Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
House Speaker Mike Johnson had several bills teed up for a vote this week, but he was forced to scrap his plans due to an uprising from several conservative members.
The details of this specific revolt are unique — Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna is saying she will shut down the House floor until the Senate passes the SAVE America Act election bill — but the broader trend is very familiar.
We have seen this happen again and again (and again and again and again and again and again) in the last two years, as Johnson’s plans get suddenly waylaid when the House Freedom Caucus decides they’d like to make a stink. Votes get canceled. One-half of the legislative branch freezes in place. And Republican lawmakers snipe at each other until a fix is agreed to. (In this case, one moderate House Republican said that Luna holding up the “House floor business over what the Senate won’t do is like beating your dog when your neighbor doesn’t mow his lawn”).
How did the House Republican Conference get to be this way, and is there any way to put it back together again?
There’s no one better to answer those questions than John Leganski, who spent more than a decade as a close aide to former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, running his floor operation. Leganski was by his boss’ side during perhaps the most chaotic moment in recent congressional history: McCarthy’s 2023 speakership election, which took several days and 15 ballots, longer than any speaker election since 1860.
Leganski is out with a new book, “Glory, Grief, and the Gavel,” recounting his time on the Hill. He traces the House GOP’s turbulence through the days of John Boehner and Paul Ryan, all the way to McCarthy’s 2023 election and eventual ouster later that year. If you watched any of the 2023 balloting, then you remember how dramatic it was from afar. Leganski does a great job bringing that drama to life, while sprinkling in tons of behind-the-scenes details from the contest. It’s why the book is causing “so much angst in the House Republican leadership,” per Punchbowl News.
In a new installment of the Wake Up To Politics Book Club, I speak with Leganski about:
How the House GOP became so ungovernable
What changes can be made to fix it
The secret initiation process the House Freedom Caucus uses for new members
The new House GOP rebels moving up through the ranks
Why he thinks Hakeem Jeffries is more of a thermometer than a thermostat
How Trump gets House Republicans in line
The stories you read that have actually been planted by congressional offices
And more
Everyone can watch the first part of the video, but the full thing above — and transcript below — are available to paid subscribers. If you watch Congress closely, or want to better understand how the institution works, I think you’ll enjoy the conversation.
Transcript
GF: John, thank you so much for being here.
JL: Gabe, thanks for having me on, man. I appreciate it.
GF: Thank you. So, John, it’s 2026. The speaker’s election was three years ago, just about. As you write in the book, there’s not too many books about speaker elections. We have a lot of books about presidential elections, not too many about speaker elections — although they obviously can be quite consequential for our political process. So tell us a little bit why you decided to write this book. Why now? What can the 2023 speaker’s election tell us, three years later, that you think is important to return to and how do you think we still are seeing its shadow in our current political ecosystem?
