Chapter 1: Why are Republican women frustrated with Speaker Mike Johnson?
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is resigning from Congress in January. And on her way out, she's been burning some bridges with President Trump, of course, but also with Speaker Mike Johnson.
You're seeing Republican women lash out directly at the speaker because he sidelines us and doesn't take us seriously.
MTG is reportedly plotting a long shot effort to remove Johnson from the speakership. She accuses him of, among other things, not having a plan to deal with a coming health care crisis. Millions of Americans are going to see their insurance premiums rise in the next few weeks as a result of the big, beautiful bill. Johnson says he does have a plan. She's just not privy.
Marjorie is not here in Washington. She's not on the committees of jurisdiction and she's not involved in those specific discussions, but she will be soon.
But the health care subsidies will almost certainly expire this year. Coming up on today explained why some GOP women are turning on the speaker.
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Chapter 2: What specific complaints do Marjorie Taylor Greene and Elise Stefanik have?
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Chapter 3: How are GOP women planning to challenge Mike Johnson's leadership?
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This is Today Explained.
I'm Noelle King, and the most comprehensive reporting that we've seen on Mike Johnson versus the ladies of the GOP came from Melanie Zanona. Melanie is a congressional correspondent at NBC.
So this was something that I noticed over the past few weeks. Now, to be fair, there has been broad frustrations in the entire Republican conference, which we can certainly talk about. But it was particularly notable that we were seeing some high-profile Republican women really speaking up and standing up against Speaker Mike Johnson, which we don't normally see.
So starting with Marjorie Taylor Greene, her complaints with Johnson are similar to what she's complaining about when it comes to Donald Trump. I do believe at this time that Republicans will lose the midterms. And I think that's unfortunate.
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Chapter 4: What impact will the expiration of health care subsidies have on Americans?
And I think economic populism is the way forward. And unfortunately, I don't see the Republican Party embracing that. She's extremely frustrated that they haven't been putting more bills on the floor that are actually related to some of the things that they campaigned on, particularly that affordability issue.
I don't think the president's team nor the speaker have told the president about the legislation that I've introduced, that actually much of it directly, literally, aligns with the agenda that he campaigned on, I campaigned on in 2024. Then there's Elise Stefanik. She really raised some eyebrows when she went on the record with some of her criticisms in a Wall Street Journal interview.
And her criticisms with Johnson was about his political acumen. And she says he's not a good strategist. She said that if a vote were held today, she doesn't think he would be elected speaker again, which is a pretty bold statement coming from someone on Johnson's own leadership team. For Anna Polina Luna, she's a little bit of a different case.
She's been advocating for specific pieces of bills or legislation that she wants to get to the floor. And she believes that Mike Johnson has made promises behind closed doors and then not kept those promises when it comes to actually putting those bills on the floor. And the prime example of this is a stock trading ban. That is something that she's been advocating for.
Chapter 5: What strategies are being discussed to address health care issues?
She does not want members of Congress to be able to trade stocks. There is huge bipartisan support for that bill. Johnson initially suggested that he would be willing to put a bill like that on the floor. But in Ana Paulina Luna's view, she believes that it's being slow walked.
I can tell you that I got a lot of pushback from leadership and not just leadership in itself, but I actually received calls from other members of Congress saying that, you know, what we were doing was going to hurt people. I was also told that I was putting the republic in jeopardy because I was going to cost us the midterms if I brought this to the floor.
Now, Johnson and his allies would say they've been busy, you know, trying to avoid a shutdown. But Anna Paulina was—Luda was so frustrated that she decided to start this discharge petition, which is this kind of procedural wonky term. But really what it means is it's a way to go over leadership's head and force bills to the floor without leadership's blessing. And so—
I described it in my piece for NBC News as a revolt of the Republican women. They're actually rebelling. It's not just, you know, frustrations being aired in TV interviews or print newspaper magazine interviews. It's also something that's being taken directly to Johnson and is having a real effect on the legislative floor and the legislative process.
