Catie Edmondson

speaker

234 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 17 Oct

Catie Edmondson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Oct 2025 with 1.

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The Daily · Republicans Take Control of Congress — and Harris Certifies Her Own Loss · 7 Jan 2025 podcast

Johnson this whole time was sitting very stoically in his seat on the House floor. But before they even, I think, got to the last set of names on the roll call, he was out of his seat and he was over talking to some of these defectors.

And that set off a very familiar scene on the House floor, which was the Republican leader haggling and negotiating in real time with these holdouts for their votes to win the gavel.

Well, it looks like he's going to lose reelection. And not only that, if the vote had been called with those lawmakers casting their votes or refusing to vote, it looked as if the gavel could fall into Hakeem Jeffrey's hands, the Democratic leader, because the person who wins the speakership is the person who wins the most votes. Oh, wow.

So this was going to be a huge problem for not only Mike Johnson personally, but potentially Republicans at large. So Mike Johnson is negotiating. He's talking with these lawmakers. And we see those six lawmakers who refused to vote suddenly change their votes and cast them for Johnson.

Well, he still has a big problem on his hands because, again, he can only lose one Republican. And at this point in time, there are three Republicans voting against him. Now, his allies always saw Thomas Massey, the congressman from Kentucky, as being immovable, someone they were not going to be able to flip.

And so Johnson's focus turns to the two other holdouts, Keith Self of Texas and Ralph Norman of South Carolina. And he'd been talking with them on the House floor, but he kind of whisks them off the House floor into this ante room. And that's when Congresswoman Nancy Mace of South Carolina intervenes. And who does she have on the phone but President Trump?

He apparently was in the middle of a golf game down in Florida. And he spoke with Johnson, Norman, and Self all on speakerphone in this ante room. And we know what his message was because Ralph Norman and Keith Self told us afterwards.

His message was, look, Mike is the only guy who has the votes to become speaker, right? You need to do this for me. We need to get on with it, right? We have a trifecta. This type of opportunity is a rare one. We need to seize it. We need to get going, right? And it sounds like neither man really pushed back much on this.

Ralph Norman told us that his response to Trump was, well, you know, we just want to make sure that Mike is the person who's going to get everything that you want. We want to make sure you get your deal. And that's really where our trepidations are.

By the end of the call, Keith Self and Ralph Norman walk back out onto the House floor. Mr. Norman Johnson. Mr. Self Johnson. Mr. Norman. and they changed their votes.

And so Johnson was able to successfully win the speakership on that first ballot.

But minutes after Johnson is officially reelected, the House Freedom Caucus, which is sort of the organizing organ for a lot of these guys, it's that ultra conservative block of lawmakers, they send him a public letter and it begins, today we voted for Mike Johnson for Speaker of the House because of our steadfast support of President Trump.

We did this despite our sincere reservations regarding the Speaker's track record over the past 15 months.

Yeah, exactly. And to send this minutes after he wins reelection, after they subjected him to this kind of embarrassing spectacle on the House floor, right, is really to assert their own power and to say, you need to listen to us.

Yeah, I mean, I think we got a preview of a lot of potential collisions to come in this Congress, both in this vote and in the past couple of weeks, right? In this letter that the House Freedom Caucus sent to Johnson, they enumerated a list of demands. And these demands are going to be incredibly hard for Johnson to act on.

One of them is that they can't raise the debt limit, which is something that President Trump has requested lawmakers do without enacting deep spending cuts that would offset their increases to the nation's borrowing limit. Another one is that if you're going to implement a program as costly as mass deportations, then you need to cut other government programs somewhere else.

And so what you have essentially is these lawmakers saying that they want to enact Trump's agenda, but they want to do so in a way that is going to be almost impossible to push through the House when it comes to achieving these types of fiscal goals. And so I think that's partly why they're looking to Mike Johnson. Congress, of course, has the power of the purse.

I think they're looking for him to come up with some of those answers to fill in some of the blanks here. But I also think it's just a fact that they inherently understand that Trump himself doesn't really have these same concerns about fiscal responsibility that they themselves share.

I think that's right. And look, I think more cynically, you also just have to face the reality that he is a politically safer target to vent frustrations at than Trump is.

Well, I think the entire exercise that we went through on Friday was really conservatives putting Mike Johnson and his leadership on notice, right? The idea that he really is going to have to answer to them. He is going to have to be responsive to their demands. And I think, look, you could say, hasn't that been true for the entire last year of Mike Johnson's speakership?

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