Mike Johnson’s days as speaker of the House are numbered. The only question is how long he will last.

A series of events in the past few weeks has undercut what little power Johnson ever had among his fellow Republicans in the House. GOP representatives – the group that he theoretically leads – are so angry that they publicly call him names. Republicans are using parliamentary procedures to get votes on bills that Johnson doesn’t want to bring to the floor.

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MAGA Republicans threaten to lay waste to Mike Johnson if he doesn’t keep all his promises

Incumbents panicking over the potential to lose their seats, in a Democratic landslide, are blaming Johnson for their problems. He has to make promises he must know he can’t keep to get bills passed. And Donald Trump is doing nothing to help Johnson in his time of need.

It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

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Johnson has always been a weak speaker. As a reminder, he got the job primarily because no one else was bland enough to win the requisite number of votes. Johnson was the fourth choice for the job. That he’s managed to hold onto his job for more than two years is a testament to the party’s unwillingness to go through the humiliation of another long, drawn-out search for a replacement that will satisfy both the far-right and the less far-right wings in the House.

Apparently, though, Johnson has infuriated enough people that he is barely holding onto his job. The far-right House members have never been fans, threatening him since day one. Despite Johnson’s impeccable credentials as a bigot and Christian nationalist, the extremists don’t think he is pushing their agenda hard enough.

Because the GOP holds such a slim majority in the House, a handful of dissident votes would cost Johnson the speakership. There have been past attempts. In May 2024, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) was booed off the House floor for trying to oust Johnson.

If she had only waited, she’d have had the support she needed to succeed.

“He certainly wouldn’t have the votes to be speaker if there was a roll-call vote tomorrow,” Rep. Elise Stefanik told the Wall Street Journal earlier this month. “I believe that the majority of Republicans would vote for new leadership. It’s that widespread.” Stefanik called Johnson a “political novice” unfit to be speaker. She’s angry that he pulled her nomination as ambassador to the United Nations to satisfy some personnel shuffling in the White House.

Usually, that kind of rhetoric would be a cloak for personal ambition. But Stefanik is running for governor of New York (very likely losing) and will be leaving Congress.

Johnson’s treatment of women in the House is, by most accounts, what you’d expect from a man who believes women should be subservient to men. Speaking anonymously, one female GOP representative slammed Johnson for refusing to treat women as equals.

“We aren’t taken seriously,” the representative told NBC News. “You have women who are very accomplished, very successful, who have earned the merit, who aren’t given the time of the day.” That attitude has led some incumbents to consider retirement – like Greene – while complicating efforts to recruit women as candidates.

It’s not just women heading for the door. A flood of GOP representatives are unhappy and leaving, especially when faced with brutal polls for Republican candidates everywhere. The count is over two dozen so far and likely to keep rising. The less extreme Republicans in swing districts are furious that Johnson hasn’t let them have a vote on extending subsidies for insurance premiums under Obamacare, knowing that they will be hammered during next year’s election cycle for supporting the cuts.

In the meantime, Republicans in the House are treating Johnson as a roadblock that they can go around. Johnson can determine what bills come to the floor for a vote, but through a process called a discharge petition, House members can bring a bill to the floor directly. There have been a record number of discharge petitions this year.

The most famous one was the petition to release the files related to convicted pedophile (and erstwhile Trump pal) Jeffrey Epstein. Johnson was so desperate to prevent that vote that he kept the House out of session for almost eight weeks during the government shutdown. He refused to swear in newly elected Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) for 50 days, knowing that she would be the final signature needed to force the vote.

House members steamed over Johnson’s tactic because other work should have been happening during their forced leave. In the end, Johnson burned his political capital for nothing, since Trump caved to pressure and announced that he supported the release of the files.

Other end runs around Johnson have been equally humiliating. With bipartisan support, the House passed a bill to protect some federal workers who are union members and another bill banning stock trading by members of Congress. Neither bill is going to pass the Senate, but Johnson earned a lot of enmity for blocking his party members from bringing the bill to the floor the usual way.

Not that that’s been working for Johnson anyway. He had to pull out all the stops to get the National Defense Authorization Act passed. The spending bill, which is marked by anti-trans bigotry, should have been an easy sell. Instead, the America-first contingent in the House hated spending money on foreign wars while the federal deficit grew. That led to promises from Johnson that he may not be able to keep.

If Johnson was looking for backup from the president, he’s learning that loyalty is a one-way street for Trump. Trump hasn’t spent any energy on a health care bill that Republicans could use to mitigate the cuts that they voted for. Indeed, at times, Trump has seemed to go out of his way to embarrass Johnson.

Trump didn’t inform the speaker before he pardoned Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), a Democrat indicted on conspiracy and bribery charges (which Cuellar denies). Republicans had considered Cuellar’s seat a good prospect to flip, but not anymore. Trump had hoped Cuellar, a conservative with an anti-trans voting record, would become a Republican, but Cuellar said he will remain a Democrat.

“I didn’t know anything about it,” Johnson was forced to admit.

The main issue before Johnson now is how long until he’s no longer the speaker of the House. It’s possible that Republicans, knowing they will lose the House anyway, will decide not to go through another demeaning exercise of trying (and failing) to find a new speaker. On the other hand, they may just want to kick Johnson out for the sheer pleasure of it.

Either way, Johnson will be out one way or another. The only question is whether it’s due to voters angry with Republicans in the House or Republicans in the House angry with one of their own.

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