Many in leadership will likely be breathing a sigh of relief when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), a House of Representatives rabble-rouser and thorn in Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) side, departs Capitol Hill.
However, the speaker’s problems are far from over, as her resignation has exposed deeper issues with the House’s “top-down” approach, which has turned off lawmakers who can no longer legislate without the White House’s say-so.
With Greene unexpectedly announcing her retirement from Congress in January, her resignation will give Johnson a bit of a reprieve. Greene, who has publicly never been a fan of Johnson, has spent the last month blasting the speaker for the GOP’s inability to get things done in Congress.
And she’s not alone, strategists say. Other members of Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, have privately and publicly expressed frustration that the House has not gotten much substantial work done this year.
“We’re living through a period of extreme top-down control of the House of Representatives,” said Philip Wallach, who specializes in congressional dysfunction at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “When you have a super top-down model like you have today, it really gives members the sense that they don’t have much to do. They’re sort of told to show up and vote for the deals that leadership works out.”
He added, “There’s zero legislating there.”
Although considerable effort had been spent on successfully passing a reconciliation bill earlier this year and the fight over government funding shortly thereafter, Greene pointed out in her resignation letter that several pieces of legislation to codify President Donald Trump’s agenda are currently sitting in limbo.
“That’s how it is for most members of Congress’s bills, the Speaker never brings them to the floor for a vote,” the Georgia congresswoman said.
Many bills considered bipartisan top priorities, including those to ban stock trading among members or to release the Epstein files, often sit in committee and are never brought to the floor for a vote unless House leadership receives the green light from the White House.
Instead, multiple bills are introduced each week, focusing on repealing Biden-era clean energy policies, renaming post offices, or other niche areas that don’t fall within the range of addressing kitchen-table issues that Republicans successfully ran on fixing in the 2024 election.
To bring any influential legislation to the floor, Republicans have turned to using a discharge petition to circumvent their own leaders and force a vote on their bills. Long considered a “tool of the minority” by the GOP, its own rank-and-file members have split from the speaker, encouraging him to bring the bills to the floor regardless of whether it could be politically damaging for some of their colleagues.
“I do think some of the frustrations [Greene’s] voicing with the way the House operates are very widely held, and there’s a sense amongst GOP members that even though they’re in the majority, they don’t really have any control over what happens in their chamber,” Wallach said.
Johnson’s legislative approach hangs precariously
Johnson is engaging in what strategists refer to as “defensive legislating,” taking cues from the White House instead of leading forward as the legislative body is instructed to do so under the Constitution. It’s been under a microscope since Trump took office, particularly as reports have surfaced that Trump has joked, “I’m the speaker and the president” in private.
Trump’s influence over Republicans has been in place for a long time, on full display last December when he and Elon Musk stepped into a funding fight and essentially killed a deal right before Christmas to fund the government.
The weight of his support was felt last week as Trump had long pushed Republicans not to vote for the bill, calling it a “hoax.” Leadership refused to bring it to the floor for a vote, despite the likelihood that it would pass with wide bipartisan support. But then, in a change of tune, Trump told Republicans to vote for the bill “because we have nothing to hide.”
Leadership, including Johnson, took a breezy approach to the Epstein files vote, stating they wouldn’t whip against the Democrats’ “political show vote” and they would move past the matter quickly. Many GOP lawmakers had argued against the legislation, arguing that the Oversight Committee was holding its own investigation and it was essentially unnecessary.
However, Trump’s words gave GOP lawmakers the green light, prompting them to vote for the bill, and all but one Republican fell in line and voted to release the files.
Johnson has already been criticized for ceding legislative power to the president throughout this year, blocking votes on investigations into Trump’s executive orders and legislation to undo Trump’s tariff policies. He also kept the House out for 54 days during the government shutdown, a fact Greene referenced in her letter, and now the chamber faces a heavy backlog in bills.
“It is, really is, a function of how Republican politics work right now, where, like, what comes down from Trump really is just expected to kind of carry the day and not get a whole lot of pushback,” Wallach said.
