Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast
Speaker Mike Johnson avoided a shutdown. He won’t avoid the conservative blowback.
After House Republicans ousted former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) in early October because he put a stopgap government funding bill on the House floor, Johnson isn’t at risk of losing his new job for doing the same thing.
But that doesn’t mean conservatives aren’t deeply disappointed that Johnson opted not to barrel toward a shutdown in some doomed gambit to extract spending cuts from Democrats.