Washington, D.C. is finally quiet, which is no small feat after last week’s apocalyptic funding debate. Both sides of the Capitol have scattered, exchanging the chaos and commotion of the city for the normalcy of home. No one will be happier to leave the pressure cooker behind than House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who took a beating in his bid to keep the government open. And while the parties did manage to kick the funding fight to March, Republicans may be coming back from the holidays with a bigger question: what to do with leadership.

The fact that a deal even got done after a frenetic push by the president-elect’s team to scrap the original draft is a credit to the man taking all the punches. Johnson, who had to walk a tightrope of his wafer-thin majority, the GOP’s cantankerous budget hawks, Trump surrogates Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, and the president-elect’s own agenda, managed to shrink the 1,500-page boondoggle he’d negotiated with Democrats down to a virtually clean bill—a miracle given the buzzsaw of backlash he faced.

After dumping the debt ceiling language that tanked the second vote, Johnson’s third attempt — complete with disaster relief and farmers’ aid — found the sweet spot, sailing through by a vote of 366-31-1. A few minutes after midnight, the Senate hurried to the floor to pass the compromise, 85-11 just as the White House hit “send” on a statement reassuring the public that “agencies will not shut down and may continue normal operations.”

While Trump, no doubt peeved that Congress ignored his debt ceiling demands, didn’t applaud the final product, Musk did. “The Speaker did a good job here, given the circumstances,” the billionaire posted. But how much damage has been done to the young Louisianan is yet to be seen.

When members reconvene in early January, the first vote they’ll take is electing a speaker. Johnson, who seemed to be the consensus pick after the Republicans’ election success, is in limbo now, some warn. Late Friday, House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris (R-Md.) signaled a bumpy road ahead, arguing that this funding bloodbath has left him “undecided on what House leadership should look like in the 119th Congress.” Others were more blunt, suggesting that the spending fracas might have cost Johnson his job. “Everything has consequences,” South Carolina’s Ralph Norman (R) insisted. “No one puts forward this bill the way it was done.”

Of course, as Rep. Tom McCormick (R-Calif.) pointed out, it’s not like there’s an obvious replacement. “Anybody who wants it obviously isn’t in his right mind,” the Californian half-joked. Sounding slightly more open to giving Johnson a second chance, he told The Hill, “We’ll see how it goes. … I want a consensus pick.” As for Johnson’s missteps, McCormick replied, “Of course, he’s made mistakes. And any quarterback in any Super Bowl, including the MVP, can make mistakes. But you know, nothing’s done until it’s done.”

It’s also possible that tempers will cool over the Christmas recess when conservatives take a step back and consider how a speakership fight might affect their 100-day agenda. To keep the gavel, Johnson can’t afford to lose more than one Republican — and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) has already vowed to oppose the speaker this time around.

“I don’t know how this is going to impact it,” Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) admitted after the intra-party meltdown over the CR. “I think at the end of the day if Trump is backing Johnson, he’ll be speaker.” So far, the president-elect is holding his cards close. “We’ll see,” Trump told NBC Thursday.

But after the strain of the last 14 months, does the young dad of four even want the job? After Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy helped kill the early deal he struck with Democrats, Johnson asked Elon, “Hey, you want to be speaker of the House?” Musk replied that he didn’t know. “I think it might be the hardest job in the world.”

When a reporter asked if he even wanted to stay in the post, Johnson answered, “Being speaker of the House is a challenge in the modern era.” He paused. “I wouldn’t say it’s the most fun job in the world all the time, but it’s an important one,” Johnson wanted people to know. “[This is] a hugely consequential moment for the country.”

And not everyone believes someone else could do it better. Despite his criticism over the first CR, former Speaker Newt Gingrich understands the rigors of the job. “Let me just say, I’m very pro-Johnson,” he told Fox News’s Jesse Waters. “I can’t imagine what he goes through with a one-, two-, or three-vote majority.”

Johnson’s good friend and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) tried to tamp down the GOP grumbling, insisting the speaker had shown “tremendous leadership this week through very difficult times.” “At the end of the day, I think everybody recognizes it makes sense to keep [the] government open but also to take care of those disaster victims who have been waiting for months for this relief and the farmers who are struggling,” Scalise pointed out. “There’s a lot of good that’s going to be done in this bill.”

Trying to put the December skirmish behind him, Johnson looked forward. “We are set up for a big and important new start in January.” The good news, Family Research Council’s Quena Gonzalez quipped, “is that Congress has finally left the capital, and the republic is safe — for now.”

But, Gonzalez cautioned, “When looking at the back-and-forth right before the budget cliffhanger on Friday night, it’s important to understand that the Republican Party is not unified. There are many Republicans in Congress who are happy with business as usual and who are not that concerned that we continue to drive up the national debt with deficit spending, year after year,” he told The Washington Stand. “There are fewer Republicans who are working to try to reverse that, and some of them believe their fellow conservatives aren’t working fast enough to reverse deficit spending. What we saw play out in Congress this week/last week was an actual debate in real time about the future of our country. The very fact that we’re not used to seeing this debate says a lot about where we’ve been — and where conservatives in Congress are trying to help us go.

The bottom line is, “If your hope is in Washington, D.C.,” Gonzalez noted, “get used to disappointment. Change will end in Washington, not begin here.”

But, he observed, “Christmas is a great time to reflect on the fact that Jesus came to Israel at a time of tremendous darkness and uncertainty about the future. The people of God were living under Roman occupation in the first century, longing for freedom. The Bible says that the borrower is slave to the lender; our nation lives under a different kind of spiritual bondage, in bondage to debt. Our current national debt limit is over $31.4 trillion. That’s almost $91,000 for every man, woman, and child in the U.S.” Reflecting on this holy season, Gonzalez added, “May God move on our hearts, and in the hearts of our leaders to bring about the real and lasting freedom that only revival can produce.”