One vote to lose: Life inside a chaotic House GOP majority

By Sarah Ferris, CNN

(CNN) — As Speaker Mike Johnson and his team have navigated the House’s slimmest margin since before World War II, they’ve seen it all.

Once, Republicans were headed for a second, embarrassing failed attempt to impeach then-President Joe Biden’s Homeland Security chief because of internal disputes — unless they could round up one more GOP vote. They phoned up a Republican who was resting at home with a heart condition, whose doctor had warned against flying to Washington. The member flew anyway.

Another time, a Republican member was in Washington when he learned of his mother’s death. GOP leaders had to ask him to stick around for a few more hours or they’d fail a vote. He stayed.

And just last month, dozens of House Republicans attended a White House coal industry event but couldn’t get back to the US Capitol for a vote because protests — including throngs of Buddhist monks — had closed the streets. The GOP leadership team frantically phoned members telling them to ditch their rides and hoof it to the Metro.

House Republicans are living in a constant struggle to maintain control of their chamber as evidenced by such instances, which were described by multiple members and aides in GOP leadership.

With the slimmest margins since the 1930s, Johnson can afford to lose only a single vote on the House floor. It’s an extraordinarily difficult task in this fractious GOP conference, with a handful of hardliners willing to defy the party — and even President Donald Trump — on key issues. GOP leaders must also navigate demands from battleground members anxious to survive the midterms, plus dozens more Republicans with their own priorities running statewide campaigns.

And while the House is unlikely to pass major legislation in the coming months, Trump and GOP leaders are still eager to use Congress to show their priorities ahead of November’s elections — requiring the party to be in lockstep.

House Majority Whip Tom Emmer recalled a conversation in recent days with a Republican threatening to support a Democrat-backed resolution because, as they told him, “no one’s listening to me and my district is going to be a problem.”

Emmer offered a terse reply: “If you do this, it ain’t your district that’s going to be a problem.”

It could soon get more difficult for Johnson.

If he loses even one more seat, Republicans acknowledge it could become virtually impossible to govern the chamber.

One of their members, Texas Rep. Tony Gonzales, is facing calls to resign his seat after admitting to an affair with a staffer who later died by suicide.

GOP leaders are also closely monitoring the health of Rep. Neal Dunn of Florida, who some fear may need to leave his seat early for health reasons, multiple Republicans told CNN.

And there’s private concern among leadership that their members who lose statewide bids, such as Rep. Wesley Hunt of Texas, could threaten to stop showing up altogether, multiple sources told CNN.

The margins leave zero room for error — and that is assuming every member is present, which is never guaranteed with 218 Republicans from all corners of America. It’s an undertaking that often requires minute-by-minute monitoring, with an intricate knowledge of members’ moods and calendars.

“We have to watch every single flight to make sure every single member gets on that flight,” one person in GOP leadership told CNN.

Sometimes, it requires particularly painful conversations, such as asking members to return to Washington while still grieving losses of their spouses or children. Many members cite Rep. Steve Womack, a respected senior Republican, who lost his wife of 41 years in January and returned to vote days later — before the family held a burial — to oversee his spending bill on the floor. Others have had to battle through their own health challenges, including House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who was actively voting during much of his treatment for blood cancer a few years ago.

“I think those are some of the most difficult conversations we have to have,” another person involved in the GOP vote-counting operation said.

‘Real leverage’

With every vote tight, any Republican threatening to defect can now get an audience with GOP leaders — and sometimes Trump. Rep. John Rose of Tennessee recently vowed to tank a party priority as he sought to get a boost from the president in his governor’s race, as CNN reported.

“I love it. I’m getting everything I want,” quipped Rep. Andrew Garbarino of New York, a leadership ally, of the attention.

Sometimes, the conference’s most recalcitrant members have simply refused to tell leadership how they plan to vote, forcing Johnson and his team to gamble.

Emmer recalled a time during appropriations season when he huddled on the floor with Scalise and their whip teams deciding whether to call certain members’ bluffs and hold a vote. When Scalise asked aloud what the team wanted to do, Emmer pretended to throw a handful of dice. They went ahead with the vote and won.

“There are people who understand what real leverage is. And there are people who think they’re leveraging that have nothing to leverage,” Emmer said.

It also requires tough decisions from GOP leaders. Johnson has needed to bar his own members from promotions inside the Trump administration and quash members’ dreams of Senate appointments, such as keeping them out of the running to backfill Marco Rubio Florida’s seat last year, according to multiple GOP leadership aides.

Sometimes there simply aren’t enough members to hold votes. Weeks ago, House Republicans were forced to pull a personal Trump priority — a bill to increase shower pressure levels — from the schedule because they didn’t have enough “bodies on the floor” to defeat a Democratic procedural vote, as one GOP aide put it. Last week alone, GOP leaders canceled two days of votes because of attendance.

