Marjorie Taylor Greene’s bid to vote on firing Speaker Mike Johnson risks throwing the House back into leaderless paralysis for the second time in six months.

But it also holds real peril for the frustrated conservatives whom she claims to represent — with some worried she could possibly push Johnson into working with Democrats on Ukraine aid.

The Georgia Republican last week introduced a resolution ousting Johnson that she hasn’t said when she will force a vote on, portraying it as an early warning to the speaker after he pushed through a government funding deal that his right flank loathed. Should Greene decide to tee up that vote later next month, after Johnson’s margin shrinks to just one vote, she might need only a single colleague on her side in order to fire him — so long as Democrats unite against saving his job.

“You should take her very seriously,” said Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), who voted to oust Kevin McCarthy as speaker last year but said he “isn’t there yet” on joining Greene’s anti-Johnson push.

“Marjorie is playing chess, not checkers. She’s looking at the long game, and she’s holding all the cards on this one,” Burchett added. “And I think it’s an attempt on her part to move the Republican party to a more conservative area — where our base is.”

Yet as Johnson increasingly looks to Democrats to help pass major bills, including a $1.2 trillion spending plan that most of his conference opposed, Greene’s latest chess move could backfire spectacularly. There’s no guarantee any Republicans will join her in ousting Johnson, since even many conservatives are disinterested in firing another speaker. Still, some haven’t ruled it out — and Johnson has no room to maneuver in his thin majority.

So the speaker could end up answering her threat by giving Democrats floor time for Ukraine, as the Louisiana Republican actively decides a path forward on the foreign aid package. That may well be enough to lock in a few Democratic votes for saving his job.

One House Republican, granted anonymity to speak candidly, summed up the fear: Greene’s move could “deliver aid to Ukraine” by giving Johnson no choice but to seek common cause with Democrats. “Wouldn’t that be rich,” that member added sarcastically.

Interviews with more than a dozen GOP members and aides point to a clear division between Johnson’s allies and his critics on the right. The speaker’s supporters dismiss Greene, arguing that there’s little appetite within the conference to relive another divisive leadership fight that would plunge the House into chaos during an election year.

A smaller number of conservatives, like Burchett, warn that Greene’s move poses real danger to Johnson as he approaches two big policy fights next month — one on foreign aid and the other on renewing contentious government spy powers. Both of those issues promise to drive a wedge through the already fractured GOP conference.

But for now, even some of the Republican rebels who had no qualms about ousting McCarthy are swatting down Greene.

“She’s on the McCarthy revenge tour,” House Freedom Caucus Chair Bob Good (R-Va.), one of the eight GOP lawmakers who voted to remove McCarthy, said at a campaign stop Tuesday. “We don’t talk about removing the speaker. We’re trying to influence him to do the right thing.”

Another House Republican, granted anonymity to speak candidly about Greene, described her Johnson ouster push as “the narcissist wanting more attention.”

Besides Good, five of the other six Republicans currently in office who booted McCarthy from the speakership are either presently opposed to or holding out on any moves against Johnson.

Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), a chief McCarthy foe, recalled during the campaign event with Good that he had told Johnson he’s “increasingly disappointed in his performance as speaker.” But, Biggs added of ousting the Louisianan, “I don’t think it’s going to happen, regardless of whether we want it to.”

Greene, however, has claimed she has silent supporters. Conservatives have soured on Johnson’s leadership in growing numbers, believing he’s either getting bad advice or that he isn’t willing to fight for their priorities the way they’d hoped when they helped elect him.

Johnson’s relationship with his right flank is notably different from McCarthy’s, however, which could help his chances of survival. Several hardliners have said they saw McCarthy as willing to lie to them — unlike Johnson, whom they generally like as a person.

And much of the private chatter from Johnson’s biggest critics has focused on next year’s leadership slate, including floating speaker alternatives if the GOP holds the majority in November.

Still, some could be staying strategically quiet to see how Johnson navigates the foreign aid debate in particular. The Georgia firebrand moved up her own timetable for filing a so-called motion to vacate the speaker’s chair, at first saying she would do so if Johnson took up a Ukraine bill — and then moving her goalposts after the spending deal passed.

Once Greene seeks to attach “privilege” to her resolution ousting Johnson, should she make good on her vow last week to do so, GOP leaders will have 48 legislative hours to bring it up on the floor. Greene has declined to say when she will trigger a vote, saying that she wants to give her conference time to come up with alternatives and avoid the weeks of chaos that followed McCarthy’s ouster.

