Mike Johnson Lost Control of His House (Again). That’s Worth a Little Dance.

Since millions of Americans rang in the new year with expired Obamacare subsidies, Congress has been scrambling to restore them. If only Democrats didn’t choke at the height of the longest-ever federal shutdown and abandon the fight they started—and were clearly winning—to ensure this wouldn’t happen. Anyway.

If the Democrats aren’t fumbling or folding, they’re… dancing. On Thursday, the House passed the Health Care Affordability Act in a 230-196 vote, which would provide a three-year extension to the Affordable Care Act, thus extending the pandemic-era subsidies that expired on December 31. And while the bill is pretty much guaranteed to be dead-on-arrival in the Senate (especially since it’s already been rejected by the upper chamber and Sen. Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) vowed to ignore it), that didn’t stop Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-Ill.)—who introduced it—from performing a little celebratory dance.

Oh my gosh you guys! The House just passed my bill to extend the health care tax credits for three more years!

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— Rep. Lauren Underwood (@underwood.house.gov) January 8, 2026 at 10:39 PM

To Underwood’s credit, I, too, feel like dancing when I think of how embarrassing Thursday’s events were for House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.)—who seems to have lost control of the House.

That is, the GOP is slowly losing its 218-213 House majority, and now that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has resigned and Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Calif.) has passed away, Johnson can only afford to lose two votes whenever all House Democrats show up to vote. And on Thursday, 17 GOP representatives broke ranks to join Democrats in passing the health care law, which has been a long-detested policy within the party—but not enough to refuse millions of Americans affordable health care. (Though it’s worth mentioning that many of those reps are up for re-election this year.)

“Philosophically, I completely disagree with this,” Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) told reporters after voting to approve the bill. “But I’m not going to leave millions of Americans who truly need health care insurance in the lurch.”

Before Thursday’s vote, the lower chamber also saw nine Republicans cross party lines to advance the bill on Wednesday, and sign the Dem-led discharge petition, despite Johnson explicitly objecting to them doing so. And before that, four GOP centrists revolted against Johnson in December when they gave Dems the tipping-point signatures to force any legislation at all. At the time, Johnson attempted to pitch Obamacare legislation of his own, but it was a bipartisan failure and had zero mention of expanding any health savings accounts. (It is, perhaps, for bungles like these ones, that House Republicans are rumored to be considering his replacement.)

While the Senate has already vowed to reject the HCAA, its passage could still find a way forward—and open a conversation about moving towards a compromise that doesn’t necessarily put three-year extensions on Obamacare subsidies, but expands them nonetheless. “Today’s vote was to move a bill to the Senate so that the Senate could come back with a bipartisan compromise, said Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.).

The majority of Americans favor the ACA and—before they expired—more than 20 million were using the subsidies to buy insurance. So if being anti-that is yet another hill Johnson is willing to die on, he better start packing the gavel now.

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