House Speaker Mike Johnson says he didn’t necessarily want to make history and bring the chamber to a standstill by keeping procedural votes open for a record amount of time, while Republicans haggled over their megabill.
“It was not my intention,” he told NOTUS in an interview outside the House chamber Thursday. “It’s not good for us,” Johnson, sleep deprived and hopped up on caffeine, said of the coffee and Celsius energy drinks he’d consumed since 5:00 in the morning Wednesday — but he had no regrets about keeping members in for an all-nighter so he could whip up support for the legislation.
“It was needed just to work through the process,” Johnson said.
One of those procedural votes — officially intended to last no longer than five minutes but stretched nearly seven-and-a-half hours — appears to have been the longest single House vote in history. Republican leaders followed it up with another extended vote, lasting roughly six hours. Those delays gave them time to hash out their differences and flip a number of holdouts, ending with Republicans mostly unified after months of infighting.
“I just want to have a normal, boring Congress, but no one knows what that looks like anymore,” Johnson told NOTUS when asked about breaking the record for the longest vote. “I’m tired of making history.”
Tired or not, the Louisiana Republican’s tactic of holding votes open on the floor has been working for him this year, and now he’s able to send a bill to President Donald Trump’s desk with literal hours to spare before the party’s self-imposed Fourth of July deadline. Forcing skeptics to hash out their issues overnight was decisive in winning them over on Thursday.
“The holdouts who are voting ‘yes’ today on this bill are largely because of conversations that they had into the wee hours of the night with the CBO director,” Rep. Andy Barr of Kentucky said after the vote.
And Rep. Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican who on Wednesday sounded downright opposed to the legislation but flipped to support it after late-night talks with GOP leaders, said the stalling strategy “wins.”
“And it’s legal,” he told NOTUS on Thursday. “So yeah, I think it’s a great tactic.”
In interviews with Republican lawmakers, only one member said holding votes open until morale improves — and until enough members bend to the speaker’s will — might not be the ideal form of legislating. Most others emphasized that prior speakers did the same thing, and that late-night votes are common for the House at this point. They argued that Johnson’s strategy simply proved he has the skill and wherewithal to wrangle the GOP’s chaotic, slim majority toward victory.
“You do whatever you need to do to win,” Rep. Glenn Thompson of Pennsylvania said. “Whatever it takes.”
Freezing business on the floor to buy time for negotiation isn’t a new tactic for House speakers, and it isn’t new to Johnson. When he sought the speaker’s gavel at the start of the Congress, he maneuvered to prevent the vote from being called when he initially didn’t have enough votes to succeed, while he cajoled holdouts into supporting him. It worked and he’s relied on the tactic since then. But never as clearly as he did this week.
Some members brushed it off as routine.
“That’s what every speaker has done since I’ve worked here the last 10 years,” Rep. French Hill, an Arkansas Republican, told NOTUS, adding that the vote’s length “just barely surpassed Nancy Pelosi.”
“Democrats have held the vote open for hours and hours and hours,” Rep. Glenn Grothman echoed. “I’m not sure it matters.”
The previous record for the longest vote came in 2021, when Democrats took more than seven hours to vote on a procedural motion related to a Biden-era reconciliation package. Josh Huder, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute, told NOTUS it is common for speakers to find themselves whipping votes for hours on important bills, but the delays on Wednesday and through the night were “unusually long.”
Rep. Tom Tiffany, a House Freedom Caucus member who shared his concerns with the bill at the White House on Wednesday afternoon, told NOTUS that the extra time was “helpful.”
“At the end of the day, the speaker’s job is to get the votes, and he found a way to get the votes,” Tiffany summarized.
Rep. Kevin Hern of Oklahoma said he encouraged Johnson to do it, to give “everybody an opportunity to get their questions answered.”
And Rep. Tom Cole, who once chaired the House Rules Committee, said the votes being held open for so long pushed members in Johnson’s direction.
“We needed the time to work things out, and honestly, he needed the pressure of the vote to work things out,” Cole told NOTUS. “Whether you agree with the bill or not, it was a legislative masterpiece performance by the speaker and his team.”
Rep. Rich McCormick dismissed a question about the process: “The main thing is we got it done, and you can’t argue with the results, right?” he said. Rep. Jay Obernolte called it “no surprise,” saying it mirrored other House debates. And Rep. Andy Harris, the chair of the House Freedom Caucus and one of the members who flipped, said it’s all “part of the process.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” Harris said. “It all works within the rules, and the process, in the end, works out.”
Rep. Chip Roy, a Texas Republican, was the only GOP member NOTUS spoke with Thursday who sounded less than thrilled about the process.
“I would have had more time to look at the bill, more time for us to work on it,” he told NOTUS. “But this isn’t the first time this has been done, and it won’t be the last.”