This is Brian Lair's Daily Politics podcast from WNYC Studios.

It's Thursday, April 11th.

I'm Bridget Bergen, senior reporter in the WNYC and Gothamist Newsroom, filling in for Brian today. House Speaker Mike

Johnson is less than five months into his tenure. The Louisiana Republican was the party's

fourth choice after they ousted Kevin McCarthy, and he's faced no shortage of challenges

trying to corral his own members and lead the House through a series of issues.

Aid to Ukraine, funding to keep the government from shutting down. And just yesterday, a stalemate

over renewing a warrantless surveillance law that intelligence officials say is essential to their

ability to prevent terror attacks on the U.S. At this point, Johnson is facing a backlash from

far-right members of his own party who say he's giving too much ground to President Biden and the

Democrats. Joining us now to unpack the latest from the Capitol is Luke Broadwater, who covers

Congress for the New York Times with a focus on investigations. Luke, welcome back to the show.

Hi, good morning. Thanks for having me. And Luke, I want to zoom out to start and just remind our

listeners who we're talking about here. Who is Mike Johnson? Where does he come from? How did he

become the compromise speaker way back last October? Sure. Well, Mike Johnson was a rank-and-file

congressman from Louisiana. Nobody, if you had asked a year ago, nobody would have envisioned

him becoming the speaker. But amid the chaos and the carousel of candidates that House Republicans trotted out after they

ousted Kevin McCarthy, who was the speaker, a tired and beleaguered group finally settled on Mike Johnson,

who was seen as a consensus candidate.

He was considered very conservative, from the Christian conservative wing of the party,

a man of faith, and he was conservative enough for the right wing,

and he was establishment enough for the establishment. So they settled on Mike Johnson

...