Rep. Elise Stefanik, last seen lighting her political career on fire in a run for New York governor, has declared war on House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA). Why exactly I’m not entirely sure, other than she simply doesn’t like him. It sparked this deliciously petty but not inapt reply from what appears to have been one of Johnson’s top deputies.
Mr. Johnson declined to comment, as well. But a senior Republican congressional aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of prolonging an intraparty feud, said that after Mr. Johnson had provided Ms. Stefanik with office space and a budget for what the aide described as “a fake job and a fake title,” he would have expected her to be more gracious.
You’ll remember that Stefanik needed a fake job and title because she gave up her position to become President Trump’s UN Ambassador before he had to rescind the offer because he needed to find a drawer in which to stow former congressman-turned National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who more or less had to take the fall for the SignalGate scandal. The same New York Times article I quoted above notes that Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) is now also threatening to resign from Congress. The Bulwark has an article up entitled The GOP Women Are Humiliating Mike Johnson: Move Aside, Freedom Caucus. There’s a new House Republican insurgency in town. Get Mike Johnson a beta-blocker, stat!, you might say, or a few beta offensive lineman. (Give it a minute, you’ll get it.) There’s an air over the House Republican caucus that is both petty and baroque, some amalgam of late Soviet nomenklatura and Real Housewives franchise, rippling with disputes that manage to be byzantine and nasty while also somehow very low energy, bounded and almost inaudible despite the high octane visuals. And yes, in case you’re wondering, in the case of the Housewives franchise I’m talking about Johnson and the boys, not the women representatives tossing him around like a sad sack effigy.
The Times article suggests that the female representatives’ beef with Johnson is that he is even more explicitly and consciously patriarchal than most members of the GOP caucus, even frequently saying on the record that women’s brains can’t process information as efficiently as men and that they’re great cooks. Because of this, under his leadership, women in the caucus have been shut out of policy and strategy decisions. That seems highly plausible but also scarcely new. Who Mike Johnson is has been clear from Day One. The issue here is the unleashing of everything Trump’s iron grip has suppressed.
When a group is in danger it pulls together. But at a certain point the Titanic isn’t “in danger”; it’s sinking. And at that moment of crystallization one person looks at another and says, ‘I never liked you, motherfucker!’ and throws a punch. What else is there to do? You look at the person next to you and you either kiss them full on the mouth or punch them in the face. There’s no future and no consequences and no reason not to let it all hang out, get every suppressed urge out there. That is what is happening right now in the House GOP conference, though admittedly with more of the latter than the former — at least as far as we know.
This is the fallout of the November election and Tuesday’s special election in Tennessee, where the Democrat overperformed despite losing to her Republican opponent. GOP lawmakers seem to have accepted that their House majority is gone. So every restraint has disappeared, not against Donald Trump but against each other in the House.