All of the Power, None of the Fun

O n a particularly stressful day in a particularly stressful week during what has been, honestly, a particularly stressful year for House Republicans, the ever-sunny but perpetually beleaguered Mike Johnson insisted that he retained at least a modicum of power over the institution he ostensibly leads. “I have not lost control of the House,” the speaker declared to a gaggle of reporters trailing him through the Capitol. Johnson’s own members, in the past month, have accused him of stretching if not wholly disregarding the truth, and his assertion last Wednesday that he has a firm grip on power was correct only in the most technical sense. On the day he uttered it, a group of Johnson’s most electorally vulnerable soldiers abandoned him to help Democrats force a vote on extending health-care subsidies, and a longtime lawmaker became the 25th House Republican—with many more expected to follow—to announce that he would not seek reelection next year. “This place is disgraceful,” GOP Representative Mike Lawler of New York vented on the House floor, calling out Congress’s failure to prevent a spike in health-insurance rates set to occur in January. In the preceding weeks, a member of the speaker’s leadership team—Representative Elise Stefanik of New York—publicly denounced Johnson as ineffective (shortly before she announced that she was, for now, quitting politics altogether), and another high-profile (albeit perpetually aggrieved) Republican, Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, pined, in the pages of The New York Times , for the sturdy hand of Nancy Pelosi. As Republicans approach the one-year mark of their trifecta under President Donald Trump, their party’s rank-and-file lawmakers are not a happy bunch. And like so many unhappy employees, they are directing much of the blame toward the boss: the speaker they elevated from obscurity a little more than two years ago. “We need a course correction here,” Representative Kevin Kiley of California told us. A host of current and former GOP members of Congress we interviewed echoed his sentiment; they used more pungent terms when granted anonymity to speak candidly. These Republicans described a speaker who had, contrary to Johnson’s avowal otherwise, lost practical control of the House. “I think he’s a good man, a good attorney, a good constitutionalist, and a bad politician,” one House Republican told us. Another said Johnson was well meaning, but to a fault: “In his obsession with not offending anyone, he offends everyone.” The roots of Republican despair are both political and legislative, and they extend far beyond Johnson. Democrats will begin the new year favored to recapture the House in the midterm elections. (A Trump-led effort to fortify the GOP’s majority through aggressive gerrymandering has stalled .) With the majority in jeopardy, Republicans are bracing for a flood of additional members quitting their reelection campaigns after the holidays. A few, including Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, are leaving even before their terms are up. Dim electoral prospects aside, many Republicans are also realizing that being a member of Congress in the Trump era...

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