Gingrich Says Johnson Has the Most Difficult Speakership ‘since the Civil War’

When people ask Mike Johnson (R-La.) what it’s like to be speaker, he puts it this way, “I feel like a triage nurse on the battlefield. They wheel a bloody body in and yell, ‘Stop the bleeding!’ And I will, and then turn around and there’s another bloody body.” Now imagine a patient who doesn’t appreciate the work the nurse is trying to do, and you have a pretty good picture of some House Republicans too.

When the Louisiana speaker gavels his chamber back into session Tuesday, he’ll be doing it with a familiar threat over his head. “His days as Speaker are numbered,” threatened his caucus’s biggest critic, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) two nights before Congress reconvened. Her beef, which stretches from Ukraine funding to the open border, continues to complicate Johnson’s job — especially as the around-the-clock coverage of the drama creates more and more grassroots doubt over the young speaker’s conservative credentials.

Johnson sat down with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “This Week on the Hill” to talk through some of the criticism lobbed his way and what, if any of it, is fair. Some people are pointing to the Ukraine, Israel, Indo-Pacific funding package as evidence that the 52-year-old has been co-opted by the Democratic Party. “‘What’s happened to Mike Johnson?’” Perkins says he’s asked. “‘I thought he was a conservative.’ How do you respond to that?”

The speaker thinks for a beat and then replies in the third person. “Mike Johnson is trying to lead on principle in a terribly divisive time,” he insisted before pointing to comments that former speaker Newt Gingrich made about the impossible position Republicans have put their leadership in. Gingrich argued that “Johnson has the most difficult speakership since the Civil War.” For starters, the speaker of the late 1990s said, “[H]e doesn’t have a real majority. He has a technical majority for the purpose of organizing committees and theoretically controlling the flow of legislation, but he doesn’t have a working majority on the Rules Committee. He doesn’t have an ability to deliver 218 votes for virtually anything.”

Instead, Gingrich went on, “He has 30 or 40 members who ideologically wake up every morning knowing that they’re gonna vote no — they’re not sure what the issue is, but they know they’re going to vote no. And then he’s got this last 30 or 40 [members] who need to do something to go on TV and send out fundraising emails, and they don’t frankly care if they screw up our party or the country, if that’s what it takes for them to be so important. So he has an enormously complicated job.”

Johnson reiterated the difficulties, telling Perkins, “We’re operating with the smallest majority in U.S. history. I have a literal one-vote margin in our majority, and that means, very simply, because we only control one chamber and the Democrats control the White House and the Senate, [that] in order to move any legislation that’s our priority, I literally have to have every single Republican in the boat rowing in the same direction.” As Americans already know, “That’s a real challenge right now. A part of the reason for that, frankly, is the invention of social media, which is a whole new mixture into this.” In conversations with Gingrich, the two men talked about the very different eras they experienced. “[Newt] told me … he said, ‘You know, I had an 18-vote margin. You have a one-vote margin.’ And he said, ‘We didn’t have the internet. You know,’ he said, ‘if everybody could have gone on to social media during my era and told everybody every two minutes what they didn’t love about their 100% purity in my legislation, I would not have achieved what we did.’”

That doesn’t mean Johnson feels sorry for himself, but as he pointed out, “This is the modern Congress, Tony, and we have to work every day, inch by inch, moving the ball up the field, getting the next first down, putting points on the board so that we can win the next election cycle, grow the House majority, take back the Senate and take back the White House and really fix this mess. But in the meantime, we have big responsibilities, and that’s what we’re trying to take care of.”

One of the responsibilities that the speaker came to care about was Ukraine funding. As other reporters have pointed out, Johnson has a very personal stake in what happens on the world stage with his son about to enter the Naval Academy this fall. But the reality is, as he’s told multiple outlets, “investing right now in these matters is critical [for the United States], because … if we don’t take care of this obligation now, it’s certain — we believe very certain — that Vladimir Putin would roll … the tanks through Ukraine, take Kyiv, and then he would be right there on the border … of NATO countries — the Baltic states and Poland. … At that point, we would be asked to send American troops over there and get physically involved. I would rather send bullets to Ukraine than boys, American soldiers. And that’s what this came down to in the end. We had to do the right thing. … And I think everybody who’s paying attention and understands the stakes here knows why we had to do that.”

Something else that influenced his decision, the speaker explained, is his access to top-secret information. And what he’s learned is that over the last year, “the situation on the ground has deteriorated terribly in Ukraine. … [T]his was a fateful moment. And, you know, the classified briefings were alarming. But you don’t even need that to understand how dire and necessary all of this was.”

