The president and newly elected House speaker, on opposite sides of most issues, will need to find common ground on government spending and foreign aid
By Nicole Gaudiano
President Joe Biden and newly minted House Speaker Mike Johnson have rarely been in the same room together and are on the opposite side of most issues – including whether Biden is rightfully the president.
But they suddenly found themselves together at the White House on Thursday, talking about providing aid to allies in Ukraine and the Middle East.
The little-known Louisiana Republican’s unexpected rise to the top job in the House — second in line to the presidency — will require these two leaders with no previous relationship to work together on a wide range of pressing issues.
As speaker, Johnson is now thrust into the middle of major decisions over government funding with a shutdown threat looming. Once a back-bencher, he is now among the congressional leaders who get access to classified information. After helping lead the efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, he will likely now be invited by Biden to future state dinners with foreign leaders. And in turn, it’s now his job to invite the president to the House to deliver his State of the Union Address.
“We're crossing our fingers and hoping that he's an institutionalist,” said former Rep. Jim Moran, of Virginia, of Johnson, who is in his fourth term.
Brian Walsh, a former aide to congressional Republicans, said, “There’s no question that, even absent a personal relationship, both sides will have to work together to meet the basic functioning of the government.”
That work began Thursday at the White House on Biden’s $105 billion supplemental request, which includes funding for Ukraine, Israel, the Indo-Pacific and border enforcement. Biden met with Johnson and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y. ahead of a classified briefing for lawmakers.
Prior to their White House encounter Thursday, Biden and Johnson had only been together two other times: a congressional picnic and an event celebrating the Louisiana State University women’s basketball team’s championship.
Prospects for some areas of collaboration look better than others.
Johnson has raised questions about providing further aid to Ukraine as they fend off a Russian invasion, but he called Israel a “dear friend” and “our nation’s greatest ally” on Wednesday amid the country’s war with Hamas.
They will also need to negotiate spending bills to fund the government by Nov. 17 or risk a government shutdown. Johnson showed that he wants to move forward with appropriations by releasing a legislative timetable, but the legislation supported by House Republicans will likely face stiff opposition in the Democratic-led Senate.
Biden and Johnson will need to work together on just about everything in terms of legislation, regardless of partisan disagreements, said one former aide to the former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “We did when President Bush was in office, and then it was much tougher, of course, when it was President Trump,” the aide said.
Pelosi and Trump publicly clashed often, from a dispute over when he would give the State of the Union Address to him refusing her handshake and her ripping up a copy of his speech. Trump said Pelosi had a “meltdown” during a White House meeting, and she made the now-famous image he tweeted of her pointing at him into her Twitter cover photo.
Johnson is an ultra-conservative Trump supporter who contested Biden’s victory and backed Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen, even leading a group of Republicans who filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in support of a lawsuit seeking to invalidate 2020 election results.
In a statement after becoming speaker, he pledged to “combat the harmful policies of the Biden Administration,” among other goals.
Biden’s campaign released a statement calling him “MAGA Mike Johnson.” But the president himself congratulated Johnson in both a phone call and statement that laid out the challenges before them.
“Even though we have real disagreements about important issues, there should be mutual effort to find common ground wherever we can,” Biden said.
During a news conference on Wednesday, Biden said he wasn't worried about Johnson potentially trying again to overturn the election results if he wins a second term.
“Look, just like I was not worried that the last guy would be able to overturn the election. They had about 60 lawsuits and it went all the way to the Supreme Court and every time they lost,” Biden said. ”I understand the Constitution.”
With Biden heading into a reelection year, politics will play an even greater role than normal, Walsh said.
“I don’t think anyone should hold their breath on any major legislative deals coming through,” he said. “I also don’t expect at least for the year ahead that this will be a period of deep relationship building between the president and new speaker, simply because he’s going into his fourth year in the White House and control of the House hangs in the balance.”
If Biden is reelected and Republicans maintain control of the House, he said there may be a period where both sides “reassess and in many ways be forced to develop more of a relationship.”