The Speaker of the House of Representatives admits that his legislative chamber no longer matters. It is the result of a series of deliberate decisions by management designed to ensure its powerlessness.
House Speaker Mike Johnson speaks on the 28th day of the federal government shutdown at the Capitol.
(Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
“It doesn't matter what we do in the House of Representatives,” GOP Speaker Mike Johnson announced at a press conference This week. While it's tempting to give the MAGA leader points for candor, such a blunt admission speaks volumes about a once-powerful legislative branch now relegated to slumber as Trump's satellite messaging suite: a glorified Fox News with hammers.
Johnson fended off press inquiries about why the House had not returned from its fall recess for five weeks and disingenuously accused Senate Democrats of being in a holding pattern as they continue to reject ongoing government funding resolutions that lack the Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax breaks that would prevent monthly insurance payments. will increase by more than 100 percent for many middle-income families. As part of parliamentary procedure, the Senate GOP leadership could suspend the filibuster to pass a devastating spending resolution with a majority vote. And, more importantly, the long, nihilistic series of last-minute spending resolutions is a direct result of the failure of both branches of Congress to do the basic work of approving annual spending measures. through the appropriations process. In other words, Johnson's recognition that his legislative chamber no longer matters is the result of a series of deliberate leadership decisions designed to ensure that it does not matter.
This catastrophic dynamic has only intensified under Donald Trump's second administration through Caesarean sections. Operating with a slim six-vote majority (which was only expanded to this extent by the deaths of three Democratic legislators sworn into the 119th Congress), Johnson turned the entire legislative initiative over to the White House, producing parallel votes to ensure passage of Trump's signature priorities such as a large-scale package of measures to cut costs and taxes which ratified the ACA and Medicaid cuts is now at the center of a government shutdown. And the real reason Johnson hasn't reconvened the House is because he doesn't want to swear in Arizona Democratic Rep. Adelita Grieva—the daughter of one of the recently departed Democratic House members, Raoul Grieva, who won a September special election to replace him—because she represents the casting 218th vote in a long-introduced House resolution seeking to force the Justice Department to release its files on Trump's late pedophile pal Jeffrey Epstein. The House of Representatives has a long and checkered history of respecting corruption, but never before has it been completely stopped to whitewash the past of a serial sexual rapist in the Oval Office.
Indeed, the conspiracy of silence surrounding the Epstein documents led a handful of House GOP members to go rogue, notably Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who accused Johnson of “…spreading misinformation” about Epstein's vote. Massey has now drawn Trump-sanctioned main opponent as punishment for failure.
Johnson's Epstein case is the most egregious example of his complete devotion to Trump, but it is far from the only one. Indeed, Johnson's signature public slogan, when he does not openly admit the futility of his work, is to declare complete ignorance of the basic facts of American public life. He performed this maneuver the day after his performance of “Home? What house?” response to reporters when asked about ICE agents pepper spraying a member of the clergy during protests outside the DHS detention facility in Broadview, Illinois, and implausibly responded that he had “not seen or heard” anything about the episode, which has received widespread media coverage over the past month. He sent the same standard reply with virtually no response every moment that anyone had asked him about any entry in MAGA's extensive list of corruption and criminal wrongdoings, from Trump's boondoggle on the Qatari plane to Trump's attempt to extort $230 million in “damages” from the Justice Department for past prosecutions, to Trump's crazy speech to military generals and Trump's creepy birthday wish to Epstein. Political philosopher John Rawls theorized the “veil of ignorance” as a means of assessing just social outcomes, but Johnson took the idea as a catch-all alibi for failing to keep up with the basic demands of his work. His public role does not resemble the legacy of famous dealmaking predecessors such as John Boehner or Tip O'Neill; instead, it most closely resembles the expression of a goofy puppy dog in the rear window of a car, wearing glasses and a power suit.
If Johnson were simply the buffoon he makes him out to be, he might become a forgettable landmark in the annals of House leadership, like his immediate predecessor Kevin McCarthy, who was raging Quisling on autopilot. But if McCarthy's cowardice before Trump was a corrupt political calculation, Johnson's is an expression of rigid ideological orthodoxy. Johnson was one of the House of Representatives' key strategists in a sham attempt to bring the results of the 2020 election to a vote of the House of Representatives in order to invalidate and overturn them; At the start of his speech, he decorated his office door with an Appeal to Heaven flag, a Christian nationalist symbol that was widely used during the Jan. 6 coup attempt. When pressed by reporters on this choice, he became unusually eloquent and indignantarguing that it was simply a call for a revolutionary era, which he accepted as a constitutional lawyer and “a lover of American history.”
Anyone who seriously demonstrates these powers can tell you that combining governance with a grievance-based theology of cultural reckoning, as Johnson and Trump have done, is a first-order betrayal of the real American Revolution and the Constitution. It's just another alibi-seeking lie from the worst House Speaker in modern history, along with his typical explanation for why he supposedly can't be bothered to keep up with the news cycle: “I've been very busy.”
