Even by the standards of this year’s rolling political chaos, you’d expect House Republicans to at least try to project unity—if only to pretend their razor-thin majority isn’t hanging by a thread. But that’s not what’s happening.
On Monday and Tuesday, New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, a member of House Speaker Mike Johnson’s leadership team and a newly announced candidate for governor, accused him of shielding the “deep state” and “siding with” Democrats. It was an unusually sharp broadside, even for a conference accustomed to public melodrama.
Then, on Wednesday, she continued to blast Johnson, telling the Wall Street Journal, “He certainly wouldn’t have the votes to be speaker if there was a roll-call vote tomorrow.”
“I believe that the majority of Republicans would vote for new leadership,” she added. “It’s that widespread.”
Her dispute with Johnson is more than a personal spat. It’s the latest sign that rank-and-file Republicans are increasingly willing to air their grievances in public, underscoring how tenuous Johnson’s grip has become as the caucus lurches toward what could be a punishing midterm election.
Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, shown in July.
“I do think that there’s a lot of frustration right now in the House with the effectiveness or lack thereof of this body in recent months,” Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley of California told Politico. “The House has … in some cases ceded its own authority, hasn’t taken the lead on a lot of important policy measures, and has even taken steps now to limit the agency of individual members.”
For much of his two-year run as speaker, Johnson could lean on President Donald Trump’s dominance of the GOP to keep dissent in check, with Trump himself stepping in repeatedly this year to break up internal fights. But Stefanik’s attack suggests the spell may be fading—and just as Johnson needs all the discipline he can muster to shepherd one of Congress’s must-pass bills across the finish line.
At the center of the fight is the annual National Defense Authorization Act. Stefanik wants to include in that bill a provision that would require the FBI to notify Congress whenever it opens a counterintelligence probe into a federal candidate. She says Johnson blocked it from being included in the defense bill.
That’s not just a procedural annoyance. Stefanik warned Monday she’d vote against the NDAA if her proposal didn’t make it back in. With Republicans’ majority already paper-thin, that threat risked tanking a bill that’s normally a bipartisan layup.
In the end, Johnson appears to have relented. Stefanik declared victory Wednesday, saying she secured the provision’s inclusion in the Pentagon policy bill.
But that concession came only after a remarkable public feud. Stefanik went scorched-earth. Johnson, she posted on social media on Monday, is “getting rolled” by Democrats.
“Unless this provision is added back into the bill to prevent illegal political weaponization of the intelligence community in our elections, I am a HARD NO,” she wrote.
By Tuesday, she was naming names. Johnson, she said, “is siding with [Democratic Rep.] Jamie Raskin against Trump Republicans.”
“This is his preferred tactic to tell Members when he gets caught torpedoing the Republican agenda,” she wrote in a third post.
Before reversing course, Johnson denied her accusations outright. Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, he insisted he didn’t even know Stefanik’s amendment had been cut until she took her complaints public. He added that he supported the proposal but said its removal came from “the two chairs and the two rankers in both chambers,” not from him.
“It doesn’t mean it can’t become law,” he said. “I had nothing to do with it, so I don’t know why she’s frustrated with me.”
Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, shown in 2022.
In other words: Blame the committees, not the speaker. But the political math isn’t breaking in Johnson’s favor.
“Elise is running for governor and frankly does not give a fuck anymore about playing nice,” one unnamed House Republican told Politico.
And the skirmish lands at a time when the speaker has already taken a series of public hits—most notably his failure to stop the House from passing a bill forcing the release of Justice Department files tied to accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
In recent weeks, several high-profile Republican women have led the rebellions. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Nancy Mace of South Carolina, and Lauren Boebert of Colorado helped to muscle the Epstein bill onto the floor.
Meanwhile, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida filed her second discharge petition of the year on Tuesday, aiming to force a vote on banning members of Congress from trading stocks—a measure Johnson has stalled.
Johnson’s allies dismiss the critics as malcontents with personal grievances. But the pattern is hard to miss.
Stefanik, notably, is getting backup from Greene, who helped engineer the Epstein files vote and then announced her impending resignation—a move that further jeopardizes Johnson’s majority.
“No surprises here,” Greene wrote on X, in response to one of Stefanik’s posts criticizing Johnson. “As usual from the Speaker, promises made, promises broken. We all know it.”
Together, Stefanik and Greene are making plain what Johnson has tried to downplay: His caucus has stopped pretending to be a team, and the fractures aren’t closing anytime soon.
