Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., has declared that he will not vote for House Speaker Mike Johnson to retain the speakership next year.

“He does not have my vote,” Massie told CNN’s Manu Raju. Asked whether he would change his mind, Massie said that would require “a Christmas miracle.”

Earlier this year Massie supported Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene in pushing to remove Johnson from the speakership, but the vast majority of members in both parties ultimately voted to spike the ouster effort. 

JOHNSON HIT WITH POSSIBLE SPEAKERSHIP RIVALS AS CONSERVATIVES REBEL OVER GOVERNMENT FUNDING PLAN

“It’s a new paradigm in Congress. Nancy Pelosi, and most republicans voted to keep Uniparty Speaker Mike Johnson,” Massie tweeted at the time.

This week Johnson had advocated in favor of a more than 1,500-page government spending measure that would have averted the looming prospect of a partial government shutdown. 

During a Wednesday interview on “Fox & Friends” Johnson said that the spending measure would kick the government funding issue until March when Republicans will have control of Congress and the White House, enabling the GOP to “decide spending for 2025.”

The measure also included disaster relief funding as well as aid related to farmers.

“Disaster aid and Farm aid is not ‘Pork’. It’s called governing. That’s what we were all ELECTED to do,” Rep. Greg Murphy, R-N.C., declared in a post on X.

But conservatives savaged the proposal and Elon Musk spoke out against it.

President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance also weighed in. In a statement, they called for passage of “a streamlined spending bill that doesn’t give Chuck Schumer and the Democrats everything they want.”

“Republicans want to support our farmers, pay for disaster relief, and set our country up for success in 2025. The only way to do that is with a temporary funding bill WITHOUT DEMOCRAT GIVEAWAYS combined with an increase in the debt ceiling. Anything else is a betrayal of our country…” they said in the statement.

HOUSE GOP LEADERS SCRAMBLE FOR PLAN B AFTER TRUMP, MUSK LEAD CONSERVATIVE FURY AGAINST SPENDING BILL

Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., speaks at a campaign event for Republican presidential candidate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at McDivot’s Indoor Sports Pub on Jan. 7, 2024, in Grimes, Iowa.  (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Massie mocked Johnson this week by sharing an AI-generated image that depicted the speaker holding a hose while a house burned in the background. 

He shared the image after declaring in a tweet that “US foreign aid spending is like watering the neighbor’s yard while your house is on fire.”

The 1,547-page interim spending bill to avoid a government shutdown is effectively dead. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has all but yanked the plan off the floor after President-elect Trump, Vice President-elect Vance and Elon Musk torched the package to avoid a government shutdown this weekend and fund the government through March 14.

Had House Republicans had the votes to pass the bill – without leaning too heavily on Democrats – Republicans may have been able to pass the bill late Wednesday afternoon before the intervention of Mssrs. Trump and Vance. But there was just too much grassroots pressure, sparked by Musk on X and elsewhere.

HOUSE GOP LEADERS SCRAMBLE FOR PLAN B AFTER TRUMP, MUSK LEAD CONSERVATIVE FURY AGAINST SPENDING BILL

The stopgap spending package proved unpopular due to its size, and various legislative ornaments festooned on the bill like a Christmas tree. Conservatives were expecting Johnson to handle the spending plan differently this year at the holidays. But it backfired. Badly.

It’s notable that Mr. Trump did not weigh in until the 11th hour. He also demanded a debt ceiling increase. That’s something which faced the President-elect in the first quarter of the year and threatened to derail any legislative agenda or potentially spook the markets.

Johnson’s decision to veer off course – despite touting the bill heartily on Fox this morning – underscores several things.

This is a sign of things to come once President-elect Trump is in office. And that could present problems for Johnson as he may be at the whim of decisions by the new President?

Why did Johnson pull the bill?

It was wildy unpopular with his rank and file. But it devolved further once Musk and the President-elect got infused themselves. 

MATT GAETZ REPORT BY HOUSE ETHICS COMMITTEE TO BE RELEASED

In many respects, Johnson’s decision to pull the bill was all about January 3. That’s the day of the Speaker’s vote. With 434 members to start the new Congress, Johnson needs 218 votes. Otherwise, he lacks a majority and cannot become Speaker. The House must vote repeatedly – as it did in January 2023 – before electing former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) five days later in what was the longest Speaker’s race since the 1850s. 

Johnson tried to salvage himself in the Speaker’s vote by adding emergency agriculture spending to the bill. But Johnson is now trying to salvage himself by coming up with a new bill. 

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) listens during a news conference following the Republican conference meeting at the U.S. Capitol on January 17, 2024, in Washington, DC. (Kent Nishimura/Getty Images)

The irony is that Johnson did not want to create drama before Christmas with a spending package. But drama is exactly what he got in what quickly became the worst Congressional holiday standoff since the fiscal cliff in 2012 or a government shutdown threat in 2014.

So here’s the $64,000 Question: What play does Johnson call next?

Does he do a clean CR to fund the government with nothing attached? Is it a bill that just re-ups current funding coupled with disaster aid? Do they attach a debt ceiling suspension as President-elect Trump has requested?

RFK JR SET TO FACE ABORTION, VACCINE SCRUTINY IN SIT-DOWNS WITH SENATORS ON CAPITOL HILL

And then the biggest question of all: can ANYTHING pass at all? Especially without votes from the Democrats?

Johnson has a tranche of conservatives who won’t vote for any CR at all. Many of them would also not vote for a debt ceiling increase, either. 

And even if there is a new bill, do conservatives insist on waiting three days to ponder that bill? That triggers a government shutdown right there.

