Speaker Johnson begins fight for the House gavel promising to be Trump's 'quarterback'

WASHINGTON -- Speaker Mike Johnson is beginning the hard fight for his gavel, a weeks-long campaign that starts Wednesday during internal House Republican leadership elections and will establish the new power centers in Congress for a Washington dominated by President-elect Donald Trump.

Johnson and his leadership team are all working behind the scenes to shore up support to stay on the job. While Johnson has no serious challenger, he faces dissent within his ranks, particularly from hard-right conservatives and the Freedom Caucus withholding their votes as leverage to extract promises ahead.

The speaker is expected to host Trump ahead of voting, presenting a unified front.

“This leadership will hit the ground running to deliver President Trump’s agenda,” Johnson said Tuesday on the Capitol steps as lawmakers returned to Washington.

It’s been a remarkable political journey for Johnson, the accidental speaker who rose as a last, best choice to replace ousted former speaker Kevin McCarthy more than a year ago and quickly set course by positioning himself alongside Trump and leading Republicans during the elections.

As Johnson tells it, Trump is the “coach” and he is the “quarterback” as their GOP team prepares to run the plays in the new year.

Johnson has embraced Trump's agenda of mass deportations, tax cuts, gutting the federal workforce and a more muscular U.S. image abroad. Together they have been working on what the speaker calls an “ambitious” 100-days agenda hoping to avoid what he called the mistakes of Trump's first term when Congress was unprepared and wasted “precious time.”

“We will be ready on day one,” Johnson said.

While Johnson expects to lead the House in unified government, with Trump in the White House and Republicans having seized the Senate majority, the House is expected to remain narrowly split, even as House control remains undecided with final races particularly in California still too early to call.

But the problems that come with a slim House majority and plagued Johnson's first year as speaker when his own ranks routinely revolted over his plans are likely to spill into the new year, with a potential fresh round of chaotic governing.

Johnson needs just a simple majority in Wednesday's closed-door voting to win the GOP nomination to become speaker. But he will need majority support of the full House, 218 votes, to actually take hold of the gavel on Jan. 3, when the new Congress convenes and conducts the election for its speaker. It took McCarthy some 15 rounds of voting in a weeklong election to win the gavel in 2023.

Trump has made Johnson's problems more complicated by tapping House Republicans for his administration, reducing the numbers further. Some Republicans want the House leadership elections postponed until control of the House is fully decided.

Still, with Trump in the White House, the speaker may enjoy a period of goodwill from his own ranks as Republicans are eager to disrupt the norms of governing and institutionalize Trump's second-term agenda.

“His challenge is what it’s always been,” Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., a member of the Freedom Caucus, said of Johnson.

But he said, “With Trump in charge, it’ll be easier for him to deliver.”

Conservatives have been discussing whether to field their own candidate as a signal to Johnson as they push their own priorities, using the same tactic they did with McCarthy to force the speaker into concessions, particularly on steeper budget cuts.

As Johnson begins the budget process for next year, including using a so-called budget reconciliation process that makes it easier in unified government to push Trump's agenda through the House and Senate on simple majority votes, conservatives want him to load up those packages with their own policy priorities.

Democrats, who lent Johnson a hand at governing multiple times in Congress — supplying the votes needed to keep the federal government funded and turn back an effort by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to bounce him from office — are unlikely to help him in the new year.

“Voters voted for them,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “Let’s see what they do.”

It's not just the speaker election Wednesday, but Republicans will also determine their down-ballot leadership.

Majority Leader Steve Scalise, also of Louisiana, and GOP Whip Tom Emmer of Minnesota, are expected to sail to their reelections in leadership.

The No. 4 position, the House GOP conference chair, is the most contested with Trump's decision to tap Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York as his ambassador to the United Nations. Her departure opens up the post that is being contested by several GOP lawmakers.

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Associated Press writers Kevin Freking and Farnoush Amiri contributed to this report.