Hakeem Jeffries’s Mike Johnson Bear Hug

Plus: The GOP Establishment courts Kari Lake, and the greatest crossover political ad in history.

(Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images.)

Hakeem Jeffries’s Mike Johnson Bear Hug

House Democratic leaders are throwing Speaker Mike Johnson a lifeline, but ironically, the person they may end up helping most is Marjorie Taylor Greene. 

In a Tuesday morning statement, Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and his leadership team pledged to protect Johnson from Greene’s long-threatened motion to oust him: 

From the very beginning of this Congress, House Democrats have put people over politics and found bipartisan common ground with traditional Republicans in order to deliver real results. At the same time, House Democrats have aggressively pushed back against MAGA extremism. We will continue to do just that. 

At this moment, upon completion of our national security work, the time has come to turn the page on this chapter of Pro-Putin Republican obstruction. We will vote to table Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Motion to Vacate the Chair. If she invokes the motion, it will not succeed.

Greene went predictably berserk: “Everyday, I fight the Democrat agenda destroying America and I fight for an America First Republican agenda,” she tweeted. “Mike Johnson is officially the Democrat Speaker of the House. Here is their official endorsement of his Speakership. What slimy back room deal did Johnson make for the Democrats’ support?”

She went on to call for Johnson to resign and insisted she will still force a (now doomed) vote to take his gavel: “If the Democrats want to elect him Speaker (and some Republicans want to support the Democrats’ chosen Speaker), I’ll give them the chance to do it . . . Americans deserve to see the Uniparty on full display.”

Democrats will be doing the right thing if they shield Johnson from Greene’s burn-it-all-down attacks. But here’s the odd thing: Every indication has been that Johnson was already outflanking Greene even among Republicans. Here was Axios this morning:

A sizable number of GOP lawmakers cast doubt on the odds of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) pulling the trigger on her motion to vacate Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), with some arguing her efforts lost momentum after members went home for recess. . . .

Greene told reporters she felt members would hear from constituents back home in support of her motion shortly before House lawmakers left town. But multiple members said GOP voters have largely been against another speaker ouster attempt this Congress. “Even trolls online have said they don’t want it,” one member told Axios. “I don’t think she’s going to do it—I think that window for her has passed,” another argued. 

A few things bear mentioning here. The first is that it’s notable how much even 30,000-foot fights like the possible ouster of a speaker end up being matters of political momentum. 

During his second impeachment, Donald Trump benefited enormously from the relatively slow pace of the proceedings, which gave Republicans time to regroup from the shock of January 6th and reassemble their rationalizations for supporting him. Last year, when Kevin McCarthy was ousted as House speaker on the heels of a brutal government-funding fight, it was in no small part because he fumbled the timeline: canceling a planned House recess that would’ve given everyone some time to go home and cool off. 

This time, Johnson used the House recess to his favor: Lawmakers had come back to D.C. this week already feeling like Greene’s plan was old news.

They would have felt differently, of course, if Donald Trump and the biggest names in right-wing media had spent the recess calling for Johnson’s scalp. But remarkably, Johnson spent this month outflanking Greene among those very people. He went on a subtly anti-Greene charm offensive through Christian media: “I try to follow all the biblical admonitions, as I do every day,” Johnson told the Christian Broadcasting Network on April 10. “One of them says you ‘bless those who persecute you.’ I’m getting a lot of practice in that right now—and that ‘a soft word turns away wrath.’”

And his trip to Mar-a-Lago a couple days later paid huge dividends: At an evening press conference, Trump stood by Johnson’s side to proclaim that “I stand with the speaker,” who’s “doing about as good as you’re going to do.” 

How did Johnson pull this off? By exploiting the subtle but significant differences between Trump’s knee-jerk skepticism of foreign funding generally and Greene’s far more online out-and-out hostility to Ukraine, specifically. (Earlier this year, she called the embattled nation “one of the most corrupt countries on Earth.” She tweets that sort of thing a lot.)