He said Johnson’s decision to stick close to Trump has worked well for him to keep his job as speaker, which seemed to be on thin ice in the months that followed after former Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s ousting. But his ability to keep the gavel largely relies on rank-and-file members being “willing to accept that the current environment sort of is what it is, and that they should accept their kind of humble role as vote casters.”
The snail pace with which the House is moving goes hand in hand with the erosion of rules and decorum over the last five years. Some lawmakers blame the speaker for giving the conservative, right-flank Freedom Caucus considerable sway over House procedures.
But even the conservative fiscal hawks are finding their patience with Johnson waning. When reports circulated that Johnson was considering raising the threshold for discharge petitions, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) was quick to blast leadership and insist there will be a vote on a bill to ban members from trading stocks.
“Any move to take this away as a tool FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE will be viewed as a hostile ACT by the SWAMP and I WILL OPPOSE AT ALL COSTS. I HOPE this is not what the speaker is really saying,” Luna said.
Luna has gone against leadership before, when she led a discharge petition earlier this year to try to force a vote on a bill that would change the House rules to allow proxy voting for new parents. The conservative pushback was so severe that Luna ended up leaving the Freedom Caucus, blasting her former caucus colleagues for holding “backroom deals” and holding up the floor to avoid a vote.
Margin for error thin heading into 2026
When it’s time for campaign season, focus shifts from heavy legislating to boosting incumbents and vulnerable battleground lawmakers, particularly this upcoming cycle, where the House’s razor-thin majority hangs in the balance.
Democrats need only a net gain of three seats to recapture the majority, and the party opposite the White House historically performs well in midterm elections.
Dennis Lennox, Republican strategist, said Greene’s departure may give leadership some breathing room.
“One less wildcard makes the day-to-day math of governing a little more predictable, even if the margin shrinks,” Lennox said. “The bigger challenge is that House Republicans remain deeply fractured with or without M.T.G. They don’t agree on what winning looks like; some want to legislate, others want to play talking head pundit or social media commentator.”
Greene’s decision to leave should spur leadership to “go on offense,” other strategists argue.
“They need to come up with a legislative agenda that is popular with Republicans and splits the Democrats,’ GOP strategist Dennis Lennox said. “The shutdown… put them way behind. If you don’t keep Members busy, it becomes a huge problem for leadership.”
When asked if Greene’s departure will be to Johnson’s benefit, Feehery noted that there will “always be rabble rousers in the House,” and her resignation doesn’t mean the thorns in the speaker’s side will stop.
“That’s the nature of the institution,” he said. “Somebody else will play that role.”
Who that will be, and from what caucus, remains to be seen. But Wallach said Johnson can’t afford for members who are frustrated with the lack of legislation to follow in Greene’s footsteps and retire.
“Even one or two more resignations would be a very serious problem,” Wallach said.
Wallach pointed to a mass exodus of lawmakers already deciding not to run for reelection, including current and former committee leaders such as Reps. Jodey Arrington (R-TX) and Michael McCaul (R-TX), as well as other Freedom Caucus members like Reps. Chip Roy (R-TX) and Ralph Norman (R-SC) are seeking other statewide offices.
But he said that attention should be paid to centrists who may follow in Greene’s footsteps.
Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE), who has frequently spoken up on the erosion of rules in the House, told the Washington Examiner that he briefly considered retiring early over Trump’s handling of Ukraine, but ruled it out “pretty fast.”
“It wouldn’t have been right,” Bacon said when asked about Greene’s decision to resign early. “When you run for office, you have an obligation to fulfill your term.”
Wallach said times like these in the House could move other legislators to consider, “Why am I wasting my time here?”
“If you’re an ambitious person who wants to get things done, staying in the House starts to look more like, ‘Why are you going to put your time in here?’ I think that is already a concern for the institution, that it’s kind of having trouble retaining good talent,” Wallach said.
“I’m sure that Johnson’s going to be not so sorry to see [Greene] go, this sort of close-at-hand irritant won’t be there anymore,” he added. “But like, on the process side of things, there’s going to be plenty of other people raising these concerns.”
The Washington Examiner reached out to Johnson for comment.
David Sivak contributed to this report