Republican congressman says party should drop ‘food fight’ over leadership
Share:
Mike Lawler says Mike Johnson should remain speaker as cracks appear between Trump’s team and far right. The US House member Mike Lawler attempted on Sunday to tease out two pressing issues facing the new Congress beginning in 2025, telling an American political talkshow that this was not the moment for his fellow Republicans to have a “food fight” over leadership in Capitol Hill and that the country “needs an immigration system that works”.
Both issues have dominated political headlines in recent days, as potential policy splits become apparent between far-right congressional Republicans and the executive team being assembled for their party leader Donald Trump’s second presidency beginning in January.
Lawler told ABC’s This Week that the US House speaker, Mike Johnson, should be re-elected despite Republican infighting over whether he should keep the position after his handling of negotiations over a government funding bill. “Mike Johnson inherited a disaster when Matt Gaetz and several of my colleagues teamed up with 208 Democrats to remove Kevin McCarthy, which will go down as the single stupidest thing I’ve ever seen in politics,” Lawler said, referring to the spectacle of mutinous Republicans led by Gaetz in the fall of 2023 taking the speaker’s gavel away from McCarthy.
McCarthy left Congress months after his removal. Gaetz also left Congress in November in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the House ethics committee from releasing a report which found “substantial evidence” that he paid for sex with a minor, among other serious violations of congressional rules and laws in his home state of Florida.
