Speaker Johnson Defiant: ‘I’m Not Resigning’ | EUROtoday

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), going through renewed threats to his management, mentioned that he won’t step down and that he sees himself as a “wartime speaker.”

Johnson’s remarks got here as House Republicans have been attempting to place collectively a plan to vote on 4 high-priority objects — help for Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan and a catch-all invoice of different nationwide security-related provisions — with out fracturing the occasion additional.

Opponents of a measure to replenish the U.S.′ personal weapons shares, and thus enable extra unused weapons in storage to be despatched to Ukraine’s army, have threatened to oust Johnson.

“I am not resigning and it is in my view an absurd notion that someone would bring a vacate motion. We are here simply here trying to do our jobs,” Johnson mentioned at a press convention following a Tuesday morning House GOP assembly.

The menace to Johnson’s maintain on the speaker’s gavel grew on Tuesday when Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), a far-right libertarian House Republican, mentioned on social media he would help an effort by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) to vote to toss Johnson.

“He should pre-announce his resignation (as [former GOP Speaker John] Boehner did), so we can pick a new Speaker without ever being without a GOP Speaker,” Massie wrote.

Massie posted that Johnson mentioned on the closed-door assembly he wouldn’t resign. “I said to him that he is the only one who can prevent us from going through what happened last fall,” Massie mentioned, referring to the three weeks the House was unable to contemplate any payments as Republicans struggled to discover a new chief, after then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy was booted from the publish.

Dissatisfaction with Johnson’s management has grown since he changed McCarthy. At the highest of the checklist of issues his opponents level to is the deal to fund the federal government by way of September, a cut price that supplied Democrats with a lot of the spending they wished and Republicans with just a few smaller victories.

He’s additionally introduced Democratic-supported payments to the ground to allow them to be accredited with out modification so long as they get a supermajority of votes. And he supported the controversial renewal final week of a 9/11-era spying provision that a number of lawmakers in his occasion, together with many Democrats, opposed.

Republicans have additionally been unable to get the Biden administration to do a lot on immigration, which has been their situation for approving any additional Ukraine help.

Greene has but to name for a vote on Johnson’s future and described her movement to vacate the speaker’s chair as extra of a warning when she first filed it in March. It’s unclear if she has sufficient votes for it to succeed, nonetheless ― although Johnson would have solely two GOP votes to spare earlier than needing to show to Democrats for help.

Johnson mentioned Tuesday he was unconcerned in regards to the menace and pressured the necessity for occasion unity as Congress offers with varied crises overseas.

“I regard myself as a wartime speaker. In a literal sense, we are [at war]. I knew that when I took the gavel. I didn’t anticipate this would be an easy path,” Johnson mentioned.

“The way we get through that is we show unity. We explain how we have answers to all these great challenges. We have those answers. We shouldn’t get in the way of ourselves.”