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What's next after MTG fails in bid to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, DC, shares his perspective on US politics.
This is what we're watching in US Politics this week: More turmoil in the House.
Georgia member Marjorie Taylor Greene, who's made quite a name for herself as an outspoken opponent of Republican leadership and a prolific fundraiser online, this week triggered another motion to vacate the speaker. The second this year. Only this time it was against Mike Johnson, the speaker who replaced Kevin McCarthy after he was removed during a motion to vacate earlier in the year.
The big change this time was that Democrats rallied to Johnson's side, defending him against the Republicans that tried to take him out and resoundingly defeating the measure, which really takes a lot of the wind out of the sails of future rebellions against the Republican speaker at least for the rest of 2024. Democrats and moderate Republicans are both tired of this level of chaos and want to defang the Republicans, who want to make life harder for the leader of the House of Representatives. That doesn't mean they're all allies now however. Mike Johnson is going to spend the rest of the year pushing very partisan measures across the floor of the House of Representatives in order to draw a contrast between Republicans and Democrats that voters understand when they go to cast a ballot in November. There will be a very small number of must pass legislation coming up.
Right now, Congress is working on reauthorization of the FAA. Later in the year, they're going to have to once again pass a budget bill to keep the government funded. Those will probably be very bipartisan measures. And one of the big ironies of the extreme polarization that's happening in the House, including within the Republican faction, is that the House is now effectively functioning more like the bipartisan Senate, which requires a supermajority of 60 senators, and which is always a bipartisan coalition in order to get almost anything done.
That's now the situation that the House finds itself in. The House is typically the significantly more partisan body. But because of the Republican dissenters against Johnson, they've turned the House into a much more bipartisan place, which really won't get much done this year. So one lesson from Marjorie Taylor Greene this week is that if she comes to the king, she better not miss, she came for the king and she missed. And now she's going to find herself on the outs with the Republicans, probably for the rest of the year.
Thanks for watching. Tune in next week.
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President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky participate in the Conference of Ambassadors of Ukraine, in Kyiv President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky participate in the Conference of Ambassadors of Ukraine, in Kyiv on December 23, 2022.
Hard Numbers: Zelensky targeted, Putin inaugurated, Greene satiated, Neom downgraded
2: Ukrainian authorities said Tuesday they had detained two colonels in the State Guard, the unit responsible for protecting Kyiv’s most important officials, who were allegedly plotting to kill President Volodymyr Zelensky and members of his government. The suspects were allegedly working for the Russian Federal Security Service and may have planned to carry out the assassination to coincide with President Vladimir Putin’s inauguration.
5: Speaking of, Putin was inaugurated for his fifth term as president of Russia on Tuesday in a glittering ceremony at the Kremlin. Putin has led Russia since 1999, with a brief stint as prime minister while his puppet Dmitri Medvedev helped change the constitution to make Putin president again. His new term ends in 2030, but his reign likely won’t.
2: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) met with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) two days in a row on Tuesday before announcing she would back off on her threat to unseat him. Johnson has now survived the wrath of the far-right despite needing to cooperate with Democrats to pass bills, a move that doomed his predecessor.
1.5: Saudi Arabia has downscaled the first segment of its Neom project, the “line city” that is envisioned to stretch 105 miles through the Saudi desert, from 10 to just 1.5 miles by 2030 amid delays and cost overruns. With around $100 billion of the original $500 billion cost projection already spent, some experts estimate that Riyadh may end up spending $2 trillion if it wants to complete this megaproject.GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene offers remarks on the future of the House Speakership during a press conference at the US Capitol in Washington, DC.
Taylor Greene gets sidelined – for now
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., plans to force a vote to try to oust Speaker Mike Johnson next week, but Democrats say they will come to his rescue. Greene is among the most incendiary lawmakers on the GOP's far right in the House, which was angered by Johnson’s deal-making with the left that led to a bipartisan vote for $95 billion in wartime aid for Ukraine, Israel, and other US allies.
Greene’s vote will likely fail, which could undermine her influence on Capitol Hill while bolstering her image with anti-establishment supporters.
“Greene overshot her mark within the conference, and now that Dems have proactively confirmed they will save Johnson, her threats are hollow,” says Clayton Allen, US director for Eurasia Group.
“She’s cemented the far right as being relatively non-influential this year, but that may not be so bad for them, since they primarily want an issue (or two) to complain about.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-GA, yells as President Joe Biden speaks during the State of the Union address from the House chamber of the US Capitol in Washington.
Greene sees red over Johnson’s support for Ukraine
Roughly six months after Kevin McCarthy was booted as House Speaker, GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia aims to oust his successor, Mike Johnson. On Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,”Greene declared, “Mike Johnson’s speakership is over. He needs to do the right thing to resign ... If he doesn’t do so, he will be vacated.”
The reason? On Saturday, Johnson cut a bipartisan deal with Democrats to pass a $95 billion foreign aid package that includes $61 billion for Ukraine. The far-right wing of the GOP is opposed to the notion of funding “foreign wars,” contending that US funding should instead go toward domestic issues like border security.
Though former President Donald Trump publicly backed Johnson last week, it’s unclear if this will be enough to save him from the growing mutiny among House Republicans. Some even say the party risks tearing itself apart.
Johnson stands firm. Despite Greene’s threats,Johnson remains steadfast. “I really believe the intel … I think Vladimir Putin would continue to march through Europe.”
In Ukraine, meanwhile, the aid package's approval has been met with gratitude. Officials there say it will help replenish Ukraine’s short- and medium-range air defense systems to intercept Russian ballistic missiles targeting Ukraine’s energy grid.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) during a House Oversight Committee hearing on Hunter Biden and his business dealings on Wednesday, March 20, 2024.
House passes spending bill, prompting far-right revolt
Congress continues to be a source of seemingly nonstop political drama as lawmakers on Friday again scrambled to keep the US government’s lights on. The House of Representatives passed a $1.2 trillion spending bill hours ahead of a midnight deadline to avert a partial government shutdown.
The bill now moves to the Senate, where its passage could be held up if even one senator objects. This could push a vote into Saturday and trigger a partial shutdown, though the impact wouldn’t be major if the bill is passed before the end of the weekend.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and President Joe Biden have both urged the Senate to pass it quickly.
Meanwhile, GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) on Friday filed a motion to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson — just months after he got the top job in the lower chamber — over the spending package. But Greene, who accused Johnson of helping pass a “Democratic budget,” isn’t pushing for a hasty vote on the matter, stating, “It's more of a warning.”
"I'm not saying that it won't happen in two weeks or it won't happen in a month or who knows when, but I am saying the clock has started," Greene said. "It's time for our conference to choose a new speaker."
Trump's 2024 outlook: more vulnerable after Jan 6 hearings
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi, everybody. Happy Monday. And a Quick Take for you to get your week started off. Wanted to talk a little bit about a topic I haven't discussed very much and that is the implications of the January 6th commission and where we are heading for US elections.
It's pretty clear to me that Trump is still the most popular in the Republican Party. And if you want to make a bet, you would certainly still say that he gets the nomination. I think it's virtually a hundred percent that he's going to announce his candidacy. Closest people around him certainly believe that in relatively short order. But he is more vulnerable than he was just a few months ago. And some of this is obvious. I mean, he's not president anymore and so he doesn't have the platform that he had when he was president. Of course, he's going to lose a significant amount of attention, impact as a consequence of that. He's been banned from Twitter. He's banned from Facebook. And his new Truth Social is not doing very much to speak of, at least to date. Doesn't seem to have any real management. And a couple times I've taken a look at it, doesn't seem to have a lot going on in terms of the space. He's not attracting the same crowds he used to when he gives speeches.
Now, the January 6th committee, which has been an anti-Trump effort... There's no question that the decision by Kevin McCarthy to pull those that he had appointed to serve on it and make sure that it was basically only Republicans that were strongly anti-Trump, in this case, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, would participate, meant that it was going to be perceived as a more partisan affair than it would have if there had been full participation from across the political spectrum. No question about that. But it has still had impact. And I think one of the reasons it's had impact is because so many of the people that have participated are hardly Democrats. And in fact, many of them are people that were strong pro-Trump characters until January 6th; a bunch of former staffers, the deputy press secretary, Sarah Matthews, the deputy national security advisor, someone I know pretty well, actually, Matt Pottinger, members of Pence's team, others. I mean, these were all people that had been strongly loyal to Trump for the entirety of his first term.
Now, I want to be clear, the rank and file of the Republican party still think that this whole thing is a nothing burger. There's only a small minority of the Republican party that believed on January 6th that he was responsible for it in any way. And that number has basically not moved. It's within a margin of error. But independents have shifted against Trump. And by the way, so has Rupert Murdoch. And I think it's very interesting that over the last few days, you see opinion editorials from the editorial board, from both the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal saying that Trump is unfit to run again for the presidency, shouldn't be president in 2025. These are press outfits that were all in for Trump in 2020 and they're not anymore.
Now, the Wall Street Journal is an elite newspaper. It has a lot of Democrat and establishment Republican readers, few that would be considered ultra-MAGA. That's not true of the New York Post. Though, of course, New York itself is a heavily blue voting urban area, but they're going to lose a lot of subscribers in Staten Island, certainly on the basis of taking that perspective. But even Fox News itself... I mean, you watch Hannity, you watch Tucker Carlson, they're a hundred percent still for Trump. But the daily coverage that you see that has been much more straight up news over the last couple of years has also covered a lot more. They haven't been covering the January 6th commission, but they have not been promoting Trump and they've not been trying in any way to whitewash him or actively cheerlead for him in a way that Newsmax, for example, has consistently no matter what time of the day that you watch it.
So I think at the very least we can now say that we're going to have a lot of alternative candidates for 2024. I think it's increasingly likely that Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, is going to run against Trump. I think there will be a number of others as well. Again, you wouldn't bet against him at this point, but you wouldn't think it's going to be easy. And I think that's important. By the way, that's of course also true of Biden in the sense that Biden is at his most unpopular of his entire presidency right now. He's polling in the mid to high thirties. He's got big problems, particularly with the economy, particularly with inflation. He's vulnerable on COVID issues as well. And he also is looking increasingly slow, and his age is a factor, by the way, as is Trump's. And that fact is something that's going to make a lot of people much more interested in having anyone but Biden run in 2024 in the Democratic side and anyone but Trump run on the Republican side.
But this matters more about Trump because frankly, if you get Biden or if you get someone else, there's not a lot of impact in terms of the ultimate trajectory of US political institutions, the role of democracy, the kind of policies that you get in the way that the United States is perceived globally, where if it's Trump vis-à-vis another more mainstream Republican, it matters a lot, precisely because of Trump's unfitness, his willingness to call elections illegitimate and do everything he can to undermine them, certainly something you'd expect to do again, as well as his indifference to rule of law. So I do believe the fact that both Trump and Biden are increasingly vulnerable to significant challenges is a much greater impact and import when you look at the Republican side. Now, again, if you make me bet right now, I would still say that Trump gets the nomination and that it's close to a conflict for 2024. But again, overall, the likelihood Trump becomes president a second term has gone down significantly.
Now, one danger I'd like to raise. I really think we need to call out those Democrats that are spending money and channeling money in a number of races to try to get pro-Trump stop the steal election deniers to win in Republican primaries, because they believe that those pro-Trump candidates are going to be easier to defeat in a general election. Now, first of all, a lot of Democrats felt that way about Trump himself in 2020 and look what happened as a consequence, but I'll go further than that. This is a very dangerous game they're playing, and they should stop.
One more Marjorie Taylor Greene, in the House is too many. One is too many. It leads to violence. It leads to lunacy. It leads to disinformation. She's a self-avowed Christian nationalist. She's doing everything she can from a weak position to try to undermine the American political system and the values that it's built upon. And if you end up with five or 10 of them in the House, a couple of them in the Senate, a couple of them as governors, you do a lot more to deeply undermine the structural integrity and stability of the American political system. So the Democrats should stop playing that game right away.
Finally, I want to make a shout-out to Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, two people on the Republican Party. Kinzinger voted for Trump, was full-throated about it. Cheney votes with Trump over 90% of the time in the House. They have basically given up their political careers. Liz Cheney lost her role in the leadership of the House and is almost certainly going to lose her upcoming race for re-election. Kinzinger has already had to step down. In both cases, these are people that are standing by democracy and rule of law in the country above their narrow political preference. There are not many people in the country that are leading by example right now. And if by doing it, that means you have to lose your job, well, they're showing us what a leader really is and I tip my cap to them. That's it for me. I'll talk to you soon.
For more of Ian Bremmer's weekly analyses, subscribe to his GZERO World newsletter at ianbremmer.bulletin.com
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Marjorie Taylor Greene support in House shows Republican Party tilt
Get insights on the latest news in US politics from Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington:
Lots of drama to start the year on Capitol Hill. First, you had an insurgency on January 6th, followed by an impeachment of the President of the United States, accompanied by magnetometers being installed on the floor of the House of Representatives because the Democratic members thought the Republican members were trying to carry in guns with which to hurt them. Accusations that some of the Republican members may have been aiding the insurgents in that 6 January riot. Not a lot of evidence for that, but it does show there's a lot of bad partisan will between the two parties, right now. And that is culminating this week with a vote to potentially expel freshman member Marjorie Taylor Greene from her committee assignments in the House of Representatives.
In previous instances, where members of Congress were outspoken and used rather inflammatory language, the Republicans voted to strip former member Steve King of his committee assignments on the basis of him using some inflammatory language about white supremacy. But in this case, the Republicans argue that Marjorie Taylor Greene's comments on social media before she was a member of the House of Representatives don't quite rise to the level that she should be stripped of her committees. The reality is, she's an ally of the <former> President Donald Trump and the Republicans want to stay in his good graces in order to help them in the 2022 midterms. So, the Democrats are taking matters into their own hands, setting up a vote to strip her of committee assignments, which potentially could lead to a path, if Republicans take the majority in two years, where they retaliate against Democrats that they don't like. You're already seeing some Republicans talk about that.