The GOP leadership staff have become fluent in the sparse flight schedules of tiny rural airports, as well as the can’t-miss campaign events for dozens of House members who are trying to balance statewide races back home. Other times it’s the weather that complicates things. Last July, as House GOP leaders prepared for final passage of Trump’s sweeping domestic policy bill, GOP leaders watched flight after flight get canceled. With flight-tracker apps pulled up on their computers, the leadership team phoned members from all over the country, telling them to get in a rental car and drive.

“You’re trying to see when you can put a vote on the floor based on weather — I mean, based on the weather!” Rep. Kevin Hern, a member of Johnson’s leadership team, exclaimed to CNN. “It makes it very difficult, because you don’t get along with your family, obviously, all the time, and we are family.”

Earlier this year, Johnson recalled telling his members — and not in jest — “take your vitamins” and avoid “adventure sports” because he couldn’t afford anyone coming down with sickness or injury.

Some things, though, cannot be avoided. Rep. James Baird of Indiana returned to Washington in a neck brace after he and his wife were in a serious car accident. His wife later died following complications from her injuries. (Baird’s accident in January was a jolt to GOP members: It happened around the same time as the sudden loss of their longtime colleague Rep. Doug LaMalfa of California.)

And there are plenty more health scares that go unreported.

“One of our colleagues, I’m not going to tell you who, literally came here to vote and then went back to the hospital,” Rep. David Joyce of Ohio said, adding that members feel the weight of their obligations. “Your duty is here. You got elected to do your job here.”

Matters of ‘life and death’

Until recent years, House members were free to occasionally miss votes for more routine life events back home, such as a kid’s big sporting event or a grandchild’s wedding. For most of the modern era, party leaders have had large enough margins that attendance was not an issue. They could even afford for members to resign mid-term.

Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, one of this Congress’ retiring members, said he’s been asked why he’s bothering to stick around for the rest of the year when there’s almost no chance of big legislation going through.

“People say, ‘Why don’t you just resign now?’” Bacon recalled, but he noted he’s been firm: “I wouldn’t do that to my district” — or, he added, to Johnson.

Democratic Rep. Steny Hoyer spent decades in leadership, including when the party in charge had a majority of 50 votes. But over the years, the nation’s bitter partisanship and redistricting gambits have shrunk those margins dramatically. By the time Biden and Hill Democrats had full control of Washington in 2021, they were down to single digits.

“We had four. That’s a landslide compared to what he’s got now,” Hoyer said of Johnson. (Republicans like to point out that Democrats also used pandemic-era proxy voting during that time, which made attendance far less of a problem.)

GOP leaders repeatedly warn that only matters of “life and death” should prevent members from attending votes. That includes even noncontroversial votes because Republicans cannot risk losing a procedural vote to Democrats. If they did, that would effectively cede control of the floor to the minority party.

“If we’re in the majority for a day, there are plenty of ways that we could make their lives very annoyingly difficult,” one House Democratic aide said. “We could make a lot of mischief.”

The whip team takes attendance so seriously that when they find out any member must miss votes, it’s treated as classified information — lest Democrats find out.

Members, too, take the mandate seriously.

Rep. Kat Cammack of Florida has not missed a single vote since she gave birth to her daughter last August. (She didn’t time it that way, but acknowledges it worked out because members do not have maternity leave.)

“Two weeks after I gave birth, I put my daughter on a train, because I didn’t want to fly with her. That was a 16-hour train ride. She’s been on dozens of flights. She goes back and forth with me. We make it work,” Cammack said.

Democrats know that their attendance in Washington is one of their most powerful tools from their perch in the minority.

Rep. Brittany Pettersen flew with her newborn son almost immediately after giving birth in January 2025. The Colorado Democrat campaigned for remote voting privileges for new parents — but GOP leaders opposed it and ultimately blocked the effort.

The year before, Democrats’ perfect attendance helped tank the GOP’s first attempt to impeach Biden’s Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas — dealing a humiliating defeat to Johnson and Trump.

Republicans went ahead with the vote despite key defections on their side, gambling that Democrats would be down a member, since Rep. Al Green of Texas had been out all week for abdominal surgery. But in the final moments, Green emerged on the floor in hospital garb and a wheelchair to defeat the measure.

Emmer will never forget which Republicans voted against the party that day — including then-Wisconsin Rep. Mike Gallagher, who led a coveted China panel at the time.

The GOP whip added that he sometimes wished party leaders had played hardball with Gallagher, recalling what he would have loved to say to him at the time: “Look, I love you Mike, but if I don’t have you on this one, maybe this China subcommittee — maybe someone else has to do it.”

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CNN’s Lauren Fox contributed to this report.