Contrast that with this February statement from Trump’s Truth Social: “WE SHOULD NEVER GIVE MONEY ANYMORE WITHOUT THE HOPE OF A PAYBACK, OR WITHOUT ‘STRINGS’ ATTACHED. THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA SHOULD BE ‘STUPID’ NO LONGER!” 

That statement, which came as the Senate was preparing to consider $95 billion in aid to Ukraine and Israel, was seen as a major obstacle to Republican support for the package. But Johnson saw it as an opportunity: By restructuring the deal as a loan, he could outflank Greene and get Trump on his side. That’s exactly what happened. “We’re thinking about making it in the form of a loan instead of just a gift,” Trump said in his joint press conference with Johnson during the speaker’s Mar-a-Lago visit.

All that explains why Greene’s anti-speaker efforts were already on the rocks coming into this week—and why she’d started to talk in fuzzier terms about whether she’d move forward with her motion to vacate at all. “His days as Speaker are numbered,” she wrote Sunday—but as Politico noted Monday, that threat was “much more nebulous than the one she previously made.”

But all that was before today’s statement from Jeffries and Co., which scrambles things considerably. 

The great destabilizing structure of the current Congress has always been the razor-thin Republican majority—which has shrunk further in recent weeks to a hilariously precarious one-seat margin. Greene already had two allies in her anti-Johnson crusade: libertarian contrarian Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and lurching white-nationalist crank Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona. But without further expansion of that coalition, Johnson wouldn’t have needed broad Democratic buy-in to neutralize the threat: It would have been enough for a small handful of centrist Dems to vote to save Johnson while couching their votes as a pure referendum on Greene. “I’m not going to let her do that,” Rep. Jared Moskowitz told MSNBC on Sunday. “We won’t even let her name a post office. We’re not going to let her take out the speaker.” 

Instead, Democrats are planning to support Johnson en masse. And that puts the fight right back in a place Greene is very comfortable having it. It’s no longer a weird, lonely crusade of her and a couple other cranks against Johnson, Trump, and their assembled media allies. Instead, it’s her and the MAGA movement against the dreaded pro-Ukraine “uniparty.” It wasn’t a surprise that Greene was hemming and hawing about forcing the Johnson vote before, and it isn’t a surprise that she’s leaping at the opportunity to force it now.

Does that make Jeffries and Co.’s announcement a strategic error? Shouldn’t they at least have waited for Greene to forge ahead with her motion before tipping their hand? Not from their strategic point of view. A Mike Johnson who had stared Greene down on his own terms—who had taken the internal Republican argument fight to her, and won—would have been a considerably empowered Mike Johnson. And why would Democrats want to see an empowered Republican speaker? 

By tying themselves to him now, Democrats can take credit for his survival and be seen by the public as acting like serious, responsible, institutionally-minded lawmakers. In a word, grownups. But not only that. They can also drive a fresh wedge between him and a MAGA base—not to mention a certain former president—whose deepest political principle is “if the Democrats are for it, we’re against it.” It’s the surest way to ensure Johnson still won’t get anything done this Congress without significant Democratic help.

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McConnell’s Would-Be Successors: We Love Kari Lake

The fellas who hope to be the next Republican Senate Majority Leader just can’t get enough of Kari Lake, per Axios: 

Republicans hoping to be the next Senate GOP leader are seeking favor with Arizona GOP candidate Kari Lake to boost their MAGA credentials, which is paying dividends for her campaign . . .

The two men currently vying to next lead Senate Republicans have checkered records with former President Trump and his allies, which could be a roadblock in their path to victory. But Lake has emerged as a key Trump proxy in the leadership race.

Sens. John Thune (R-S.D.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas), both running to be the next GOP leader, have each raised six figures in cash for the Lake campaign, a source familiar told Axios.

Lake boasts a rare combo of political characteristics that make her both deeply corrosive to America and deeply desirable as an ally in the internal GOP politics of the moment. She’s charismatic, sharp, great on camera. She’s beloved by the MAGA base thanks to her full-throated embrace of Trump (an affection he reciprocates), denunciations of the left, and public embrace of conspiracy theories about vaccines and elections. But importantly, she’s also no true believer in her own bromides against the establishment. When the establishment comes calling, she’s willing to deal. 

