Johnson could get help from Democrats who refused to save McCarthy -

When House members vote whether to retain Mike Johnson as their speaker in the coming days, he will receive something not granted to his predecessor Kevin McCarthy: Democratic salvation.

That decision can be boiled down to the inverse of an old saying: The devil the Democrats barely know (Johnson) has been deemed more trustworthy than the devil they know quite well (McCarthy).

Johnson (R-La.) remains a question mark to most Democrats, having claimed the job after less than seven relatively obscure years in Congress. McCarthy (R-Calif.), first elected to the House in 2006, came to the speaker’s office in January 2023 as an open book, to Democrats and Republicans alike, well known after a dozen years as a member of the GOP leadership who liked to organize bipartisan workouts and social outings.

Yet Johnson’s fate has little of the drama that preceded the McCarthy vote in October because Democrats — guided by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) — have decided to spare Johnson.

They will provide whatever votes are needed, maybe a good bit more, to sideline the bid by a trio of extreme-right Republicans who want to expel Johnson as speaker.

Their rage peaked after Johnson relied on Democratic votes — including on procedural motions that always pass with just majority party votes — to approve a $95 billion national security package, including $61 billion for Ukraine’s defenses. Johnson also angered them in March by passing a full-year government funding package at the levels originally negotiated last year between President Biden and McCarthy, also relying heavily on Democratic votes.

Given the narrow margins, if Johnson loses more than a handful of Republicans on this motion, his fate rests in Democratic hands, just as it did for McCarthy on Oct. 3.

Back then Democrats stuck to the custom in which the minority party does not cast votes to help the opposing speaker.

“I don’t like to kick people when they’re down. And so, you know, that happened, and I had a good relationship with him. But the caucus made a decision,” Jeffries said of his refusal to back McCarthy.

In an interview Wednesday, he offered his most detailed explanation of why McCarthy was not worthy of the same dispensation that will be given to Johnson, if needed.

What little Democrats know of Johnson begins with his bid to help Donald Trump’s failed effort to overturn the 2020 election. But Democrats also see a slight, important political evolution over the last couple of months that demonstrated some political courage, even if it took longer than they felt was necessary to reach some of these calls.

In their old friend McCarthy, Democrats saw little of the traditional Reagan-era conservative they knew a decade ago and instead began to view him as someone just trying to cling to power.

Even McCarthy’s final offer last fall — a “clean” extension of funding for federal agencies, averting an imminent shutdown — was seen through the Democratic lens as a Trojan horse.

McCarthy’s move effectively cast aside a bipartisan Senate bill to keep the government open that also included about $6 billion for Ukraine, meant as a symbolic down payment on the much bigger package coming later.

Once the House passed McCarthy’s stopgap funding bill, lasting just 47 days, he held a valedictory news conference during which he demanded that Biden and Democrats agree to strong border security measures to receive any money to defend Ukraine against the Russian invasion.

Jeffries remains bitter about that.

“The decision was, we’re going to pull Ukraine funding, block the Senate from doing its bipartisan work, and try to extract an extreme ransom demand from responsible Democrats and traditional Republicans related to America’s national security, in exchange for right-wing border policy,” Jeffries said Wednesday.

Jeffries also cited a line about how McCarthy told House Republicans in a closed-door meeting Sept. 30 that they should get ready “to jam the Senate.”

It was the last straw of what Democrats considered months of backtracking from bipartisan deals.

In May 2023, after weeks of negotiations, McCarthy reached a deal with Biden to raise the Treasury’s borrowing authority, in exchange for some modest conservative wins imposing fiscal restraints on spending.

Biden’s top advisers viewed McCarthy as an honest broker in those talks and, to this day, don’t disparage him in public or private.

But a rump group of far-right Republicans tried to block that deal every way they could, including opposing the rule vote that is needed to pass to set terms for debating a bill. In a historic move, Jeffries blessed the Biden-McCarthy deal and several dozen Democrats approved the procedural vote, leading to the bill’s overwhelming passage with majorities in both caucuses.

Within two weeks that far-right group started blocking other procedural votes, and McCarthy backtracked from the spending outline he had agreed to with the president.

He ditched other bipartisan deals, such as the annual Pentagon policy bill, and in September he announced a formal impeachment inquiry into Biden that has, so far, little to show for it.

“Agreements were breached,” Jeffries said.

That series of events left the overwhelming majority of Democrats with no appetite for saving McCarthy from the very same forces to which he kept kowtowing.

A small group of centrist Democrats was willing to help McCarthy against foes in his own party, but it would have required a concession greater than just keeping the government open for less than seven weeks.

McCarthy never asked for help, anyway, and on Oct. 3, all Democrats and eight Republicans voted against him, making him the first speaker ever ejected midterm.

It then took three weeks for Republicans to choose Johnson, as more than a dozen others raised their hand for the job, only to get rejected.

Do Democrats regret ousting McCarthy and elevating a more conservative, more Trump-loving Republican? No.

From the moment McCarthy first issued his border-Ukraine demand on Sept. 30, everything played out exactly as they feared: another hostage-taking moment in which a small band of far-right Republicans blocked the will of an overwhelming majority in Congress.

All the drama of the subsequent fall, winter and early spring — which Jeffries characterized as unnecessary — had its roots in that Sept. 30 move.

“To me, that’s the entire arc of the story,” Jeffries said.

After that border-Ukraine demand, a bipartisan Senate group spent four months haggling over a fairly strict deal. While Senate GOP leaders endorsed the effort, Trump declared his opposition and the border deal fell apart.

The Senate responded by passing the security-only bill, without any immigration measures, and for more than two months, Johnson waited and waited to call the vote.

Johnson, 52, and Jeffries, 53, served together for six years on the Judiciary Committee but did no meaningful work with each other. In their first speaker-leader get-together, Johnson reminded Jeffries, literally chapter and verse, of the first time they met each other.

It came at a bipartisan prayer breakfast, where Jeffries had been invited to speak and offer up his favorite scripture. Johnson remembered it years later — Luke 8:23-26, about Jesus calming a storm on a lake when his disciples feared they would drown.

The duo have since bonded over coming of age in different segments of the Baptist church. Johnson worshiped in a Southern, heavily White evangelical church and Jeffries grew up attending one of Brooklyn’s most prominent Black churches.

As it became clear that Johnson would face a similar revolt as McCarthy, Jeffries started holding the same small discussions that his leadership team held in September. Should they save Johnson?

The decision was much easier.

Johnson had broken with the far-right flank in ways that McCarthy wouldn’t. Johnson supported the broad funding bill at the previously agreed-upon levels, passed a Pentagon policy bill and, finally, got the Ukraine funding included in the broad national security bill — all with a large bloc of Democratic votes.

Essentially the new speaker was backing up the handshake deals that the old speaker had made and then retreated from.

Could it have gone differently for McCarthy with the Democrats? Most likely, yes.

If McCarthy had passed a government funding resolution on Sept. 30 that included Ukraine funding, Democrats probably would have taken that as a signal that he was willing to live up to his spending deal with Biden and fully support Ukraine.

“It may have been evaluated differently,” Jeffries said.

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