Speaker Mike Johnson was at his wit’s end.

For months, he had been dealing with one rebellion after another, and now members were about to tank a bipartisan veterans bill. The House was scheduled to quickly approve the bill that Thursday morning and head out for the weekend.

Trying to salvage another priority for his party, Johnson brought a handful of members, including those threatening to block the bill, into his “ceremonial room” across from the House chamber. Reps. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Florida), who opposed the bill, and Zach Nunn (R-Iowa), who supported it, started yelling at each other.

Luna then pointed her anger toward Johnson. Fed up, the speaker snapped and replied, “I’m sick of this shit,” according to multiple sources in the room.

Witnesses were shocked that the typically even-keeled Johnson had lost his cool. Almost immediately, he apologized to Luna for his outburst. He then walked over to the elementary-school-aged son of Rep. Gabe Evans (R-Colorado), who had witnessed the interaction, and got down on one knee and apologized for cursing in front of him, the sources said.

Johnson left the room and did what he’s been forced to do repeatedly this Congress: pull the bill because a few Republicans wouldn’t agree to vote for it.

NOTUS spoke with more than a dozen lawmakers and aides for a broader view of how the speaker’s daily crises — often brought about by his own members — continue to derail his party’s agenda.

Most rank-and-file Republican members are upset with the handful who regularly make the House look like a hot mess. Some lawmakers refuse to be team players, and the incentive structure that rewards them makes governing impossible, they say. (Proposals that would punish those who step out of line are even being considered, sources told NOTUS.)

“It creates anger and resentment,” retiring Rep. Don Bacon (R-Nebraska) said. “We want to get things done, and dysfunction’s not good.”

Republicans have shut down the House floor, tanked rules, cursed at one another on the floor and gotten in each other’s faces — and those are just the fights that have happened in public.

In private, members have grown increasingly incensed at the state of the House of Representatives. And the episode between Luna and Johnson off of the House floor encapsulated that.

Johnson and House Republicans have managed, with a razor-thin majority, to pass significant legislation, but it hasn’t been easy or pretty. This week the conference passed three marquee bills — the annual defense authorization bill, a budget resolution for defense and farm aid and a bill curbing lawmakers from trading individual stocks.

But even these items came with significant hand-wringing and last-minute agita.

A handful of members — particularly those on the far right — have learned they can use their votes as leverage to get what they want. Johnson has frequently placated most of their demands, much to the dismay of the rest of the conference.

“The Republican conference is a diverse gathering of people, some of whom are really effective at getting things done and others who are more interested in knocking things down,” Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-South Dakota) told NOTUS.

As the House starts its annual August recess, members are fed up that the rebels are being rewarded for their bad behavior.

Rep. Carlos Gimenez speaks to reporters alongside Johnson. Jose Luis Magana/AP

“The vast majority of members are team players who do not appreciate the minority, the small minority, that does that,” Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-Florida) said of the members who block legislation. “I don’t appreciate it, but we live in that reality that they can leverage it. So there are the vast majority of us who don’t like that. We’re team players.”

But the group that’s spent this year holding things up view themselves as fighting for conservative principles.

“It’s the hardcore conservatives against everybody else,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tennessee) said. “Matt Gaetz told me, I remember, he said that, ‘We’ll have more power if we don’t have a supermajority; it gives us more opportunity because if we did, we’d just get run over,’” referring to the former House Republican who regularly clashed with top leaders.

Rep. Andy Harris (R-Maryland), the chair of the House Freedom Caucus, said “the only measure is whether we are successful in delivering for the American people.”

Members across the Republican conference agree on one thing: Johnson has the hardest job in Washington. Gimenez described Johnson as being in a “very difficult situation” and said, “It’s tough to herd cats.”

“So while some of us may be frustrated by some of the actions, it’s not by his actions. It’s merely by the actions of those few,” Gimenez added.

Bacon agreed, noting that with just a two-seat majority, “there’s not a lot of leeway.”

“They should be adults and be responsible. So it’s really the individuals versus Mike. I mean, Mike can only do so much,” he said.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna. J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Earlier in the summer, Luna and a handful of other members shut down the House floor for more than two weeks over President Donald Trump’s priority voting bill that’s going nowhere in the Senate. Johnson eventually gave Luna a commitment the House would attach the bill to must-pass legislation in an attempt to force the Senate’s hand.

In the past, lawmakers who rebelled against the speaker were punished; they lost a plum committee assignment or leaders refused to advance their bills. Now, with such a narrow majority, members believe there’s not much leadership can really do.

“You have a chicken-and-egg situation,” one GOP member said. “There’s really no ability to lay consequences on someone’s feet when you need them again next week.”

This House Republican said the way it typically plays out is unfair to everyone else.

“You’ve seen the speaker and the leadership spend a wildly disproportionate amount of time with a narrow band of members. And, you know, that hasn’t necessarily sat well with the couple that come here, work together, work hard and are trying to move their own objectives forward,” they said.

But some members told NOTUS that Johnson is being an enabler by agreeing to almost every demand.

“They get accommodated a lot, and we don’t like it,” Bacon said.

The constant cycle of rebels getting away with stalling Republican bills is prompting some members to come up with ways to punish them, sources tell NOTUS.

When then-Speaker Paul Ryan faced challenges from those in the Freedom Caucus, Rep. Austin Scott (R-Georgia) proposed a rule that if any Republican voted procedurally with the Democrats and blocked legislation from coming to the floor, then the GOP-led steering committee — a panel that doles out committee assignments — could take action against the member by removing them from a committee or stripping them of a gavel.

Rep. Austin Scott. Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP

Ryan ultimately rebuffed the plan. But now, Scott has revived the idea as a measure of accountability and is pitching his colleagues on it, two members with knowledge of the discussions told NOTUS.

“It’s clear these guys are no longer representing their districts,” one of those Republican members told NOTUS. “So this would provide more to be put [on] the steering committee, not a speaker who effectively has a gun to his head every time he makes a decision.”

Without any real ability to penalize lawmakers, Johnson has had to find different ways to keep his members in line. One strategy has been to make promises he can’t always keep.

Back in June, Johnson promised hard-line conservatives a vote on a controversial immigration bill known as “HR 2” before the July 4 recess, but that upset more moderate members who didn’t want to vote on the bill in an election year.

In turn, Johnson ended up not putting the bill up for a vote, which caused a ripple effect of drama.

The speaker has also promised to include members’ wish lists in subsequent reconciliation packages as a way to punt fights to a later time.

In 2025, when members were upset that their priorities weren’t in the first reconciliation bill, Johnson assured them they would be included in the second party-line package the conference was planning to vote on in 2026. When that bill became narrowly focused on funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, the speaker promised those same members that their issues would be addressed in a third reconciliation bill.

Speaker Mike Johnson. J. Scott Applewhite/AP

But the White House has instead commandeered that package to be for Iran war funding, aid for farmers and portions of the SAVE America Act.

“Unfortunately, the call has been made,” said Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas), who was the top Republican pushing for a larger reconciliation package that could have included policies tackling prescription-drug costs, energy affordability and fraud prevention.

Burchett said the promise of another party-line bill is “a moving target” and that “it’s frustrating” when the goal keeps moving.

One senior GOP member said Johsnon is acting as “a military tactician” when it comes to lining up legislation. “In order to hold the front line together, the speaker has been strategically retreating across the calendar,” the senior Republican said.

But at some point, the speaker will have to face the political realities of making members potentially vote for another sprawling reconciliation package, and that could impact his own future.

“Will the great political battle come in September or after the November general election? I cannot say,” the member said. “But it is coming.”