The speaker of the House has for centuries played a singular role among political leaders in the United States, as the only partisan figure in Congress who is also explicitly empowered by the Constitution to lead the legislative branch.
One wouldn’t necessarily know that from watching the recent behavior of Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, who is conducting himself less like the autonomous head of a coequal branch of government and more like a junior partner to President Trump.
In the past couple of weeks, Mr. Johnson removed the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Michael R. Turner of Ohio, acting upon a request from Mar-a-Lago. He trailed behind Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance at the White House, breathlessly chronicling Mr. Vance’s first moment setting foot in the Oval Office as if he were a White House staff member.
“I told him and President Trump that I HAD to capture the moment on video,” Mr. Johnson wrote online in a giddy caption to his viral video last week.
On Monday, when Mr. Johnson and House Republicans held their annual retreat at the Trump National Doral in Miami, the speaker complimented Mr. Trump on his “beautiful club” and defended several norm-shattering and legally questionable moves the president has made that circumvented Congress.
“We support the president’s initiative, obviously, 100 percent,” he said of Mr. Trump’s decision to overhaul the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He stood by the president’s decision to fire more than a dozen inspectors general overseeing government agencies without giving Congress the required 30-day notice about such removals.
“Sometimes you need a fresh look,” Mr. Johnson said.
And when it came to Mr. Trump’s weekend war of words with Colombia about accepting U.S. military planes flying deportees into the country, Mr. Johnson gave what sounded like a neat encapsulation of his governing philosophy: “Congress will back up the White House.”
With that, any past pretense of the party having its own agenda beyond Mr. Trump’s priorities was firmly dispensed with. It is a break with the past, when speakers of both parties have been territorial about the prerogatives of Congress, even if it sometimes meant challenging their own president.
Molly Reynolds, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, said the too-slim House majority leaves Mr. Johnson, a relatively inexperienced speaker, with little latitude to play his institutional role.
“He has to figure out how to work with Trump most effectively to drive the House Republican conference to agreement on things,” she said. “He needs to figure out if there is a way for Trump to be helpful in doing that.”
So far, Mr. Johnson has been doing so primarily by acting as the president’s legislative valet. That has been his strategy for a while. On election night, he bolted from his own victory party in Shreveport, La., and flew to Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida for the real celebration.
More recently, he said he would not “second guess” Mr. Trump’s decision to pardon violent criminals who attacked police officers at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The amount of power concentrated in the speaker’s office has ebbed and flowed through history. But in recent decades, congressional power has been centralized in the speaker’s office, and until recently its occupant acted, at least nominally, as an institutional leader.
Mr. Johnson, by contrast, has effectively installed himself as a member of the president’s entourage and, as a consequence, has shrunk the stature of the office he holds.
In a viral photograph of Mr. Trump taken just after the election, the president-elect sat on his plane eating McDonald’s with Elon Musk, his son Donald Trump Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his pick to serve as health secretary.
Mr. Johnson was also in the picture, but not in a seat at the cool kids’ table. In the photo, he is perched over Mr. Kennedy’s shoulder, leaning to get in the frame and looking a bit like a fifth wheel as the group headed to Madison Square Garden for a Saturday night UFC fight.
Democrats contend that Mr. Johnson’s approach is eroding the power of his own position and of Congress itself.
“This relationship diminishes the constitutional office of speaker,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland. “The president is not the boss of the speaker, the Congress or the nation. The speaker is not the president’s right-hand man, aide-de-camp, little buddy or inferior officer.”
Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi was a vital partner to two Democratic presidents. But she had her own potent power base on Capitol Hill, and she distanced herself from President Barack Obama at times, including on his plan to leave 50,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and his decision not to prosecute Bush administration officials involved in torture.
She also pushed back hard on the Obama administration when it wanted to pursue a smaller, piecemeal health care overhaul, lobbying instead for a comprehensive plan. (She won.)
“The incredibly shrinking speakership that began with Kevin McCarthy has unfortunately continued under Mike Johnson,” Ms. Pelosi said, referring to Mr. Johnson’s predecessor, whom Mr. Trump nicknamed “my Kevin.” “When the speaker indicates to the president that House Republicans are a rubber stamp for him, members lose leverage in any debate on policy that could impact their districts.”
She noted that when she held the post under Democratic presidents, both Mr. Obama and President Joseph R. Biden Jr., there were disagreements. But, she said, “they always respected that the vote is a privilege of the House members who are held accountable to their constituents in a way that they were not.”
Even former Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican who is complimentary of how Mr. Johnson is playing an impossible hand, compared his demeanor filming Mr. Vance in the Oval Office to that of an adoring spouse who was just trying to have some fun.
“It’s like my wife — she takes pictures of everything. If she doesn’t take a picture, it’s like it didn’t happen,” said Mr. Gingrich, who called the moment “cute.”
“This guy got thrust into his job that he didn’t ask for, has endured endless pain from the nuttier members of his conference,” he said, “so he has a little fun.”
Strategically, Mr. Gingrich said, Mr. Johnson’s approach of hugging Mr. Trump close made sense given that Republicans need to keep control of Congress after the 2026 midterm elections.
He also noted that on what may be the single biggest legislative decision of the year — whether to cram all of the party’s immigration, tax cuts and spending cuts into one bill or split them into two — the speaker appears to be getting his way and getting Mr. Trump to push for one big bill. (Republican Senate leaders have been pressing for two.)
“Trump is like F.D.R. or Lyndon Johnson in the intensity of his support and the emotional depth of his having survived the shooting,” Mr. Gingrich said in an interview. “You want Trump and the House Republicans to be part of the same choir.”
