“Like Saturn,” wrote the Genevan journalist Jacques Mallet du Pan, “the Revolution devours its own children.” For a few fateful weeks, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) looked like he was the next entree on the menu.

The House Republican majority was hanging by a thread. Johnson’s grasp on the speaker’s gavel looked just as tenuous. Republican lawmakers were clamoring for the 52–year-old’s ouster. “This is not personal against Mike Johnson,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) told reporters in March. “He’s a very good man. And I have respect for him as a person. But he is not doing the job.”