But whenever that might happen, Johnson could get help from Democrats, who refused to lend the same hand to McCarthy.

That’s because, while the conservative speaker doesn’t have much ideological overlap with Democrats, a sizable number of people in the House minority are loath to repeat the frenetic vacuum of the post-McCarthy period. Some in the party are also watching what Johnson does with the long-awaited foreign aid package and are likely to vote to protect him if it gets a floor vote.

‘We’re going to get a Republican speaker anyway. And I figure, why would you want to go through that nightmare we went through before because they can’t get their act together?” said Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.). He urged Republicans to change the one-person threshold to force a vote on ousting the speaker, because it is “affecting all of us.”

Yet Peters’ prediction that the House will keep a Republican speaker regardless isn’t ironclad. And House Democrats are unlikely to get ahead of their own leaders on an anti-Johnson vote; the caucus is expected to hold a conversation before deciding on any course of action.

If Democrats hang together and withhold any support from Johnson after his margin shrinks to one vote, Greene’s push could even result in a speaker from their party or a coalition government.

It’s an outcome clearly identified by Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), who was initially noncommittal about Greene’s effort before ruling out a Johnson ouster.

“I don’t agree with what Marjorie did. We got a one-seat majority … If you want to put [House Minority Leader] Hakeem Jeffries in, then do just what she’s doing,” Norman said in an interview.

Daniella Diaz contributed to this report.

TALLAHASSEE, Florida — A panel of federal judges upheld Florida’s congressional map, turning away a challenge that alleged it was discriminatory against Black voters after the district held by former Rep. Al Lawson, a Black Democrat, was dismantled.

The decision is a substantial victory for Republicans and Gov. Ron DeSantis, who muscled the map through Florida’s GOP-controlled Legislature. The congressional map his administration crafted ultimately resulted in Republicans gaining four seats, helping the GOP flip the U.S. House during the 2022 midterm elections.

The three-judge panel unanimously ruled that those who challenged the map did not prove that Republican legislators discriminated against Black voters by adopting the map that was shaped by the DeSantis administration. Instead, the judges pointed out lawmakers initially resisted the governor’s plan only to then “run out of steam” and bow to the governor’s wishes.

“Consequently, whatever might be said about the Legislature’s decision to give up the fight for preserving a Black-performing district in North Florida, it did not amount to ratification of racial animus in violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments,” the opinion read.

The ruling can be directly appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. But even if it is, any appeal would be unlikely to resolve ahead of this year’s elections. A separate legal challenge against the map is also pending before the Florida Supreme Court.

Two of the three judges on the panel were appointed by Republican presidents.

DeSantis upended Florida’s once-a-decade redistricting process when he insisted on coming up with his own congressional map. The governor repeatedly argued that Lawson’s North Florida district — which stretched from Jacksonville to Tallahassee — was unconstitutional and an illegal race-based gerrymander, although there have not been court rulings that reinforce DeSantis’ assertions.

The governor in 2022 vetoed a map drawn by the Legislature, even though the lawmakers’ plan would have created a much smaller district centered around Jacksonville that could have allowed Black voters to elect a candidate of their choosing. After DeSantis’ veto, GOP legislative leaders relented and agreed to pass a map drawn up by the DeSantis administration.

Lawson, who is from Tallahassee, tried to run for another term under the revamped map that placed him in the same district as Panama City Republican Rep. Neal Dunn, but he lost by nearly 20 percentage points.

Voting-rights and civil rights organizations — including the Florida branch of the NAACP and Common Cause — as well as individual voters that sued contended DeSantis intentionally discriminated against Black voters. They argued his decision to veto the Legislature’s initial map bolstered their case as well.

“He did not act for some lofty race neutral reason,” attorneys for the group suing the governor wrote in a November brief. “Only an illegal desire to prevent North Florida’s Black voters from electing their candidate of choice can explain the Governor’s otherwise incoherent — yet, insistent — string of arguments and actions.”

U.S. appeals court Judge Adalberto Jordan, in a concurring opinion, wrote that while he supported the decision he added that the evidence presented at trial “convinces me that the governor did, in fact, act with race as a motivating factor.”

Attorneys representing the governor and Florida’s top elections official argued in their own post-trial brief that those who challenged the map lacked the proof to back up their allegations.

