The big story out of last week’s House Republican retreat is the ongoing GOP civil war, and Speaker Mike Johnson is proving to be a pathetic excuse for a general.
Last week’s planned two-day retreat was supposed to be a policy session for members to map out their strategy for the general election. It ended up being a one-day retreat when the majority of the GOP conference decided to stay away. The only theme that emerged was Johnson’s pleas for the team to play nice with each other and stop getting involved in primary challenges against incumbents.
“I’ve asked them all to cool it,” Johnson told CNN. “I am vehemently opposed to member-on-member action in primaries because it’s not productive. And it causes division for obvious reasons, and we should not be engaging in that.”
“So I’m telling everyone who’s doing that to knock it off,” Johnson added. “And both sides, they’ll say, ‘Well, we didn’t start it, they started it.’”
If you needed to know how ill-equipped Johnson is to lead in any of this, there you go: He’s calling out “both sides.”
Johnson is seemingly so terrified of the extremist Freedom Caucus and Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz—the chaos agent most responsible for ousting former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy—that he refuses to single them out for the mess they’ve made of the House.
Meanwhile, Gaetz was thumbing his nose at the leader of his conference. While Johnson was preaching at and scolding his members to play nice, Gaetz was in Texas campaigning for a MAGA challenger to GOP Rep. Tony Gonzales. He bragged about how he was bucking Johnson before the retreat even began.
“While the rest of my colleagues on Thursday will be on retreat, I’m going to be on the advance,” he crowed. “I will go to any place in this country where we can pick up seats, where we have Republicans who are not acting in adherence with our values and our principles,” Gaetz told CNN. “Let the battle begin.”
Gaetz also mocked Johnson’s pleas for unity in a tweet last week, responding to an Axios story by highlighting the Republican split on aid to Ukraine.
“House GOP leaders plead with Republicans to stop campaigning against each other,” read the Axios tweet.
“In other news—Grassroots Republicans plead with House GOP leaders to stop sending money to Ukraine,” Gaetz wrote.
Johnson is such a weak leader that some of his own allies are ignoring his pleas and campaigning against Freedom Caucus members who voted to oust McCarthy, including Reps. Bob Good of Virginia and Eli Crane of Arizona.
It seems the House speaker brought a squirt gun to this battle for the soul of the Republican Party.
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