The House speaker admits that his legislative chamber no longer matters. That’s the outcome of a series of deliberate leadership decisions to ensure its powerlessness.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson talks 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,” GOP Speaker Mike Johnson announced in a press conference this week. While it’s tempting to give the MAGA leader grudging points for candor, that churlish admission speaks volumes about a once-robust legislative branch now relegated to inert duty as a satellite Trumpian messaging complex: a glorified Fox News set with gavels.
Johnson was fending off press queries about why the House hasn’t returned from its fall recess for five weeks now, and disingenuously blaming Senate Democrats for the holding pattern, since they continue to reject continuing resolutions to fund the government that omit the Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax credits that would prevent monthly insurance payments from increasing by well over 100 percent for many middle-income families. As a matter of parliamentary procedure, the Senate’s GOP leadership could suspend the filibuster to move the ruinous spending resolution through on a majority vote. And far more consequentially, the long nihilistic run of last-minute spending resolutions is a direct consequence of the failure of both arms of Congress to do the basic job of approving annual spending measures through the appropriations process. In other words, Johnson’s admission that his legislative chamber no longer matters is the outcome of a series of deliberate leadership decisions to ensure that it doesn’t matter.
This disastrous dynamic has only accelerated under Donald Trump’s Caesarean second administration. Operating on a narrow six-vote majority (which has only expanded to that margin courtesy of the deaths of three Democratic lawmakers sworn into the 119th Congress), Johnson has handed over all legislative initiative to the White House, producing lockstep votes to secure passage of signature Trump priorities like the massive spending-and-tax-cut package that ratified the ACA and Medicaid cuts now at the center of the government shutdown. And the actual reason Johnson hasn’t reconvened the House is that he doesn’t want to swear in Arizona Democratic Representative Adelita Grijeva—the daughter of one of those recently departed Democratic House members, Raul Grijeva, who won a September special election to replace him—because she represents the decisive 218th vote in a long-tabled House resolution to compel the Justice Department to release its files on Trump’s late pedophile crony Jeffrey Epstein. The House has a long and checkered history of deference to corruption, but it’s never before been brought to a complete standstill in order to whitewash the past fraternizations of a serial sexual assaulter in the Oval Office.
Indeed, the conspiracy of silence surrounding the Epstein documents has caused a handful of GOP House members to go rogue–notably Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who has accused Johnson of “spreading misinformation” about the Epstein vote. Massie has now drawn a Trump-sanctioned primary opponent as punishment for breaking ranks.
Johnson’s Epstein handiwork is the most egregious instance of his complete fealty to Trump, but it’s far from the only one. Indeed, Johnson’s signature public watchword, when he’s not openly confessing to the uselessness of his job, is to claim utter ignorance of the basic facts of American public life. He executed the maneuver the day after his “House? What House?” rejoinder to reporters, when he was asked about ICE agents pepper-spraying a member of the clergy at protests outside DHS’s Broadview, Illinois, detainment facility and implausibly replied that he had “not seen or heard” anything about the episode, which got wide media coverage over the past month. He’s delivered the same canned non-reply at virtually every moment that anyone has asked him about any entry on the expansive roster of MAGA roster of corruption and criminal wrongdoing, from Trump’s Qatari jet boondoggle to Trump’s bid to extort $230 million in “damages” from the Department of Justice for past prosecutions to Trump’s unhinged speech before military generals to Trump’s creepy Epstein birthday greeting. Political philosopher John Rawls theorized a “veil of ignorance” as a device to assess just social outcomes, but Johnson has embraced the notion as an all-purpose alibi for failing to keep up with the basic demands of his job. His public-facing role doesn’t call to mind the legacies of well-known deal-making predecessors like John Boehner or Tip O’Neill; instead, it resembles nothing so much as the mien of a bobble-headed puppy in the rear window of a car, outfitted with glasses and a power suit.
If Johnson were merely the sort of buffoon he comes across as, he might be a forgettable blip in the annals of House leadership, like his immediate predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, who was a raging quisling on autopilot. But where McCarthy’s cowardice before Trump was a venal political calculation, Johnson’s is an expression of hardcore ideological orthodoxy. Johnson was one of the key House strategists in the bogus effort to throw the 2020 election results open to a House vote to invalidate and override them; early on in his speakership, he bedecked his office door with an Appeal to Heaven flag—a Christian nationalist symbol prominently displayed during the January 6 coup attempt. When reporters pressed him on that choice, he became uncharacteristically articulate and indignant, claiming that it was simply a callout to the Revolutionary Era he adopted as a constitutional lawyer and “American history buff.”
Anyone displaying those credentials in earnest can tell you that fusing governance with a grievance-driven theology of cultural payback the way that Johnson and Trump have is a first-order betrayal of the actual American Revolution and Constitution. This is just another alibi-seeking lie from the worst House speaker in modern history—together with his typical explanation of why he ostensibly can’t be bothered with keeping up with the news cycle: “I’ve been really busy.”