News

Democrats, Johnson told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt last week, “move in a herd” and “act like a union” following their leader because there’s no diversity of opinion causing them to stray. Their groupthink could even be described as the behavior of “socialists,” he asserted. Republicans, however, can’t be forced to unite because they’re “rugged individualists.”

That’s one way of putting it. What Johnson didn’t articulate was how a rowdy bunch of flamethrowers on his right flank — roughly 15 lawmakers, many of them members of the vocal Freedom Caucus — has pretty much sabotaged any hope of a conservative legislative agenda this Congress. These hard-liners have refused to compromise on issues ranging from immigration legislation to government spending and foreign aid for Ukraine, and in the process they have yielded power to a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers.

This stubborn adherence to ideological purity is causing the hard-liners to lose leverage in a House where the GOP has just a two-vote majority.

Given the threat looming over Johnson and their inability to compromise, Republicans will probably resort to passing noncontroversial legislation that doesn’t rankle their conference, while also prioritizing possibly cutting federal funds to universities and piecing together an “election integrity” bill that Johnson and former president Donald Trump floated earlier this month. (Voting by undocumented migrants is already illegal in the United States.)

But Congress must reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration by May 11 and fund the government for the 2025 fiscal year while reauthorizing a farm bill by Sept. 30. Given how the far right’s unrealistic demands to curtail spending plagued the last spending process, it’s unlikely that Republicans can notch aggressively conservative wins this time around.