Mike Johnson seizes the moment

Mike Johnson seizes the moment “Necessity is the mother of invention” (probably Plato). “I have seen the future and it works” (Lincoln Steffens). “Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert” (Isaiah 43:19).

We’re speaking, of course, of the House of Representatives.

Maybe it was a one-off. Maybe it was simply a harmonic convergence, an unusual alignment of the political planets. Maybe it will never happen again. Maybe it’s the way forward.

But twice this spring, amid acidic rhetoric and under great pressure, House Republicans and Democrats joined to pass vital legislation. Their approval — of a measure in late March that avoided a government shutdown, and then a series of bills in the past week to provide aid to Ukraine, Israel and the Indo-pacific — ended a tortuous process, creating the bare outlines of a new governing majority. And as that coalesced, the hardline conservative fringe that, until recently, was able to be at the center of Capitol bargaining was unceremoniously sent to the sidelines.

A shaft of light appeared in the House the way it often appears on a religious greeting card. It illuminated a new governing coalition.

It’s fragile, to be sure. It can’t be too robust when 112 of the Republican majority defected in both the vote for Ukraine military aid and to fund the government through the end of the year. But still: A fragile governing coalition is better than a fractured one.

Don’t count on this coalition to be re-created on climate change or anything to do with guns, gender or abortion — the unholy social-issues trinity that continues to divide lawmakers, even though the divisions among the American people are far less well-defined. While about two-thirds of the public believe abortion should be legal in the first trimester, according to the Gallup Poll, don’t expect the House to enact legislation permitting that. While Gallup tells us a majority of Americans want stricter controls on guns, don’t expect that to emerge from the House anytime soon, either.

Still, this new coalition, cobbled together by House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, is a formidable concept, if not exactly a formidable force.

Its initial power is in keeping the machinery of government oiled and in advancing legislation the public, most Democratic lawmakers and most Republicans House members want. The body in recent years has denied the voters their desires. Now, in some discrete cases, it can fulfill the public’s wishes.

This new governing coalition works the way the Compromise of 1850 operated, by splitting up controversial packages of legislation and calling for separate votes on each element. It also works in some ways like the coalition that passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act — though at that time, it was a Democratic president (Lyndon Johnson) who needed Republican help (from Everett Dirksen of Illinois, the Senate minority leader, and others) to pass landmark legislation. (A coalition of 27 Republicans and 44 Democrats ended the filibuster on the Civil Rights Act that was conducted by five Southern Democrats and consumed 60 working days).

The 112 Republicans who supported Ukraine arms weren’t the same 112 Republicans who voted to keep the government running. But in each case, the Republicans — a coalition of the willing, you might say — were paired with a sufficient number of Democrats to push the measures through.

In both cases, the GOP insurgents howled, calling the measures a toxic mix of perfidy and treachery. “This is the third betrayal by Mike Johnson,” said Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. “A foreign-war package that does nothing for America? It’s unbelievable. I’m thankful that America gets to see who this man is.”

One of the 14 Republicans who voted against sending the fresh funding to Ukraine was Rep. Chip Roy of Texas. Earlier, in a Rules Committee session that paved the way for House consideration of the aid package, Roy defied Johnson, voting against allowing the spending bills to proceed to the floor. Months ago, when the Republicans were wrangling over who should succeed House Speaker Kevin Mccarthy, Roy called Johnson “the right guy at the right time.”

That was then. This is a different now.

And in this new dawn, the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, customarily regarded as the stentorian voice of American conservatism, took those GOP rebels to task. “Like Republicans in the 1930s who slept while Hitler and Tojo advanced,” it said, “these Republicans apparently think America can sit out these fights in splendid isolation.”

Now some of these rebels want to topple Johnson, the way they toppled Mccarthy after they squeezed huge concessions from the Californian, a feckless figure who was so desperate for the job he handed his opponents a dagger to hold for every moment he held the speaker’s gavel. That’s what put Roy and two other insurgents on the Rules Committee. That’s what put the House in a position where a single member — in this case, Greene, then joined by Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky — could call for a vote to vacate the chair, essentially creating a Capitol Hill version of the recall on the whim of a lone dissident.

Now Johnson’s putative biggest ally in his struggle to survive is Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democrat who’s the House minority leader. In his hands, and not in the hands of Greene, is the identity of the person second in line, after Vice President Kamala Harris, to the presidency.

There hasn’t been a Quaker in the House for a decade. Indeed, there have been only 20 in all of American history (Richard Nixon, representing the 12th district of California from 1947 to 1950, was one of them). But perhaps the members of the 118th Congress nonetheless were heeding the Book of Discipline produced by the Quakers exactly 60 years ago, in 1964, when the yearly meeting of the British Quakers produced this wisdom:

“Faithfulness and sincerity in speaking, even very briefly, may open the way to fuller ministry from others. Try to speak audibly and distinctly, with sensitivity to the needs of your fellow worshippers. Wait to be sure of the right moment for giving the message.”

This was the right moment.

David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-gazette.