Johnson Is Inextricably Tied To Trump & Trump’s Baggage
If I was a conspiracy theory kinda guy, I might say that Kevin McCarthy engineered the ascension of MAGA Mike to his old job to either to show the world that the GOP conference could be run a lot worse than the way he had run it or to wreak havoc and revenge on the conference that had just wrecked his career. But that’s not what happened. Trump approved of MAGA Mike and he’s been just another failure in Trump’s long, laughable list of “best people,” from Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort, Scott Pruitt, Roger Stone, John Bolton and Jeff Sessions to Stephen Miller, Sebastian Gorka, Betsy DeVos, Erik Prince, Wilbur Ross, Ryan Zinke and dozens of others— a whole cavalcade of incompetence, controversy, corruption, conflicts of interest and ethical violations.
Yesterday, Haley Wilt and John Seward examined MM’s failing speakership. “Members of Congress,” they wrote, “have a few basic expectations for whoever holds the speaker’s gavel, and Rep. Mike Johnson isn’t meeting them. Johnson is failing on multiple fronts: Lawmakers don’t know what the House will work on each week and the chamber’s schedule frequently falls apart. Republicans are forced to take uncomfortable or pointless votes. They don’t have much clarity into Johnson’s strategic thinking. The only area they think Johnson is doing particularly well in right now is fundraising. ‘Everybody’s frustrated. I’m frustrated,’ Florida Rep. Byron Donalds told reporters. GOP leaders, Donalds argued, should strategize further in advance, make firm decisions and stick to them. ‘There’s a lot of paralysis of analysis,’ Donalds said.”
The Republicans will be lucky if MAGA Mike’s missteps, indecisiveness and rookie mistakes only cost them a dozen seats. People are starting to talk about the kind of serious GOP bloodbath that could take a decade to recover from. And that’s even before the government shutdown MM has engineered for Trump starting March 1. The Republicans are looking at a swing district wipeout from Miami to Syracuse, through Omaha and across the country to Maricopa County in Arizona to the suburbs of southern California and Portland. Want to help the GOP commit political suicide? Here you go.
Wilt and Seward noted that “Each week since Johnson won the speakership a little under four months ago, House members have traveled to the nation’s capital uncertain if their planned work will actually come to fruition. Government spending legislation, messaging bills and procedural votes that are supposed to be eye-wateringly boring have all collapsed— publicly, and often embarrassingly.
Are Republicans just flying by the seats of their pants? ‘Oh no, we ain’t flying,’ Donalds answered. ‘Right now, we’ve, like, crashed.’… Members are starting to grumble about their leadership— and some are wondering if Johnson, a relative newcomer to the chamber who won the speakership primarily because he didn’t have any enemies in the GOP conference— knows what he’s doing.”
This week MAGA Mike was forced to pull the long fought over a spy powers reauthorization bill from the schedule as GOP factions fought over the legislation. It was his second failed attempt to bring a FISA bill upon for a vote. “On Wednesday, the House also defeated a procedural vote Johnson had promised Mike Lawler, John Duarte, Nick LaLota, Mike Garcia, Michelle Steel, Anthony D’Esposito, Tom Kean, Andrew Garbarino, Marc Molinaro, Young Kim, Brandon Williams and Jeff Van Drew on tax breaks for high-income married couples in their blue state swing districts. He also embarrassed his party by botching an attempt to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, though he finally got it done a few days later— albeit by 1 vote. Appointing Marjorie Traitor Greene, Clay Higgins and Andy Biggs three of the impeachment managers is almost certain to turn out to be an even worse embarrassment as they strut their stuff in the Senate (and on national television).
As they struggle to pass their own agenda, morale is low. Republicans’ margins are so thin and the rifts between members run so deep that Rep. Garret Graves, an ally of ousted Speaker Kevin McCarthy, called it “coalition government.”
“I don’t really view what we have as a majority,” he told NOTUS.
Twenty-one House Republicans are planning to retire or seek other offices at the end of their terms. Several of them are young, chair powerful committees and have been seen as serious legislators with a lot of potential to keep rising through the ranks. (It’s almost as if the House GOP conference isn’t a satisfying or productive place to work.)
Governing will only get more difficult for the rest of the year. With this week’s Democratic victory in a special election to replace expelled Rep. George Santos, Republican leaders will soon have a meager two-vote majority. “I was out for a while because I fell off a ladder,” Rep. Greg Steube of Florida said. “If you have somebody who has an accident and can’t be here, now you have significant challenges to just doing regular order on the floor.”
That’s why most Republicans— even if they’re tired of this tumultuous new normal— refuse to blame Johnson.
“I don’t believe that Mike’s position has been undermined,” said Rep. Ken Buck, a retiring Republican from Colorado. “It’s very hard to govern with a very small majority.”
And Rules Committee Chairman Tom Cole said Wednesday that Republicans have “got the right guy” as speaker, but the conference is contending with members who are “putting their individual goals, or their individual animus, ahead of what’s good for the team and what the majority of the team wants to do.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, “politics is still a team sport.” Cole has been around the block and witnessed a lot of dysfunction, but nothing has quite matched the House’s foibles over the past year. “Frustration is built into the system here,” he told NOTUS in an interview last week. But he isn’t ready to throw in the towel: “These are setbacks, not defeats.”
With only a couple of votes to spare on bills Democrats oppose, Johnson has often bypassed Cole’s committee entirely by suspending the rules to pass uncontroversial bills with overwhelming bipartisan support. That approach has helped avoid government shutdowns, but it may not be a sustainable way to avoid conflict as another government-funding deadline approaches and GOP lawmakers grow restless.
“I don’t like a lot of this suspension stuff,” right-wing Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona told NOTUS on Tuesday. “The American people deserve to see us debating, they deserve to see transparency. And we need the regular order.”
Where does blame for the chamber’s dysfunction lie?
“The flaws— and I want to say this delicately— I think that this comes from the very top,” Biggs answered. The speaker “ultimately decides what’s going to go on the floor, when it’s going to go on the floor.”
If Johnson isn’t able to keep his right flank happy, criticism like that could ultimately escalate into a full-blown ouster attempt, as McCarthy experienced last year.
Do you think this helps the GOP cause? Sure, maybe in rural red backwaters, like Marjorie Traitor Greene's and Ronny Johnson's districts-- but not in places where people managed to actually earn high school diplomas. Click on the tweet graphic to hear what longtime Republican Party/Kremlin spokesperson Tucker Carlson had to say:
