“I have not lost control of the House,” Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) proclaimed to a gaggle of reporters last week. However, his stranglehold on the caucus may be faltering.
Writing Tuesday in The Atlantic, Elaine Godfrey and Russell Berman argued that being a Republican member of the House while under Donald Trump's presidency is not all it's cracked up to be.
In the past month, Johnson has been attacked for "stretching if not whollydisregarding the truth" with his colleagues. It's a problem that former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) also faced before he was voted out of the chair.
The day that Johnson claimed he still had control of his members, a small group of GOP lawmakers came together with Democrats to push a bill that would extend healthcare subsidies that were set to expire at the end of 2025.
“This place is disgraceful,” vented Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.). He was attacking the failure to stop huge spikes in health insurance premiums.
Godrey and Berman noted Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), also denounced Johnson in public, saying he was ineffective. She then decided to leave and run for governor (though she has since suspended her campaign and is not running for another term in the House).
Even Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), who has frequently spoken out against Democrats, asserted that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calf.) was an effective leader while implying that Johnson is not.
It has been almost a year since Republicans gained control of every branch of government: the White House, two houses of Congress and a conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court. But despite all of that power, they have little to show for it.
At the end of the year, C-SPAN releases statistics on the House and Senate and found that 2025, "The number of public laws enacted by each body is at an all-time low."
“We need a course correction here,” complained Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calf.) when speaking to The Atlantic.
A group of current and former Republican members of Congress wouldn't give on-the-record comments, asking that they speak anonymously to be more candid, the report said. They agreed Johnson has "lost practical control of the House."
“I think he’s a good man, a good attorney, a good constitutionalist, and a bad politician,” said one Republican lawmaker.
Another said he means well, but, "In his obsession with not offending anyone, he offends everyone."
Republicans also spent very few hours out of the 43 days of the government shutdown at work in Washington. By contrast, the Senate sessions continued. The House GOP also made "no effort to constrain" Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) while the quasi-agency gutted Congressionally-funded agencies, per the report.
When they began to see the significant impact of Trump's tariffs on the economy, the GOP wrote provisions into bills that restricted lawmakers from trying to cancel the taxes.
The one accomplishment of the GOP was passing Trump's so-called "One Big Beautiful Bill Act," but the bill itself is not only unpopular, but Trump also tried unsuccessfully to rebrand it in an effort to persuade Americans to support the law.
The writers concluded that things won't get much easier for Johnson in the coming election year, and that the speaker will likely be outvoted trying to block the healthcare subsidies. Another government shutdown in the coming month is also not out of the question.