The US Capitol in Washington, DC, on Monday, Nov. 11, 2024.  (Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The deadline is 11:59:59 pm ET on Friday.  

So this is going to require someone to pull a rabbit out of a hat. 

President-elect Trump’s maneuver today is reminiscent of a similar move he made in December 2019, which sparked the longest government shutdown in history. 

Then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), then-Appropriations Committee Chairman Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) and others thought they had a deal to fund the government and avoid a Christmas-time shutdown. 

The Senate voted for the bill. Senators even sat in the back of the chamber and sang Christmas carols during the vote. 

Mr. Trump then balked at the last minute. House Republicans followed suit. The government shut down for more than a month. 

The day Joe Biden faced reality, stepped aside and cleared the way for Kamala Harris to replace him atop the Democratic ticket, Teja Smith felt a mix of exhilaration and dread.

Smith, who runs a social media firm in Los Angeles, had been working particularly hard of late, so she treated herself to a daylong stay-cation with family at a Beverly Hills hotel. Word of Biden’s announcement came as they were hanging out by the pool.

The historic nature of that thunderclap moment wasn’t lost on the 34-year-old entrepreneur. But there was another, less-uplifting sensation as well.

“Get ready,” Smith posted on Instagram, “because we’re about to see how much America hates Black women.”

The election result on Nov. 5 — just about 100 days after Harris’ overnight transformation — left Smith feeling sadly, grimly vindicated. The only surprise, she said, was how badly Harris lost.

Her defeat, Donald Trump’s triumph in each and every battleground state and — especially — his winning the popular vote were more than a slap in the face of Black women, long among the most loyal and dedicated of Democrats. It was a fist landed square in the gut.

Raw. Visceral. Shattering.

The feeling has left many like Smith and other Black women she knows ready to pull back from national politics, focusing more on their inner needs and applying their outward energy to local issues and community concerns — places where their investment of heart and soul will be reciprocated in a way that seems beyond much of America.

“It’s draining,” Smith said of seeing the vice president — a former United States senator, California attorney general and San Francisco district attorney — turned aside so emphatically. It also shows, she said, that “no matter how high the ladder” a Black woman manages to climb, “people are still going to doubt you.”

Political activism came naturally to Smith. Her grandmother, who helped raise her, opened the Oakland chapter of the Urban League. Smith’s godmother was chief executive of Planned Parenthood’s Bay Area chapter. Her folks were the kind who took their child with them to their polling place, and they steeped her in the lore of the revolutionary Black Panther Party, which had its roots in Oakland and neighboring Berkeley.

After high school, Smith moved to Southern California. The attraction wasn’t politics but the dreamscape Smith grew up watching on TV. She graduated from Cal State Northridge and used her degree in journalism and communications to open a firm, Get Social, that connects political advocacy and social justice with entertainment and pop culture.

It was through her work, Smith said, that she knew Trump would win the White House in 2016, even as the supposed political experts and many in the news media wrote him off. She could sense Trump’s popularity outside California and other left-leaning climes, as well as the apathy of those who couldn’t imagine the deeply flawed candidate and reality TV star being elevated to the nation’s highest office.

Trump’s administration turned out to be every bit as bad, Smith said, as she had imagined — a mashup of scandals, impeachments, anti-immigrant policies and a botched response to a global pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans; a disproportionate number of them were nonwhite. “That was really a cherry on top with the presidency being bad,” she said.

Smith began working ahead of the 2018 midterm election to educate and register Black and brown voters, contracting with Rock The Vote, among others. Her efforts, both paid and voluntary, continued through the 2020 campaign. She wasn’t exactly wild about Biden — Bernie Sanders was more to Smith’s taste — but her goal was simple: “To make sure Donald Trump never comes near the White House again.”

I recently visited with Smith in the dining room of her South Los Angeles home, a charming 1922 Craftsman that she shares with her husband and their 2½-year-old son. A portion of her bedroom doubles as Smith’s office. A deluxe espresso machine in the kitchen feeds her caffeine habit without busting the family budget.

When Trump became the GOP nominee a third time — “I don’t even understand how he was able to run again,” Smith marveled — she redoubled her political efforts. In September alone, she traveled to six states to gin up enthusiasm for the election, helping register voters and explaining the ins and outs of early balloting and vote by mail. In all, Smith visited more than a dozen states and spent 2½ months on the road.

There were no grandparents or other relatives to help with child care. Just her husband, a mortgage loan officer, holding down hearth and home while running his side business, Hellastalgia, a hip-hop music page.

After all that time and sacrifice, Trump’s victory left Smith depleted and more than a little discouraged. “I was already annoyed going into the election, the fact that it would even be close,” she said over a homemade lavender macchiato. “And to see it play out the way it did. I just. I can’t even…”

Words fail.

A second Trump administration, Smith fears, will be much worse than the first. But there is none of the urgency to rush the barricades or join the political resistance that followed the 2016 election.

“We started nonprofits. … We started all of this stuff to make sure it didn’t happen again,” Smith said. “And now that it’s happened again, it’s one of those things like, well, maybe this is what you guys want.”

Like many of the Black women she’s spoken with, Smith plans to turn her attention away from Trump and national politics and, in her case, work on issues such as Los Angeles’ chronic homelessness problem. “We’re going to need people advocating and talking about things that are impacting their direct communities,” Smith said of her intended focus. “Obviously working at that big level is not working … well for us.”

While she’s no spokesperson for Black women, Smith said, she and others she knows feel overworked, undervalued and taken for granted for too long. There’s no desire, she said, to keep “stepping up for people that haven’t stepped up for us.”

The feeling is: You made your bed, America. Now you lie in it.