Mike Johnson Humiliated As House Republicans Boycott His Unity Retreat

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has been humiliated by his own Party once again, as more than 100 Republican lawmakers announced that they will be skipping the yearly Republican retreat this week. One of the key items on the agenda for the retreat is creating "unity" within the Party, but apparently Republicans would rather keep fighting with one another than make nice and actually get some work done. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins discusses this.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Republican members of Congress are on their way to West Virginia for their yearly Republican retreat, where they're gonna have seminars on such things as Biden's failed for in policy, battling omics and putting American families first. Now, this is a retreat, as I said, Republicans do it every year. Typically they do it in Florida this year. They said, what the hell, west Virginia's lovely this time of year. Let's go there. The only problem is Republican speaker Mike Johnson, who is obviously the one putting on this retreat, um, he's not getting a lot of, uh, RSVPs. In fact, as Republicans head to this gathering, out of the 219 Republicans in Congress, fewer than 100 are actually expected to go. And part of the reason is not because of these boring seminars or because their keynote speaker, Larry Kudlow of Fox News dropped out. It's because of the infighting taking place within the Republican party, because even with all these little breakout sessions and talking points distributed, the overall theme of the gathering was to get every Republican on the same page heading into the 2024 election.

So the theme was, in fact, unity, let's come together, put our differences aside, and focus on winning in 2024. And more than half of the Republicans in Congress said, no, no, I don't want unity. No, I don't want us to come up with winning campaign strategies. Are you crazy? We've got lots of stupid things to do and we're gonna keep doing it, apparently, is what these Republicans are saying. Now, some of them are offering very stupid excuses. Uh, Tim Burket said, Hey, I got a farm to run. Okay, well, that, that doesn't stop you from being in Congress. I don't know why it would stop you from actually working for a couple days. Uh, Nancy Mace said, I can't go. I gotta go on real time with Bill Maher. Hoo. Uh, others said, Hey, I wish it was in Florida. I'd go to Florida, but I'm not going to West Virginia.

The point is, this is another failure for Speaker Johnson, a speaker who is effectively at this point already on the ropes, right? They're already talking about motions to vacate in an election year. They're talking about the fact that if Johnson goes through with these budget deals that have to get passed, by the way, uh, we may enact a motion to vacate. So Johnson needed all of his Republicans to come together. He needed to sit them all down, all 219 of them, I guess 218. Now, considering Ken Buck is retiring next week, probably doesn't need to be at the retreat, but he couldn't even get that. He couldn't even get that.

He couldn't even get a majority of them. That is how dysfunctional and disjointed and disconnected the entire Republican caucus in the house has become. They hate each other. They cannot coalesce, and it's driving them mad. It's driving them to be at each other's throats. And I, I'm not complaining, trust me, I think this is hilarious. Or at least it would be hilarious if these weren't the people running the country. If this was just happening inside the Republican party itself, like the RNC, which God knows they've got enough problems going on right now too, then it would be funny. But these are actually elected officials. These are people that do have jobs to do in Congress, and they're not doing them because they don't just hate the other side. They hate their own side. So nothing gets done. So it's no surprise that we have people like Ken Buck saying, screw it.