Mike Johnson declines to lead House Republicans into minority, two-term speaker told staff the morning after Democrats took the chamber

Mike Johnson told his staff on a morning phone call that he will not stay on as Republican leader in the new Congress, one day after Democrats took the House majority, NBC News reports, citing four people who were on the call. The two-term speaker, elected after Republicans removed Kevin McCarthy from the post in 2023, has not said what he does next.

Republicans will hold an internal election on Nov. 10 to choose their candidate for minority leader, and no obvious successor has emerged. The post-mortem did not wait for one. Senator Curtis posted on X that after the Biden administration Americans wanted an economy that worked for them, and that what they received instead was a hastily executed war, headline after headline of scandals, a national debt that ballooned to $40 trillion and unpredictable tariffs. In a Substack essay about growing up in Utah, Curtis listed the pioneer values of his childhood — hard work, thrift, self-reliance, faith, family, integrity — and wrote that the party had steadily abandoned such principles over the last decade. The shrewd political minds who judged that abandoning them was worth it to win elections were, he wrote, largely right about winning. He welcomes the millions the populist movement brought into the party, and adds that winning elections was never the ultimate objective.

The war Curtis calls hastily executed is the one that pushed American pump prices to records in the campaign's final weeks, after the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Whether the defeat belongs to the war, the fuel pump or the debt is the argument the party has until Nov. 10 to conduct.

Trump has two years left in office and has said he will spend them governing by veto and executive action. What a congressional majority cannot pass over a veto it can still investigate: subpoenas, hearings, the confirmation calendar. In the campaign's final weeks Trump floated pre-emptive pardons for Elon Musk and his efficiency staff — pardons covering crimes no prosecutor has yet named, drafted ahead of the investigations Democrats promised if they took Congress. Musk spent close to half a billion dollars trying to prevent exactly that outcome.

Johnson's future plans are not known, NBC reports. The election to replace him is scheduled for Nov. 10.