WASHINGTON — It was Thursday morning and Mike Johnson had a problem — again.

An increasingly familiar scene was playing out on the House floor, as a handful of holdouts threatened to tank a procedural vote that once would have held little drama. What was supposed to be a 5-minute vote stretched into 20 minutes, then 25.

Working their way around the chamber, the speaker and Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., tried to rein in their conference. Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., threw up his hands and left, not voting. Rep. Zach Nunn, R-Iowa, later said he agreed to vote “yes” only after Johnson promised him a meeting on ethanol with a Trump cabinet member.

Ten more minutes, a few more huddles. The remaining Republicans fell into line, and the rule squeaked by, 214-213, clearing the way for the House to go about its business, which in this case was trying to keep the government open.

Mid-vote squabbles and last-minute maneuverings have become frequent scenes this Congress during rule votes — procedural votes that set the terms for considering various bills and their amendments.

That’s not expected to change much in the new year.

“We are seeing historically thin margins, and that is being used as a bargaining chip for folks to band together and slow things down,” Taylor J. Swift, Hill veteran and director of congressional engagement at the Rebuild Congress Initiative, said in an interview.

Of the 11 rules brought to the House floor from September to December last year, seven saw at least one Republican break ranks and side with Democrats. Earlier in the year, two rules were flat-out rejected. Again and again, GOP leaders had trouble wrangling their conference, with defectors on 18 rules overall in 2025.

The drama has only continued as vacancies and absences pile up — a frustrating change for more seasoned members of Congress.

“I’m going to give you my perspective as someone who came up under the Boehner years,” said Rep. Rick Crawford, R-Ark., referring to former Speaker John Boehner, who held the gavel from 2011 to 2015. “I’ve been here long enough to remember that you could do anything you wanted, but you didn’t vote against a rule … and at that time, there were consequences for that type of action.”

Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., said when Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, led the Rules Committee, Sessions told him, “Don, vote your conscience on the bill, but I’ll kick your ass if you vote against the rule.”

Congressional productivity has slumped overall, with fewer than 70 public laws enacted last year and roll call votes in the House dipping to their lowest number since 2020. Although plenty of other factors contributed to that, including a 43-day government shutdown, division over procedural rules votes hasn’t helped.

In fact, the low productivity has created a sort of Catch-22, said Molly Reynolds, vice president and director of governance studies at Brookings. As members have fewer chances to extract their priorities from leadership, it becomes more likely they’ll threaten procedural votes.

“Sometimes when members threaten to withhold votes from a rule, they’re upset about something related to the bill itself. In other cases, they’re upset about something else, because this is their opportunity,” Reynolds said.

“Any one of us, could we do better as speaker?” said Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-Wash., when asked about last year’s productivity. “That’s the hard thing, that Mr. Johnson has such a subtle majority, how do you accomplish anything? Any bill is proposed, somebody’s gonna have problems with it.”

‘They’re not team players’

Johnson, for his part, has denied the notion that leadership makes “back room,” or back-of-chamber, deals during rule votes. When asked how he would describe Thursday’s mid-vote negotiations, he said he “committed to members, as I do all the time, openly, on the floor, in front of everybody.”

Scalise characterized the huddles as “members having questions,” not dealmaking.

“There’s no backroom deals, never has been under Speaker Johnson’s tenure,” Johnson said. “People have priorities. They want to work. … I do this all 365 days a year, so there’s no deals to anybody.”

But most Republicans acknowledge that as their razor-thin majority gets even tighter, rank-and-file “yea” votes hold more political capital. Members are empowered to hold up floor action to receive assurances from leadership on matters sometimes only tangentially related to the bill at hand.

One rule vote last year, which set up consideration for the fiscal 2026 defense authorization bill, was almost rejected because it lacked a cryptocurrency provision that some conservative members supported, for example.

Still, the thin majority isn’t the only factor, said Crawford and Bacon, the former first elected in 2010 and the latter in 2016. The bigger issue, they said, is a handful of members not acting in a “team player” mentality.

Several who voted against rules in 2025 are associated with an ultraconservative cohort of the party, including the House Freedom Caucus. But other more moderate members, some of whom are facing tough elections in 2026, have also voted against rules to appeal to their constituents.

“It started when you had individuals who felt like they’re not going to be bound by any sort of a team play construct that is imposed by leadership,” Crawford said. “I understand that people are gonna have differences of opinion, but I don’t think you settle those differences through procedural methods that are geared toward creating dissension.”

Bacon added that some members “have never played on a team before.”

“We have about 20 people that … created havoc, and they take down the rules of bills they like, just to prove another point. It’s unfortunate,” he said. “They’re independent actors, they’re not team players.”

‘Fishy’ provisions

Rep. Kevin Kiley, R-Calif., who is serving his second term in Congress, sees it differently. It makes sense to save “no” votes for the bills themselves, he said. But if members don’t agree with the rule, they shouldn’t vote for it.

And lately leadership has put some “fishy” things in rules that aren’t directly related to bringing a bill to the floor, Kiley said.

In April, for example, nine GOP members rejected a rule over language slipped into it that aimed to squash an unrelated push from Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., to allow proxy voting for new parents. Kiley was among those nine members.

Even Bacon, a team player, was close to voting down a rule in September over such “fishy” provisions, objecting to language barring votes to terminate the “national emergencies” President Donald Trump declared as his statutory justification for punitive tariffs. That provision amounted to a “gag order” wrapped into an unrelated rule, Bacon said at the time.

“Now we’re putting stuff in rules votes that are legislative too, and I don’t like that,” Bacon said of the tariff rule. “We’re not just rubber stamps. But I will always support the rule if I’m in the majority, unless you try … to sneak stuff in there.”

As the rest of the 119th Congress unfolds, Johnson is likely to see more nail-biting moments on the House floor, as the midterms approach in the fall and attendance problems threaten his majority.

He not only has to thread the needle as he tries to stitch up differences within his conference, but also has to heed calls from Trump. And if Johnson wants legislation to actually see the president’s desk, he has to ensure it can get 60 votes in the Senate.

That needle-threading sometimes results in putting “fishy” language into rules, forming last-minute chamber deals and letting procedural votes teeter on the edge.

“They don’t really have a choice,” Bacon said of leaders appeasing holdouts. “If you play hardball with them, then you’re in the minority.”

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Ryan Kelly, Olivia M. Bridges and Sandhya Raman contributed to this report.

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