But for all of the turmoil in his party over the Ukraine funding, one story Americans aren’t hearing is how Johnson improved the final language. “There’s [been] some mischaracterizations [of the bill],” Perkins prompted. “There were some improvements made to this that — had you not gone to the negotiating table — you probably wouldn’t have gotten.” He pointed to the increased oversight and accountability of the money going to Ukraine as one example.

Right, Johnson agreed. “We did not move the Senate’s supplemental foreign aid package,” he explained, meaning that this wasn’t the Democrats’ bill. “And so what we achieved was a much better policy in the end and a better process as well. … We added in the loan concept, which is something that President Trump had championed.” Eighty percent of the funds headed to Ukraine, he wanted people to know, “is really for the replenishment of our own weapons and stocks and operations. So this is American jobs building updated American weapons. We funded that by funding ourselves. And then the 20% of the Ukraine that was left over, we convert it to a loan. So it’s not just blank checks to foreign adversaries. We had to take care of this responsibility. We also added very stringent sanctions in the House bill for Iran and China and for Russia, because [they are the] aggressors doing all this.”

And frankly, Johnson wanted people to know, “If [Israeli aid] had not been combined with Ukraine and this package, Israel would not get the assistance it needs right now in its most desperate time. They’re literally fighting for their survival as a nation.”

But what about the border, Perkins asked? “We’ve got to secure our border. We haven’t done that.” When conservatives wanted to connect the funding for Ukraine to stopping the flood of illegal immigrants, why didn’t he?

“Listen,” Johnson reiterated, “the border is the number one issue in America. It is our number one priority. And it has been from day one.” He ticked off the crises triggered by the president’s decision to throw open the country’s gates: the growing number of terrorists in America, violent crime, Fentanyl poisoning and deaths, human trafficking.

“Here’s the thing, though,” he said. “We have been working [on] passing legislation. We passed H.R. 2 … our Secure the Border Act over 14 months ago. It’s sitting on Chuck Schumer’s desk collecting dust. Remember … Democrats run the White House and the Senate. So no matter what we do in the House, it won’t become law if the person sitting in the Oval Office won’t agree to it and sign it. So we’ve sent H.R. 2, we’ve sent resolutions. We impeached [Alejandro] Mayorkas, the secretary of Homeland Security. Tony, it’s the first time in the history of the United States that a cabinet secretary has been impeached.”

Republicans did all of that “because desperate times call for desperate measures,” the speaker insisted. “But at the end of the day, here’s the reality: Unless the president of the United States will enforce federal law, unless he will use his executive authority to close the border — which he refuses to do — there’s nothing really the House can do other than that. And so it came down to this choice: Ukraine literally running out of ammunition [at] the end of this month [and] Israel being fired upon by Iran openly. … Will we allow our enemies, our nation’s enemies, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea … to advance and prevail and trample upon freedom in our allies, just because the Joe Biden and the Democrats won’t do anything on the border? We have to walk and chew gum at the same time.”

Now that these “principle obligations” are taken care of on the world stage, the speaker vows that his attention is “right back to the border.” “And we will be fighting on it every single day.” Even so, he can only do what the political realities allow. And while some House Republicans want to pretend the situation is different or that the outcomes are Johnson’s to control, the simple truth is, “I’m afraid it’s going to require [change] before we can fix the border — and I mean the reelection of Donald Trump. He’ll do it. And we’ve got to fight every day until then.”

No amount of hard-nosed negotiating is going to expand the GOP’s majority. While Greene and company kick and scream about Johnson’s decisions, he would argue he’s doing the best he can with the wafer-thin control Republicans have. To those who say he should’ve walked away from the table altogether, he disagrees. “The Biden administration has projected weakness on the world stage, and that is why our adversaries are acting so provocatively and upsetting the entire world order. And we had a moment here in history, a fateful decision. Would we be Chamberlain or would we be Churchill? And I don’t think we have a choice in that matter.”

In the meantime, he prays. Perkins pointed to a surprisingly favorable article in CNN where Johnson talked about how he’d wrestled with the Ukraine and Israeli funding dilemma while also trying to appease the warring factions of his party.

“These are fateful times,” the speaker said solemnly. “I do pray about these heavy decisions. You know, I’m reminded often of what Solomon asked when he was given the crown and it was brought to leadership in Israel back in the Old Testament. And God appears to him in a dream and he says, ‘Ask for anything.’ And Solomon says, “I ask you for wisdom, Lord. You know the wisdom to govern your people and make these decisions.’ … And God granted him that wisdom, and He offers that to all of us.”

These aren’t easy days, he acknowledged. “And this is a time not unlike our Founders’ generation or difficult times in the past, where you would hope that leaders would be seeking a higher counsel. And I do.”