At the other end of the spectrum, you've got Representative Liz Cheney, daughter of the former vice president and a rock-solid conservative by any metric, who voted to impeach President Donald Trump, and now there's members of the Republican conference that want to see her pay a price for that. I think ultimately, she probably ends up keeping her job with the support of leader Kevin McCarthy. But the fact that this division is happening, where Republicans are rallying around Marjorie Taylor Greene and potentially want to take the leadership position away from Liz Cheney is an indication of where the Republican Party is going. And it looks like it's going in a more Trumpy direction even after former President Trump is out of office.
Alexei Navalny's jail sentence; EU slow on vaccine distribution
Ian Bremmer discusses the World In (more than) 60 Seconds:
First, what's the update with Alexei Navalny?
The, well-liked around the world, very popular among the West, less so in Russia, but still the closest thing you have to real opposition to Putin in the country, just got a three-and-a-half-year jail sentence. Some of that is house arrest, but most of it is actually in prison, and this is a much harder line than we've seen before with suspended sentences and house arrest, and clearly, it's because Navalny has become more of a household name and has caused more of a problem for President Putin at a time when President Putin's approval ratings are lower than they were. They're in their low 60s, which in Russia is not so great for Putin, and the economy is doing worse, and people are angrier about their pensions that aren't worth as much and wages that don't go as far, and Navalny has done everything he can, including flying back to Russia after not dying from the poisoning attempt at the hands of what almost certainly was the Russian Special Service.
So, you put all of that together, and now Navalny is a significant thorn in Putin's side and is a reason for the Americans and many Europeans to want to increase sanctions against Russia, which we will now see. They'll be primarily not against Russian sectors of the economy or key businesses. They'll be mostly against individuals, Russian elites, close to Putin, any of those seen as involved in the Navalny case, and probably some ministers and maybe some oligarchs. Which the intention would be to embarrass Putin and to undermine some of his elite level support, because that's the only way you put pressure on Putin. The mass level opposition isn't there. Let's also keep in mind the demonstrations we're seeing in Russia in support of Navalny, as dramatic as they've been, and we've had 5,000 arrests across Russia in the last week, but they're tiny compared to Belarus. They're tiny compared to the arrests for the demonstrations you saw on Khabarovsk just a year ago in Russia. So, it's not as if... as big of an issue as this is for Western headlines, the fact is that Putin is still pretty solidly entrenched in Russia itself, and his willingness to take a hard line and crack down to ensure that remains the case is pretty much complete.
Okay next. Why is the EU struggling with vaccine distribution?
Well, in part, because the EU is working together. It is coordinated, all countries are handling vaccine appropriations and distribution as one European union. In principle, that gives them a lot more market influence, but it also means it's big it's bureaucratic, and it took them a while to get behind making big orders, which meant they were behind the United States and the United Kingdom. And so now, you have the U.S. moving towards 10% of the population vaccinated, while Europe is more like two or three, and there's no question that Europeans are frustrated about that. It does mean a couple of months of greater spread in Europe, as these South African and other variants that are much more transmissible come out, while the United States in the coming months should look a lot better. Vaccine distribution you already see in Israel with over 50% of the population having been jabbed, the percentage of case spread is already going down meaningfully. That's really, really good news, and for the EU, it's going to lead to some backlash. There's no question, but overall, I think they'll get through this. The European leadership will get through this, and by the middle of the year, as they get vaccines also rolled out across the population, they will see the same level of restriction in terms of mortality and hospitalizations. The vaccines, the level of capacity of these vaccines, just a fantastic story for everyone as they get rolled out.
Is the Republican Party fracturing?
I don't think so. I mean, I see now Senate Minority leader McConnell going after Marjorie Greene, the crazy QAnon member of Congress, but remember McConnell also did that initially in terms of Trump and impeachment, and then backed away when he realized that the party wasn't with him. So, I think it's pretty clear that some of the leadership of the Republican party would prefer if they could dump the crazier, Trumpist pieces of the party, but if it turns out that the party is not there, and that the population that supports the Republican party isn't there, then they're going to back down to ensure unity of the party. And so, let's remember that whatever they ended up doing, the leadership of the Republican party is not going to risk political power. They're not going to risk their party fragmenting. They took a hit in Georgia. They lost two seats and lost control of the Senate, largely because the Trumpist wing of the party was too large, they couldn't prevent Trump from making many voters in Georgia feel like this election was rigged, so why should they turn out, and certainly Marjorie Taylor Greene has the potential to cause problems at the margins, but not to fragment the party, because the leadership won't allow that. So, the answer to is the Republican Party fracturing, in my view, is a very, very strong no.
Finally, it's Groundhog Day, six more weeks of winter, and what else?
Oh, it's got to be lockdown, six more weeks of lockdown. Why? Because it's a horrible pandemic year. And so, I think of Punxsutawney Phil sees his shadow, that means, he's stuck underground for another six months, nevermind snow.