It seems possible that some of Mike Johnson's comments in the past have opened him up to some of the criticism from his Republican women colleagues.
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Chapter 6: How is Speaker Mike Johnson responding to criticism from GOP women?
What are Mike Johnson's views on women and are they mainstream? How did we end up here?
Well, you know, one thing that did come up in my conversations with some of these Republican women is that he recently did a podcast with Katie Miller. That is Stephen Miller's wife. Stephen Miller, of course, is a White House aide. It was a much more casual setting. He was with his wife, Kelly, during the interview.
And, you know, men and women are different in this way, is that men can compartmentalize things.
Yeah, men's brains are like waffles. Yes. They have little compartments, and they can... So in this arena, like...
I'm compartmentalizing all these, you know, a myriad number of high-level, high-stress issues, nation-shaping. And I can just turn them off and sleep.
And he made an offhanded comment about how he would want Lisa McClain, that's the conference chair, the one woman in leadership, to be the one to cook his Thanksgiving dinner. Now, in his defense, Lisa McClain does talk a lot about cooking, and she likes to host a lot, and she kind of presents that sort of persona herself.
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Chapter 7: What are the potential consequences for Johnson's speakership?
But for some Republican women, that really rubbed them the wrong way. And so they took that as an example of perhaps Speaker Mike Johnson saying, looking at women in a different way. And you combine that with the fact that women feel frustrated about, you know, not being elevated and having this bottleneck in terms of the leadership.
And I think that is why you're seeing this explosion of frustration right now. How did Lisa McClain respond? Lisa McClain is very supportive of Speaker Mike Johnson. She put out a statement actually defending him. I've talked to her as well in the hallways. She says, I don't know where these rumors are coming from or who's the one pushing them. all of these stories that are coming out.
But I have seen nothing but respect for Mike Johnson. He listens to me. He treats me well. And so she actually was not rubbed the wrong way by those comments, which I do think is important to point out.
Chapter 8: How might the health care debate affect the Republican Party's future?
But that being said, you are the speaker. And if other Republican women are coming to you and saying they don't feel comfortable with rhetoric like that, that can be a problem for you as the speaker.
One of the less sympathetic responses I've seen to the Republican women who have been complaining is the Republican Party is very sexist. How did you guys not know that? You know, you're just you're just realizing what everybody else already knew. What what has gone on in the past?
Like, is there a measure of truth to the idea that the Republican Party traditionally sidelines women and nobody should be surprised by this?
Well, traditionally, the Republican Party did not put an emphasis on trying to elect women. And they always said, listen, we don't want to play identity politics. We just want the best candidate to win. But at some point, Republicans realized, hey, sometimes the best candidate is the woman.
I went to a number of women's groups and said, can you help us find folks? And they brought us whole binders full of women.
And they're not getting the same opportunities as the men, particularly in primaries. This is where it's a huge issue because women do have young kids and families, and they have bigger challenges to be able to run. It's very difficult to run a campaign. They need resources. They need the fundraising.
They need the sort of party structural tools and resources behind them in order to succeed in a primary to get over that finish line. And Republicans for a long, long time just were not placing an emphasis on that. But in recent years, in recent cycles, there was a recognition and Elise Stefanik actually played a huge part in this. I think we need to have a tone that reaches out to women.
And that's something that I've been very focused on. That they need to elect more Republican women and that women can actually flip key vulnerable seats, which they did. After 2018, we saw historic lows in terms of the numbers of Republican women represented. here in Congress. And they made a huge effort to recruit more women, to get them over the finish line in primaries. And guess what?
A lot of them ended up winning. A lot of them were responsible for flipping key seats in the following cycles. And so they did use that as a playbook going forward. But I think traditionally, Republicans have just been so scared of saying, you know, we're purposely trying to elect women. We don't play identity politics. That's what the Democrats do.
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