House Speaker Mike Johnson is refusing to retire despite calls from far-right extremists after agreeing to enable the House to examine legislation authorizing additional military help to Ukraine as well as defense assistance for Israel and Taiwan.
“I am not concerned about this; I will do my job, and I believe that is what the American people expect of us,” the speaker said at a press conference on Tuesday.
Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie urged the Louisiana Republican to step down during a meeting of the House GOP Conference on Tuesday after Mr. Johnson said he was putting forth legislation to fund Israeli and Ukrainian defense needs over the objections of members such as Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, who weeks ago filed a motion to remove him as Speaker after he allowed the House to vote on funding the federal government for the rest of the current fiscal year.
Mr. Massie, an MIT-educated engineer who consistently opposes all government spending measures, said he would co-sponsor Ms. Greene’s bill, which would proclaim Mr. Johnson’s post “vacant.” It is the same procedural maneuver that a group of Republicans used last year to remove former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy after he permitted a vote to keep the government open.
“I asked him to resign.” After the Republican conference meeting on Tuesday, he told reporters, “We will call the motion, and he will lose more votes than Kevin McCarthy.”
However, at a press conference minutes later, the Speaker flatly rejected Mr. Massie’s proposal.
“It is, in my view, an absurd notion that someone would bring a vacate motion when we are simply here trying to do our jobs,” he told reporters.
By lunchtime, a handful of House Democrats had already told various news sources that they would not vote in unison in favor of a resolution to remove the speaker, as the party did with Kevin McCarthy last autumn. The so-called “Gaetz Eight” group of Republican dissidents led the move, causing weeks of chaos and inactivity in the House.
One of those Democrats was Brad Sherman, the second-ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. In an interview with The Independent, he stated that his party would likely rally in support of the embattled speaker if he followed through on his promise to bring up the full supplemental funding package passed by the Senate in February and did so in such a way that poison pill amendments did not derail the legislation.
He declared on Tuesday that passing the additional spending plan, which includes humanitarian relief, is essential. I believe that if [Speaker Johnson] accomplishes that and then there is a motion to leave the speakership because he did the right thing, even if he did so in four distinct notebooks on unlimited colored paper, the Democrats will not allow it to pass.”
