Four Horsewomen of the GOP Apocalypse

Greene, Mace, Stefanik and Luna have it out for Speaker Mike Johnson.

Image courtesy of Yahoo News

Speaker Mike Johnson faces a political apocalypse that could end his House majority and speakership early. And it’s largely thanks to four horsewomen who are busy fomenting disarray and destruction in his conference.

There’s crazy Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, one of four crucial signatories to the Epstein Files discharge petition who also announced her early retirement, imperiling that narrow House majority.

Riding in her tracks is equally crazy Nancy Mace of South Carolina, who also signed the Epstein petition. The attention-loving Mace reportedly told colleagues that she’s sick of Johnson and may resign early, too.

A surprise flank attack came from Elise Stefanik, a member of the GOP House leadership. Stefanik recently launched an ugly public spat and declared Johnson wouldn’t survive a roll-call vote.

Rounding things out is Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, who normally sounds batshit crazy but in a moment of lucidity filed yet another discharge petition to ban congressional stock trading.

Like his predecessor Kevin McCarthy, and thanks in part to these four women reps, Speaker Johnson faces huge challenges in maintaining his slim majority, his control of House legislative procedures and the Speakership itself.

The threat of early resignations

This congressional session, Republicans have consistently held only the barest of House majorities. And their 220 votes in that chamber have felt more like 219 with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) a constant thorn in the side of Speaker Johnson and Donald Trump. Massie has been a consistent “no” on all the major spending bills and was a co-sponsor of the Epstein Files Transparency Act along with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA).

With Greene departing Congress on January 5, 2026, that number will effectively drop to 218. And more early GOP resignations may be in the works, now that Greene has opened the door. The New York Times reported yesterday, for example, that Mace is also eyeing the exits because of Johnson’s leadership:

Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina has told people she is so frustrated with the Louisiana Republican and sick of the way he has run the House — particularly how women are treated there — that she is planning to huddle with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia next week to discuss following her lead and retiring early from Congress.

After this news came out, Mace denied the report, but there are apparently people who told the Times otherwise.

The threat of early resignations looms especially large now that it’s clear Republicans will have a very tough time holding the majority. The special elections and the general election last month all point toward a Blue Wave with a shift in the double digits. Should that occur, it would even take out many of the more heavily gerrymandered GOP-friendly districts.

Nor is the outlook likely to improve. On the contrary, anger at House Republicans over issues like affordability is only likely to grow once the GOP’s refusal to extend ACA premium subsidies and its huge cuts to Medicaid and food assistance programs hit in 2026.

There is even a world where early GOP retirements create an opportunity for the Democrats to retake the majority months before the midterm elections. I don’t want to speculate further here, but with only a handful of seats between the parties, any stampede by the GOP could trigger exactly such a disastrous outcome for Johnson and the current Republican majority.

Challenges to leadership

Short of losing the actual majority, Johnson faces the possibility of a leadership challenge from his own party. That was laid bare by Stefanik during her surprisingly sharp attacks upon Johnson over the past few days.

Stefanik was outraged, or so she says, because a provision she wanted inserted into the National Defense Authorization Act didn’t make it into the draft “four corners” legislation. That provision would have required the FBI to notify a member of Congress anytime an investigation was opened on that member—a curious provision for Stefanik to so publicly insist be jammed into the bill.

She wound up winning that fight with Johnson, but in the process dug some pretty deep claw marks. Stefanik criticized Johnson, calling him an ineffective leader who was losing control his party and its members going into the midterms.

“He certainly wouldn’t have the votes to be speaker if there was a roll-call vote tomorrow,” Stefanik warned in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “I believe that the majority of Republicans would vote for new leadership. It’s that widespread.”

Stefanik’s threat looms large because she is within the top ranks of Republican House leadership. Indeed, Johnson gave her a largely made-up position after she was put up, then taken down, for consideration to be Trump’s U.N. Ambassador.

Johnson tried to turn down the heat, telling reporters, after the two came to agreement on her NDAA provision being added, that “I never understood what all the disturbance was about.” Johnson attributed their spat to a breakdown in communication.

But the threat to file a motion to vacate is now out there. Johnson’s rubber stamping of everything Trump wants has made the GOP within the House of Representatives nearly superfluous—so much so that they could be on break and absent from Washington for months and he just didn’t care. That’s not what many of these members think they signed up for and ran on.

And as another continuing resolution to fund the government looms in January, with another partial government shutdown again possible if they cannot cobble the votes together to pass appropriations bills or yet another extension, Johnson may face a full revolt leading to his ouster. It’s not as if the House GOP hasn’t shown itself willing in the past to collapse into rudderless leadership territory.

Loss of control of the floor

Short of losing his majority or his speakership, Johnson is keenly aware that he is losing his grip on what makes it to the House floor. Under normal circumstances, a House Speaker controls the legislative agenda by controlling the powerful Rules Committee, where bills can get voted out and onto the floor with certain “rules” attached, or where they can languish and die.

There are two ways to sink the Speaker’s ambitions, none of which would have ever happened when Nancy Pelosi was in charge.

The first is to take down the rule on a bill sitting in the Rules Committee. We saw this happen multiple times with the far-right House Freedom Caucus, which used to signal its displeasure with House leadership by voting down the rules on bills that Speaker Johnson wanted to move forward.

And we just saw it threatened again, this time by Mace. As Punchbowl News reported at the height of the public spat between herself and Johnson,

Stefanik is so frustrated that she’s prepared to tank the must-pass defense bill — approved by lawmakers every year for more than six decades — if the speaker doesn’t include a provision requiring the FBI to alert Congress if it opens a counterintelligence investigation into an elected official or candidate. Democrats are opposed to this provision.

“I’ll take down the rule,” Stefanik told us in an interview. Stefanik has made this message clear to House GOP leaders as well.

A second way to thwart the Speaker and cause loss of control of the floor is the now infamous Discharge Petition. The one that forced the Epstein Files Transparency Act to the House floor was so embarrassing to Johnson that he actively refused to seat Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ), who would be the 218th vote on the petition, for over 50 days. When that petition finally did its thing, it precipitated an avalanche of GOP defections that caused Trump to preemptively grant permission to Republicans to vote for the bill, even after he had worked so hard for so long to stop it.

Now representatives like Luna are rubbing further salt in that wound by filing even more discharge petitions. In so doing, Luna is telling Johnson that she doesn’t care what his legislative agenda or timeline is, because she is willing to press ahead with her own.

Johnson: women “can’t compartmentalize”

Johnson recently claimed women “can’t compartmentalize” their thoughts. He probably regrets saying this and infuriating his detractors even more.

The possible resignations, challenges to leadership and blatant procedural bypasses of Johnson are collectively converging to cast him as ineffective, vulnerable and out of touch. This will make the task of holding the Republican Party together as they face the storm of next year’s midterms extremely challenging.

And Johnson is learning in real time that, despite the mental shortcomings he claims they have, Republican women apparently can direct their anger just fine.