When Rep. Mike Johnson became speaker of the House in late October 2023, many observers expressed their condolences. He had gone from comfortably occupying a low rung on House Republicans’ leadership ladder to having to wrangle the narrowest and most fractious majority in living memory. His predecessor, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, had struggled from the first day of the 118th Congress to see how he might try to govern with the Democrat-controlled Senate and President Joe Biden while somehow remaining acceptable to his party’s angry right flank.
Philip Wallach is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of "Why Congress.”