“Plaintiffs have failed to muster the necessary evidence to overcome the presumption of good faith to which the entitled map is entitled,” they argued. “There’s also no evidence of racial animus. Far from it. The map drawer from the governor’s office … drew the congressional districts at issue with compactness and adherence to geographic and political boundaries as his guideposts.”

The battle over Florida’s congressional map is now expected to shift back to the state courts. The case now pending before the Florida Supreme Court, while focusing on different legal arguments, also centers on Lawson’s dismantled seat. In the state case, a Florida circuit judge ruled that the redrawn district violated voter-approved redistricting standards enshrined in Florida’s constitution and he ordered the Legislature to redraw it.

But the 1st District Court of Appeal — in an unusual move where the entire court decided the case — contended that the judges were not bound by the previous state Supreme Court ruling that created the initial district held by Lawson. That court also asserted that not enough evidence was presented to show that Black voters were harmed by the new maps.

SALEM, Ohio — When Donald Trump’s team invited Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose last summer to a gathering of Republican elected officials at the former president’s Bedminster golf club, it was a big moment for the Senate hopeful.

But it came with a condition — LaRose would have to endorse Trump’s presidential comeback bid, according to two people with knowledge of the conversation.

LaRose had just told POLITICO two weeks earlier that he did not plan to back a presidential candidate any time soon. But then he did, just hours before the dinner.

His forced endorsement of Trump wasn’t reciprocated. The former president instead backed another candidate in Ohio’s GOP Senate primary. And LaRose’s sudden reversal became one in a series of flip-flops that ended with a distant third-place finish in Tuesday’s primary to face Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown.

It was a dramatic fall from public favor for a man who had won reelection to his state post less than two years ago. LaRose had started the three-way race with a commanding polling lead and priceless name ID as a well-liked secretary of state.

But with his future on the line, LaRose moved away from his past reputation as a pragmatic establishment conservative and tried to push into an occupied MAGA lane. He ultimately ended up with little support from either faction.

On Tuesday, his attempt at higher office flamed out, ending with less than 17 percent of the vote. He was behind both the victor who ultimately won Trump’s coveted endorsement, Bernie Moreno, and the Trump skeptic who won over the state GOP’s old guard, state Sen. Matt Dolan.

But LaRose won’t disappear from the public eye. He has nearly three years left in his term as secretary of state — a lifetime in politics. What he learns from the Senate run and how he positions himself in that time, especially during the spotlight of the 2024 election he’ll oversee, will help determine his political future.

For now, the implosion of LaRose’s campaign holds lessons for other Republicans trying to keep up with a fast-evolving party dominated by Trumpism. As the Ohio Senate race turned into a proxy warbetween the MAGA movement and the old school GOP trying to claw its way back into power, LaRose first appeared to try to straddle the lines. Then he made a play for the MAGA crowd.

He got trounced.

“LaRose kind of wanted to have it both ways,” said Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), a conservative congressmember who considered a Senate run himself but ultimately endorsed Moreno.

A spokesperson disputed that LaRose had changed, saying he’d always been a strong supporter of Trump.

“An Ohio Republican that stands with President Trump on his policies,” LaRose told reporters when asked about his ideological alignment in the final days of the race. But he shrugged off labels: “There’s no box that you can necessarily put me in.”

All three candidates in the race to face Brown have at times seemed wary of Trump. Dolan remained consistent in his assertion that Trump did not win the 2020 election and bore blame for the events of Jan. 6, 2021. He was the only one of the three to not seek Trump’s endorsement.

Moreno had also been critical of Trump, both before his 2016 election and in the aftermath of Jan. 6. But he pivoted hard to embrace Trump, especially during his 2022 Senate run, which he ended after meeting with the former president and endorsing now-Sen. J.D. Vance. Both Moreno and Vance shirked their past Trump criticisms to go all-in on supporting the former president.

LaRose’s relationship with Trump has also evolved over time.

In 2019 he called a Trump tweet “racist”. As Ohio’s chief elections official, LaRose insisted the state’s 2020 elections were fair and accurate, that there was no evidence of widespread fraud in mail voting, and any Republican who suggested otherwise was “irresponsible.”

But in seeking reelection in 2022 with a primary challenge from the right, he accepted Trump’s endorsement — and his language about the 2020 election began to shift. By February 2022, he said “President Trump is right to say voter fraud is a serious problem.”

LaRose easily won reelection in 2022. Fresh off that success, he entered the Senate race in July 2023 as the early frontrunner, starting off with a large lead over both Dolan and Moreno, who were already in the race. Even Moreno’s own internal polling from March 2023 showed LaRose with a 17-point lead over Moreno.

