Massie threatens to oust Speaker Johnson if he doesn’t step down over foreign aid plan

Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., is facing renewed motion to vacate threats a day after he introduced a plan to pass foreign aid.

Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., threatened to force a vote to oust the speaker during remarks in House Republicans’ closed-door conference meeting on Tuesday morning, if the speaker did not willingly step aside first. He's the second conservative to do so after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., filed a motion to vacate against Johnson last month.

"I asked him to resign…he said he would not," Massie told reporters after the meeting. "And I said, well, you're the one who's going to put us into this because the motion is going to get called, OK? The motion will get called."

Massie took it a step further and said Johnson would lose more GOP support than the eight House Republicans who voted to oust former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., last year.

Asked about the chaos wrought in October during the race to replace McCarthy, Massie said, "We ended up with some guy nobody in America ever heard of."

A defiant Johnson said at his weekly press conference afterward, "I am not resigning."

"It is, in my view an absurd notion that someone would bring a vacate motion. We're simply here trying to do our job. It is not helpful," Johnson said. "It is not helping the House Republicans advance our agenda, which is in the best interest of the American people."

Massie is among the conservatives pushing back against Johnson’s plan for aid to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan, which was announced Monday night and is already facing pushback from members on the right over its lack of border security provisions. He predicted that the proposal would not even pass its initial procedural hurdle on the House floor, a chamber-wide rule vote.

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