Mike Johnson can succeed where Kevin McCarthy failed

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With last week's election of Mike Johnson as speaker of the House, the hard-right faction of the House Republican caucus has finally gotten its way. America is now poised for a catastrophic series of inter-branch battles that will push the economy and the political system to the brink.

Or is it? Johnson's first order of business was to outline a plan for dealing with the looming expiration of government funding authority on Nov. 18. His big idea is to kick the can down the road with a new continuing resolution that would keep the lights on until mid-January or maybe even April.

Granted, this is not exactly inspired leadership. And the House Sensationalist Caucus will continue to do its thing. Still, it does suggest a case for optimism about a Johnson speakership. Now that it has former Speaker Kevin McCarthy's scalp, the hard right may be willing to let Johnson do what he needs to do to have a successful term in office — even if what he wants to do is eerily similar to what McCarthy would have done.

Recall that McCarthy's rivals claimed they opposed a continuing resolution to keep the government open, offering instead a right-wing government funding bill full of cuts and extraneous policy considerations that the Senate and President Joe Biden would have to swallow or else face a government shutdown. Senate Republicans thought this was stupid. So did a critical mass of House Republicans.

So McCarthy, after playing out as much string as he possibly could, wrote a short-term continuing resolution with no money for Ukraine. Maybe he was hoping Senate Democrats would reject it, letting him get a government shutdown (what the far right said they wanted) while avoiding the blame (what his most vulnerable members wanted). But Democrats said yes, a shutdown was averted, and McCarthy was toppled by right-wingers angry that he had betrayed them.

All of this is to say that the troublemakers were, on some level, just making trouble. Or, to put it more charitably, their demand to stage a government shutdown was just a pretext. The rebels wanted McCarthy gone for whatever reason (people forget, but this wasn't the first time McCarthy's bid for speaker was shot down by conservatives), and this was the path they'd chosen to do it. The risk for America was always that a government shutdown would be the price they were willing to pay to get what they really wanted. Fortunately, it didn't come to that — and the demand for a shutdown seems to have gone the way of McCarthy.

Of course, there are still any number of ways things could go awry.

It is possible, for instance, that Johnson has read the landscape wrong, and the very same people who threw McCarthy overboard will do the same to him if he follows through on his plan. But that seems unlikely. Johnson explicitly laid out this plan in his candidacy letter, and the rightward faction was thrilled with his rise.

The bigger tripwire is the Biden administration's request for $106 billion related to Ukraine, Israel, Gaza and the southern U.S. border. Senate Republicans seem committed to pronouncing this plan dead and writing their own — but it would still be a plan with money attached. Things are different in the House, where the rightist faction objects to the idea of financial assistance for Ukraine. On Thursday, Johnson indicated that he wasn't necessarily opposed to more aid for Ukraine, but that any request would have to be considered separately.

A blowup over financial support to Ukraine would have big implications for the war. But it's unlikely to send shockwaves through the U.S. government. Democrats have already made it clear that, although they are committed to sending the assistance, they are not interested in shutting down the government over it as long as Republicans are willing to abide by the overall spending levels agreed to last June in the Fiscal Responsibility Act. Johnson hasn't committed to doing that, but his willingness to advance continuing resolutions to avoid a shutdown reveals he's not fighting too hard on this point.

Johnson, though unknown to most of the public, is well-liked by his colleagues. The far right retains the power to trip him up, but now that they have one of their own as speaker, they simply may not be motivated to do it. Maybe they are realizing that the only way to achieve hard-right policy goals is to win the 2024 election, and staging a shutdown would be counterproductive to that goal. When McCarthy made that point, they didn't want to listen. Now they do.

Or so we can hope.