Speaker Johnson abandons floor agenda, sends members home early amid GOP rebellion

By Sarah Ferris, CNN

(CNN) — Speaker Mike Johnson has once again lost a battle against hardline conservatives for control of his own House floor — and he has no clear way out.

A small group of GOP hardliners, led by firebrand Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, effectively seized the floor from Johnson this week, refusing to allow him to move on their own party’s priorities until Republican leaders come up with a plan to pass President Donald Trump’s federal elections overhaul bill.

By Tuesday afternoon, Johnson was forced into one of the most humiliating possible positions for a House speaker: He conceded he could not regain control of the chamber and instructed members to leave Washington early. It’s the second straight week that GOP leaders have had to scrap their plans, this time losing out on nearly an entire week’s agenda.

Many of Johnson’s members are fuming at the impasse. The House is not scheduled to return until mid-July — leaving just two more scheduled weeks of work before the August recess. And it may sink the GOP’s path to passing a tranche of Trump’s agenda this month — including billions in Pentagon funding for the Iran war — as Johnson and his team had planned.

The dispute between Johnson and his hardline members is amounting to an intense summertime clash that’s jamming up the House and spiking tensions in an already fractious GOP conference. Many Republicans now blame the hardliners — the dozen or so who blocked Johnson’s push on the floor to consider the annual Pentagon policy bill — for scuttling what could be their last big legislative effort ahead of the November midterms.

Multiple GOP sources told CNN it’s not clear how to resolve the weekslong standoff with Luna — who they believe has been relishing the media attention.

Even Johnson, the famously even-tempered speaker, was visibly frustrated by his own members derailing the GOP’s agenda on the floor.

“We have the smallest margin in US history. We’re nearing an election. People get very emotional about things, and sometimes they make irrational decisions,” Johnson said, referring to those hardline members. Hours earlier, he called Luna’s antics a “self-inflicted wound” for his party.

But Luna is undeterred by the criticism.

“The fact that I’m being singled out because I know procedure — I’m not stupid. I’m going to fight on behalf of the American people,” Luna said, vowing that she would back down on her floor protest if GOP leaders agreed to tack Trump’s voter ID and proof-of-citizenship measure onto the defense bill. “They’re saying they won’t, so now that you saw what happened on the floor.”

Johnson had previously insisted the House would remain in session for the next day and a half to unstick the floor. But some members were threatening to leave. Instead, within hours, Johnson was forced to cancel the rest of the week’s votes.

The problem for GOP leaders: Congress, in its current makeup, cannot pass the elections overhaul bill in the form Trump wants, lacking the votes even with GOP majorities in both chambers.

Luna and others have demanded that Senate GOP leaders take extreme steps, such as changing the chambers’ rules, to muscle through Trump’s priority. Senate GOP leaders have countered they also lack the votes to change the chamber’s rules.

Trump has publicly encouraged the GOP defectors to back down, without specifically calling out Luna. But those hardliners also know the president remains fixated on that elections bill and do not believe he is genuine in asking them to stand down.

GOP Rep. Thomas Massie — a frequent Johnson critic who recently lost his primary bid to a Trump-backed challenger — said months of mounting frustration are now bursting into the open, in part, because some Republicans have nothing left to lose.

“I think people are past their primaries and are getting restless,” said Massie, one of the members who tanked Johnson’s procedural vote. “There are people who normally wouldn’t vote against the rule and are doing it.”

This story has been updated with additional developments.

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CNN’s Manu Raju, Morgan Rimmer and Ellis Kim contributed to this report.