a constant struggle to hold together a threadbare, fractious majority — is highly unlikely to retaliate.

Doing so could create even more renegades, leaving the 53-year-old Louisiana Republican more powerless than he already is. “The speaker knows he has a two-vote margin on a narrow and very diverse majority. It appears his strategy is to produce wins in legislative passage of the president’s agenda while having to take the arrows of members who are frustrated by the process or failure to see their individual legislative plan passed by the House,” Tom Reynolds, a Republican former congressman from western New York, told me.

“He knows it only takes a few members to knock leadership off its legislative agenda,” added Reynolds, once a key party strategist who served as chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee and now works as policy advisor for Holland & Knight.

Indeed, rather than asking why Johnson lately appears to be the incredible shrinking speaker, the better question might be whether he was ever in control of the House at all. It’s important to remember that Johnson assumed the gavel without any power base or wealth of institutional support.

The mild-mannered attorney from Shreveport, in northwest Louisiana, was elected to the House less than a decade prior. He didn’t climb the rungs of leadership or chair influential committees while meticulously assembling a network of political allies — in Congress and on K Street — along the way. Rather, he was installed in October 2023 because he was the only Republican that House Republicans could agree on after his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, was sacked by a small group of GOP rebels who leveraged their party’s tiny majority to force the selection of a new speaker.

The implicit threat, that Johnson’s ability to govern could come crashing down at any moment, has hung over the speaker ever since, in part because for two-plus years he has had to manage a majority that rests on a handful of seats. As of today, Republicans number 220, the Democrats 213 (they would number 215 but for two vacancies). That’s not exactly a governing majority when 218 votes are required to pass legislation.

And yet for a time this year, Johnson looked like a magician. The speaker unified House Republicans around Trump’s top priority, the reconciliation package now known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. He kept his conference together during a record-long government shutdown instigated by Senate Democrats.

Diminished capacity

But Johnson’s ability to wrangle the competing factions and independent-minded politicians that comprise his majority has diminished as the looming 2026 midterm elections raise the specter of an electoral bloodbath. His capacity to legislate has also been stymied by differences with Senate Republicans and by a president more interested in signing executive orders than lawmaking.

Considered in toto, Johnson has very little room to maneuver and few cards to play, as Trump might say. It’s a problem that is both structural and political, said Joseph Postell , an associate professor of politics at Hillsdale College, in Hillsdale, Michigan, who has written extensively on the history of Congress . “I suppose the speaker could solve the immediate problem by just opening the floodgates and allowing more measures from all sides to reach the floor for up-or-down votes. But most people in the majority party, I think, would be dissatisfied with the results,” Postell told me in an email exchange.

“The minority party would drive much of the agenda by strategically advancing bills to divide the Republican Party,” he explained. “Then people would complain that the speaker is not exerting enough influence over the process, precisely the opposite of what they are saying now.”

Which gets me to a rather ironic point about the various objections to Johnson’s leadership emanating from disgruntled House Republicans. They’ve been perfectly content to cede their Article I constitutional power to Trump, rendering themselves no better than members of a parliament under the thumb of a prime minister. There are few if any demands coming from House Republicans for Johnson to buck the president and run the chamber like the separate, supreme branch of the US government it was designed to be.

Johnson has certainly participated in this self-restraint and House Republicans have every right to confront the speaker about their creeping sense of powerlessness. But they might want to look in the mirror, first.

David M. Drucker is a columnist covering politics and policy. ©2025 Bloomberg. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.