Dear Commons Community.
Speaker Mike Johnson yesterday easily batted down an attempt by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia to oust him from his post, after Democrats joined with most Republicans to fend off a second attempt by G.O.P. hard-liners to strip the gavel from their party leader.
The vote to kill the effort was an overwhelming 359 to 43, with seven voting “present.” Democrats flocked to Mr. Johnson’s rescue, with all but 39 of them voting with Republicans to block the effort to oust him.
Members of the minority party in the House have never propped up the other party’s speaker, and when the last Republican to hold the post, Kevin McCarthy, faced a removal vote last fall, Democrats voted en masse to allow the motion to move forward and then to jettison him, helping lead to his historic ouster.
This time, the Democratic support made the critical difference, allowing Mr. Johnson, who has a minuscule majority, to avoid a removal vote altogether. While for weeks Ms. Greene had appeared to be on a political island in her drive to get rid of yet another G.O.P. speaker, 11 Republicans ultimately voted to allow her motion to move forward.
That was the same number of Republicans who voted in October to allow the bid to remove Mr. McCarthy to advance — but back then, they were joined by every Democrat. As reported by The New York Times.
“I appreciate the show of confidence from my colleagues to defeat this misguided effort,” Mr. Johnson told reporters shortly after Wednesday’s vote. “As I’ve said from the beginning and I’ve made clear here every day, I intend to do my job. I intend to do what I believe to be the right thing, which is what I was elected to do, and I’ll let the chips fall where they may. In my view, that is leadership.”
“Hopefully,” he added, “this is the end of the personality politics and the frivolous character assassination that has defined the 118th Congress.”
Congratulations to those who voted for Johnson and for putting the country ahead of their political parties.
Tony
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
