Just minutes after Speaker Mike Johnson could exhale, having put down a short-lived conservative revolt and won re-election to his post on Friday, hard-right lawmakers sent him a letter.
It was not congratulatory.
They had only voted for him, they wrote, “because of our steadfast support of President Trump and to ensure the timely certification of his electors.”
“We did this despite our sincere reservations regarding the speaker’s track record over the past 15 months,” lawmakers in the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus continued, appending a list of three major complaints about Mr. Johnson and seven policy dictates they demanded he adopt.
Welcome to the 119th Congress.
“I just expect intramural wrestling matches to be kind of the norm,” Representative Mark Amodei, Republican of Arizona, said as he walked off the House floor after Mr. Johnson’s whipsaw election to the speakership.
Ever since he ascended to the top job in the House after many of those same conservatives ousted his predecessor, Mr. Johnson has had one of the hardest jobs in Washington. Now, with total Republican control of government and President-elect Donald J. Trump’s enormous domestic agenda at stake, he is facing his toughest test yet.
Mr. Johnson will be responsible for pushing through Mr. Trump’s economic plans, including one or more huge bills that lawmakers say they want to simultaneously increase the nation’s borrowing limit, extend the tax cuts Mr. Trump signed into law in 2017, cut federal spending, and put in place a wide-ranging immigration crackdown.
At the same time, he will be dealing with a mercurial president who has already displayed his penchant for squashing congressional negotiations and inserting new demands at the 11th hour. And he will do so while trying to corral an unruly group of lawmakers who, despite their reverence for Mr. Trump, have already shown their willingness to buck him on key votes, and who care little about the political fallout of stirring up drama within the party.
Within weeks, Mr. Johnson’s majority will shrink smaller still. He is losing two reliable Republican votes, Representatives Elise Stefanik of New York and Michael Waltz of Florida, who are leaving the House to work in the Trump administration, meaning he will only be able to afford a single defection on fraught votes.
On top of all of it are towering expectations about what Mr. Trump can accomplish with a Republican trifecta.
“I never said any of the other things that we’re going to do are going to be easy; they’re actually going to be very hard,” Representative Carlos Gimenez, Republican of Florida, said. “But we have to do it for the American people. The American people expect us to get things accomplished, and I think that’s going be the driving force. Every once in a while, we’re going to take a hard vote.”
Mr. Johnson’s allies like to say never to bet against him, a refrain they reprised after the speaker, a Louisiana Republican, was re-elected after a single, if tortured, ballot on Friday.
But it was clear that the spat on the House floor over Mr. Johnson’s ascension to the speakership was only the opening salvo in a fight brewing over the tax, budget and immigration legislation Republicans were preparing to pass.
Chief among the demands that the House Freedom Caucus issued on Friday was that the bill “not increase federal borrowing” — a move Mr. Trump has called upon House Republicans to approve — “before real spending cuts are agreed to and in place.”
They also complained that Mr. Johnson had failed to promise to ensure that “any reconciliation package reduces spending and the deficit in real terms with respect to the dynamic score of tax and spending policies under recent growth trends.”
Such demands will almost certainly set up a bitter fight among House Republicans over how to structure what is supposed to be Mr. Trump’s landmark legislation. Extending the tax cuts Mr. Trump signed into law in 2017 is estimated to cost roughly $4 trillion alone. Offsetting those cuts — as well as any immigration measures that Republicans are also clamoring to include — would tee up deep spending cuts that could run into a buzz saw from more moderate Republicans, who are sure to have their say.
Already some mainstream conservatives who just won tough re-election battles in swing districts, preserving the House Republican majority, have vented frustration with their hard-line colleagues.
“It angers the 95 percent of us that 5 percent are doing this thing to Mike Johnson — and to the whole conference; who are they?” Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska said. “We’re the 95 percent, and these guys act like they’re some House of Lords or something of the conference. And we don’t like that.”
“We have had our fill of these guys,” he added. “Most of us don’t want to work with them, we don’t want to work on their legislation, because it’s all about them.”
That may suit them just fine, but it will only make Mr. Johnson’s job of cobbling together a Republican majority for Mr. Trump’s priorities more difficult.
Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina, one of the two Republicans who initially opposed Mr. Johnson for speaker on Friday on the House floor, only to change his vote, told reporters that he felt his message about the tax and budget bill — that it could not end up costing taxpayers money — had been received.
“I think Mike Johnson knows now, that’s not going to be a reality,” Mr. Norman said, adding that he respected how the speaker had handled his concerns.
“He said, ‘Look, if I don’t perform the way I say I’m going to perform, and push the things that you’re saying, put me out,’” Mr. Norman continued. “He said, ‘I never thought I would have this job anyway.’”
Karoun Demirjian and Maya C. Miller contributed reporting.
