The chaos that has consumed the House GOP caucus for well over a year now has got to come to an end. So Speaker Johnson is going straight to the top.

As readers will remember, the insanity began when Kevin McCarthy took 15 rounds of compromise to become Speaker of the House. And in order to win his caucus over, McCarthy agreed to what ended up being a poison pill – the ability for a single member of the Republican caucus to put forward a motion to vacate the chair. He thought it would never be used against him. McCarthy was very, very wrong, as we all found out. And McCarthy is clearly blaming Matt Gaetz for what happened.

Former @SpeakerMcCarthy: "I'll give you the truth why I'm not speaker. It's because one person, a member of Congress, wanted me to stop an ethics complaint because he slept with a 17-year-old … Did he do it or not? I don't know." pic.twitter.com/xD5uLdxcXQ

— CSPAN (@cspan) April 10, 2024

And after MORE chaos, Mike Johnson took the job. But Speaker Johnson merely inherited the same issues that got Speaker McCarthy ousted – and the same single-vote poison pill. And as we all know, Marjorie Taylor Greene has been holding that threat over Speaker Johnson’s head like the sword of Damocles, ready to snap at any moment. MTG’s whining about Speaker Johnson got her a meeting with the speaker, which apparently resolved nothing.

“I got a lot of excuses,” Greene, a Georgia Republican, told reporters after she met with Johnson on Wednesday afternoon, their first conversation since she filed a resolution nearly three weeks ago to oust him. “We didn’t walk out with a deal.”

The congresswoman described the meeting as “direct” and “passionate.”

Greene threatened to force a vote to strip the Louisiana Republican of the gavel after he relied on Democrats to push through a $1.2 trillion spending bill to avert a partial government shutdown last month.

Since then, she’s openly criticized his leadership in media interviews and on social media, warning him that passing Ukraine aid or reauthorizing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act would put his position in peril. In a blistering letter to her Republican colleagues on Tuesday, Greene argued Johnson has failed to live up to his promises by negotiating with Democrats and breaking procedural rules to pass major legislation.

But Greene has not laid out a timeline for forcing a vote. Even if she does follow through, there’s been a lack of interest among Republicans for removing another leader just months after former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California was ousted.

Now, you can agree with MTG, but still think that there is LITERALLY NO ONE ELSE THE GOP CAUCUS CAN AGREE ON AS SPEAKER. If there WAS, then THAT person would have been Speaker before Mike Johnson’s name came up. If MTG pulls the proverbial trigger, the likely end result with a one-vote majority in the House is probably Speaker Hakeem Jeffries and a whole lot of Democrat gloating.

So Speaker Johnson needs to de-fang MTG, and that means going to Florida.

House Speaker Mike Johnson’s meeting with former President Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate and subsequent election integrity event could be the beginning of an alliance that shields him from a possible ouster led by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.

There will also reportedly be a joint news conference taking place at the event, marking Johnson’s first public appearance with Trump since he was elected to the speakership in October 2023. The subject of Greene’s threat to remove Johnson is likely to come up during the presser.

The event will reportedly center around proposed legislation designed to prevent non-citizens from voting in federal elections.

The long and the short of it? It is in Trump’s best interests to keep the House stable, even with a slim majority – and that means backing Speaker Johnson.

The upshot: Trump world isn’t happy with Greene’s threat to throw the House GOP into chaos once again. There’s a fear that an election-year speakership battle will undercut the party’s goals of keeping the House and flipping the White House and Senate.

“One hundred percent distraction. Unwanted. And just stupid,” one Trump insider said Wednesday night. “We’re not going to get trapped into this cycle of bullshit that comes out of members of the House.”

“It’s fair to say we don’t think she’s being constructive,” another person close with Trump said about Greene. “The internal fighting is not appreciated by [Trump].”

Those around the former president are growing weary of the constant motion-to-vacate threats, that person added: “It’s no way to run a party; it’s no way to run a House. You can’t work in that environment.”

The larger concern is that Johnson’s removal would create a power vacuum at a time when unity is essential and coordination between the Trump campaign and the speaker’s political operations is starting to tighten.

Now, MTG is one of Trump’s loudest cheerleaders. Will an open rapprochement between Trump and Johnson cool MTG’s jets? That is certainly Speaker Johnson’s goal. It sounds like it may be Trump’s goal as well. Donald Trump is probably the only person who can tell Marjorie Taylor Greene (privately) to zip her lips and knock the shenanigans off without having her take offense. Will MTG do that? Yes, but begrudgingly. She does love all the camera time that she has been getting.

The solution, ultimately, to all this insanity is for Speaker Johnson to get rid of the poison pill. A single vote to vacate has proven to be absolutely unworkable – and the Democrats won’t be making that bargain in their caucus. The ideal solution would be for the GOP to have a larger majority to work with after the 2024 election, so that any Speaker of the House is not constantly dealing with the threat of a single malcontent ready to oust them. Until then, Donald Trump playing peacemaker is probably the only thing that will work.

Featured image: Mike Johnson, official Congressional portrait by Ike Hayman, cropped, public domain