House speaker Mike Johnson, another unstable genius
This week’s wall-to-wall and floor- to- ceiling coverage of Trump at the defense table will thoroughly obscure a national news story that comes around about as often as solar eclipse. Congress actually doing something.
I mean something important, not staging another impeachment using shadow puppets or passing a resolution making it raccoon appreciation week, but something of immediate global exigency.
In the next day or two, the Senate will approve and the president will sign a measure that can save Ukraine from annexation by Russia and prevent Western democracies (including this one, such as it is), from the kind of military conflagration no one wants to ponder, not even preening Trump sycophant and, by extension, Putin flunky Mike Johnson.
Johnson’s choice
As of this deadline, Johnson remains Speaker of the House, a once-revered high government office with at least the presumption of attendant statesmanship but lately more of a cloying Washington, D.C. game show called “How Long Can You Stay Marge Greene’s Boyfriend?”
Former champion Kevin McCarthy lasted less than nine months. Johnson is going on six, but not even a politico as craven as Johnson, last seen jumping down from Trump’s lap during a compulsory Mar-aLago audience, could deny the threat posed by Russia in Europe and beyond once he saw the intelligence. Once the military implications were explained to Johnson so that even he could understand them, the light went on, particularly when juxtaposed with the Naval Academy acceptance letter just received by his oldest son.
“To put it bluntly, I would rather send bullets to Ukraine than American boys,” Johnson ultimately told reporters. “My son is going to begin in the Naval Academy this fall. This is a live-fire exercise for me as it is so many American families. This is not a game, this is not a joke.”
Oh no, the joke is on the Ukrainians, who’ve been waiting six months since President Joe Biden first asked for the weaponry critical to defend their cities, their power grid, their infrastructure, their families, their future. With the aid package Johnson buried in a
legislative labyrinth for six months, Ukraine could have saved Odesa from being bombed to bits, could have kept the power plants in Kharkiv working, could have defended the Chernihiv apartment building where some 17 civilians died in a missile attack only last week in still another round of Russian savagery.
Instead of fast-tracking military aid for Ukraine, along with Israel and Taiwan, Johnson’s House Republicans tried to tie that package to a border security measure negotiated by Oklahoma’s James Lankford. Lankford won significant concessions from Democrats and put together a viable bill, viable until the prospect of Biden signing a strong border bill spooked the former Buffoonatic- inChief.
Minority rule
“It made it much better for the opposing side,” is how Trump put it on Fox. You know, for America.
Democrats insisted throughout the process that if Johnson allowed a vote on military aid alone to reach the House floor, it would win resoundingly. So after the younger Johnson finally got his acceptance letter from the Navy and the unconscionably delayed vote actually happened, Ukraine funding passed 311-112. Resoundingly. Only two Pennsylvania Republicans, John Joyce and Scott Perry, voted nay. How about that?
But for six months, while Ukraine fought and suffered day and night, we had minority rule right here in the arsenal of democracy, minority rule by a shabby cadre of wag-the-dog Republican nutbags who think statecraft is a video game where their character jockeys for position on Fox News to gain talking points.
“Mike Johnson betrayed America once again,” Greene put on X. “House Republicans and the American people would be stronger without his disloyalty and betrayal of his principles. We need a new speaker of the House.”
What we need in the House is a reborn notion that it’s ok to work across the aisle to get things done, which should be painfully obvious to this particular assemblage, where despite its Republican majority, it needed Democratic help to keep the government open last September, Democratic help to keep it open last November, Democratic help to keep it open in March.
In the moment, it’s only through working with Democrats that Johnson is actually able to do what he knows is right for Ukraine and the world, and it gets him called a traitor.
The speaker’s new role
I don’t know if Johnson can survive another motion to vacate the chair should Marge bring it, and I don’t know if Democrats should lift a finger to help him. Yes he finally landed in reality, but his groove is authentic Trumpist lickspittle.
So just in case this is the last we see of him, let’s just recap the future former speaker’s role on the Ukraine question: won’t talk about Ukraine aid unless it includes funding for a stronger southern border; gets stronger southern border bill but rejects it at Trump’s command; and agrees to a Ukraine aid package with no border funding.
In MAGA World, they see that as some right wicked stable geniusing.