LaRose’s team, in fact, was so confident that in the summer of 2023, one of his consultants approached Moreno’s campaign with a proposal: Drop out and LaRose would endorse Moreno for another office. Moreno’s team declined, according to two people familiar with the call from LaRose’s consultant.

LaRose, meanwhile, was raising money as he became a major backer of a constitutional amendment that effectively served as a stand in for an abortion referendum that would be placed on the ballot that fall.

That vote failed badly. Meanwhile, Moreno was maneuvering to block LaRose from drawing MAGA support while also preventing him from pulling in help from the GOP establishment that was coalescing behind Dolan.

Both Moreno and Dolan are wealthy, but LaRose needed funds. Moreno’s campaign reached out to wealthy donors in GOP big-money circles — the kind who give to Americans for Prosperity and American Opportunity Alliance — to show them data on LaRose’s lack of a path forward, urging them to at least stay neutral in the race if they didn’t want to back Moreno, according to two people familiar with the conversations.

And as LaRose embraced the MAGA movement, some former donors moved to support Dolan instead. Jimmy and Dee Haslam, the owners of the Cleveland Browns and major GOP donors, publicly backed Dolan in a letter that praised him for not “catering to the extreme.”

They had donated to LaRose in the past but now began working to drum up support for Dolan from other major donors. By the end of the campaign, LaRose had so little money that he never aired a single TV ad.

Moreno’s team pounced on any opening to cast LaRose as anti-Trump as both candidates jockeyed for the former president’s endorsement.

When LaRose appeared to defend former Vice President Mike Pence’s actions on Jan. 6, Moreno’s allies immediately brought it to the attention of Trump’s orbit. LaRose quickly walked his comments back via a spokesperson. When old tweets from LaRose’s communications aide insulting Trump surfaced, LaRose abruptly fired the man. The aide was well-liked in Ohio GOP circles, and his ouster drew quick rebuke — and helped further sever LaRose’s ties to the establishment.

By the time LaRose officially entered the race, he had sent mixed messages about whether he would endorse Trump in the presidential primary — or whether a reciprocal endorsement would even matter.

LaRose had declined to endorse anyone in 2020, saying it was inappropriate for the state’s top elections official to do so.

In the spring of 2023, LaRose was caught on tape telling a group of Ohio Republicans behind closed doors that the Trump endorsement carries less weight than it once did and that there is “60 percent of the party that doesn’t care who he endorses.”

In an interview shortly before his mid-July launch, LaRose told POLITICO he wanted the Trump endorsement but wouldn’t beg for it, and that he wasn’t ready to endorse the president himself.

“There’s an Ohioan running for president, too,” he said, referring to Vivek Ramaswamy. “I want to hear what Vivek has to say some more and see how he does. We’ll see and time will pass and I’ll make a decision about who I’m going to endorse at a later date.”

Then came the Trump dinner. LaRose endorsed the former president just hours before the event in New Jersey.

But he got nothing in return. Trump endorsed Moreno in December, and the three-way race quickly became a showdown between Moreno and Dolan.

“Dolan clearly had the moderate lane and Bernie had a pretty good lock on the conservative Trump lane,” said Davidson, the Ohio congressmember. “And, you know, there really isn’t a third way that has a lot of momentum right now.”

By the time Trump came to rally for Moreno in the closing days of the race, LaRose had become an afterthought. Trump devoted parts of his 90-minute speech to ripping Dolan — and did not mention LaRose once.

Yet few Republicans expect LaRose to fade into obscurity.

He still has most of his second term as the state’s chief elections official ahead of him. Trump hadn’t attacked LaRose during the election, noted LaRose’s spokesperson, Rick Gorka, which “shows that there’s a respect for Frank.” And running the 2024 election will give him an opportunity to remain visible.

“He’s a young man, so I’m sure we’ll see him again in some statewide race,” Rep. Dave Joyce (R-Ohio) said.

And if LaRose was sending mixed signals before about the power of Trumpism, he is not now. On Thursday, he endorsed Moreno’s Senate bid, drawing praise from Moreno who called him “a good conservative.” It was the typical course of action for a defeated primary candidate, but it earned him kudos from the party.

“Frank LaRose is a good man, a talented politician, and has a bright future in Republican politics,” said Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), who chairs the Senate campaign arm. “The reality is, President Trump’s endorsement is the most powerful force in politics.”

Zach Montellaro contributed.