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Coal Magnates, Environmental Lawyers vs. the Uniparty

Stop what you’re doing and watch this ad from coal magnate, ex-con, and repeat West Virginia Senate gadfly candidate Don Blankenship: 

If you’re not inclined to watch (although I can’t stress enough that you should; it’s hard to get the full effect from print alone), here’s a transcript:

BLANKENSHIP: Hi, I’m Don Blankenship, candidate for the United States Senate, and I paid for this ad.

GRAVELLY-VOICED NARRATOR: Don Blankenship will tell you the honest truth.

CLIP OF ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Don Blankenship . . . he’s the most honest CEO in America. 

GRAVELLY-VOICED NARRATOR: Unfortunately, our government is not honest. Even the truth about the murders of Mr. Kennedy’s dad and uncle are kept hidden. They even refuse to keep Mr. Kennedy safe because he left the party. Your choice is simple. You can vote for more lies, or you can vote for: 

CLIP OF ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: —the most honest CEO in America. 

BLANKENSHIP: If they tell you I fell off the bed and hung myself, I didn’t.

Blankenship is a former coal-company CEO who spent a year in prison after an investigation into an explosion at one of his mines found he had flouted federal mine-safety standards. In 2018, he ran for Senate as a Republican (and uncorked a whole first round of wildly low-rent and highly watchable ads in the process; it was Blankenship who first called Mitch McConnell “Cocaine Mitch”). 

This time, though, he’s running as a Democrat, albeit a highly iconoclastic one. His ads routinely take potshots at Democratic progressives; in one spot, he denounces a Democratic party that “will not be relevant so long as it supports illegal immigration, drug trafficking, transgenders, and anti-Israel protests.” 

All of his ads end with that “If they tell you I fell off the bed and hung myself, I didn’t” line, by the way. It’s an increasingly popular line among people who style themselves dissidents, flattering themselves that powerful people may be trying to get rid of them soon. 

But what’s particularly notable is the RFK Jr. pull. It’s a genuine quote—but taken highly out of context. In January 2010, Blankenship, then CEO of Massey Energy, met Kennedy, then an environmental attorney, for a debate at the University of Charleston. The question under debate: the environmental impacts of mountaintop-removal coal mining.

Kennedy was withering toward Blankenship throughout the debate: “You look at the way that people are living in this state . . . The closer you live to a coal mine, the sicker you are. The morbidity and the mortality in this state, if you live near one of those mines—whether you’re a man, a woman, or children—you have a whole range of illnesses that you’re now subjected to.” He went on to talk about the perils of mining disasters to local residents—chilling comments in retrospect, considering that the mine collapse that would kill 29 miners and send Blankenship to prison would come just three months later. 

Anyway, here’s the Kennedy remark Blankenship’s ad carves its soundbite from: 

My question to you—and I know you’re an honest person, and two trial attorneys said to me, one thing about Don Blankenship, he’s an honest man. Two people who had deposed you. They said one thing about him, he’s the most honest CEO in America when it comes to answering questions about his company. I want to ask you this question: Is it possible to do mountaintop-removal mining without violating the law? 

“I doubt that it’s possible without having a single violation a single time,” Blankenship replied. “But if anybody can do it, this industry in West Virginia can do it.”

Obviously, Blankenship’s ad takes Kennedy’s backhanded compliment (if one can even call it that) way, way out of context. But what’s most striking is how the political upheavals of the intervening years would make Blankenship want to tie his own brand to Kennedy’s at all. 

A dirty baron of dirty energy and an environmental activist: It’d take a powerful unifying force to put these guys on the same page. But today, Blankenship and RFK Jr. represent the same slim coalition in U.S. politics: Hardcore iconoclasts who denounce all our political, economic, and cultural institutions as hopelessly corrupt. The political urge they represent is primal enough that it dissolves all questions of actual policy—presumably the two still have incredibly divergent visions of what U.S. prosperity would actually look like. But they’re united in their vision that what we have now is too intolerable to stand a moment longer.