House Democrats held a closed-door caucus meeting on Tuesday morning and decided to back a motion to table any efforts to depose Republican Speaker Mike Johnson.
“We will vote to table Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Motion to Vacate the Chair. If she invokes the motion, it will not succeed,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.), Minority Whip Katherine Clark (Mass.), and Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar (Calif.) said in a statement.
The unprecedented move by the Democrats to save the job of an opposing speaker will raise questions about just exactly who Johnson will be working for.
For her part, Greene has now decided to bring the motion to vacate the chair to the floor for a vote.
“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,” Greene said. “I’m a big believer in recorded votes because putting Congress on record allows every American to see the truth and provides transparency to our votes.”
“Americans deserve to see the Uniparty on full display. I’m about to give them their coming out party!” she added.
Technically, the Democrats won't be voting to keep Johnson in office, only to table Greene's resolution to vacate. “None of the discussion that we had in caucus was about saving Mike Johnson,” Rep. Aguilar told reporters. “The underlying motion to vacate was not discussed. The motion to table was.”
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In addition to Greene, there are two other Republicans who will support her motion. Reps. Thomas Massie (Ky.) and Paul Gosar (Ariz.) have both co-sponsored the resolution. This means that technically, even if every other Republican voted to keep Johnson in the speaker's chair, he would still be cashiered because of the GOP's one-vote majority.
However, that scenario would only play out if Democrats voted against Johnson en masse, which is the usual outcome of the motion to vacate in the past. Most recently, every Democrat voted to kick former Rep. Mike McCarthy from office last October.
It does not appear that will be the case this time.
During Tuesday’s Democratic caucus meeting, Jeffries gauged where rank-and-file members stood on whether to table any attempt to boot Johnson. House Democrats had seemed inclined to vote to throw out the speaker-deposing motion in a closed-door conference meeting Tuesday morning, according to four people familiar with the discussions. Some voiced their objections, like Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), who was reluctant to help Johnson as an architect of legal efforts to overturn the 2020 election. But even she indicated that she'd be a team player, according to a person in the room.
Although Democratic leadership has made their position clear, Jeffries told his caucus members to vote their own conscience, according to that person in the room. Jeffries did not indicate during their discussion that leadership would send a statement taking a formal position on whether to save Johnson, according to one Democratic member in the meeting who asked for anonymity to speak freely.
“It’s not the time,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) said Monday in reference to Greene's motion to vacate. “Although I’m profoundly frustrated, disappointed, and disgruntled, it’s not the time.”
Greene’s vow to bring her motion to the floor for a vote comes after the congresswoman declined to lay out a timeline for her ouster effort, leading some to believe that she would not follow through with her threat.
Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.), who often criticizes GOP leadership, told reporters Monday night “I don’t think it’s gonna come up” when asked about the motion to vacate.
Nick Dyer, Greene's spokesperson, told Politico on Sunday night that “anyone who is saying she is backing down is high, drunk, or simply out of their mind."
But the Democrat's unprecedented move to support Johnson makes Greene's motion moot.
