The Republican House fails the Ronald Reagan test

Following its Friday failure to deliver a new package of aid for Ukraine, it’s time for a title change in the US House of Representatives. As we saw yet again, the House has a speaker in name only. Mike Johnson, the spectral figure who holds that title, is little more than a zombie, fated to flit fecklessly about in pursuit of fantasies that eternally fade to frustrating failure rather than take shape as legislative accomplishments.

But zombies, in their cinematic incarnation anyway, are at least possessed of a certain bite. Not Johnson. He imagines himself the Lord’s chosen legislative leader, but perhaps the House’s Lowly Ghost is a more apt appellation.

Certainly the last few days have demonstrated yet again the full extent of his dilemma — and his utter inability to resolve it. On Friday morning, the House finally gave approval to a fiscal package needed to keep funding the US government. But that measure depended disproportionately on Democratic votes for the two-thirds majority required under suspended-rules circumstances. More than half of House Republicans voted no.

At a time of increasingly urgent need in Ukraine, the spending plan included no aid for that beleaguered nation. Nor did such a package move independently.

Instead, the House left for a twoweek Easter recess with that matter unaddressed, effectively lending aid and comfort to Russian czar Vladimir Putin as he continues to assault Ukraine.

But not before the mere act of keeping the federal government open triggered a reaction from the Republican Party’s reduce-it-to-rubble reactionaries.

Taking advantage of the rules concession Kevin McCarthy made to secure his own doomed speakership, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the pugnacious MAGA conspiracy theorist who has emerged as a hard-right Republican “thought” leader, promptly filed a vote to vacate the chair. That is, to oust Johnson.

After all, from her pixilated perspective, Johnson had double-crossed Republicans by working with Democrats to keep the government funded and functioning. Imagine, for a moment, the Lowly Ghost’s plight: Not only having the Sword of Damocles hanging over his head, but with MTG controlling the horsehair by which it dangles. (Maybe it’s time to rebrand that famous instrument of apprehension: the Sword of Deranged Fleas.)

Will Greene force such a vote or — like Dionysius I, who supposedly suspended the blade over the cranium of a covetous courtier simply to subject him to the fears that rob royalty of its pleasures — is she principally intent on creating a sense of immobilizing anxiety?

In this case, it’s a distinction without a difference. At a time when this country badly needs a functional government, one half of Congress is all but paralyzed.

We’re back about where we were in the last days of McCarthy. Like him, Johnson can’t govern without help from the Democrats. Yet he is reluctant to seek it. In mid-March, Johnson told Politico he was going to push ahead with aid for Ukraine, even while conceding such a move would likely require Democratic support.

That was a laudable declaration, the exact sort of thing that anyone who favors democracy over despotism would do.

But to accomplish that, he has to contend with the Putin-admiring Donald Trump and his messengers, who are not-so-subtly rallying MAGA against aid for the nation the Russian despot has invaded.

That means, as with the government-funding bill, Johnson would need the help of House Democrats. If Democrats then promised they would help him survive any resulting motions to vacate the chair, he wouldn’t be ousted as a result. Representative Jim McGovern, a Democrat from Worcester and ranking member on the House Rules Committee, intimates that those conversations have already quietly occurred.

“He knows that Democrats will be there for the vote and if there are procedural votes and moves to oust him, I think he already knows that there are Democrats who will have his back,” McGovern told me.

Then why won’t Johnson choose that option, which would put him on the right side of history on one of the biggest foreign policy issues of our time? Because Trump and MAGA would view that as a betrayal, and their future opposition would keep House Republicans from again choosing him as their leader.

“That means that, no matter what happens in the next election, he would no longer be speaker nor minority leader,” McGovern said.

So the Lowly Ghost faces this choice: Do what’s best for the world or what’s right for him.

Somewhere, Ronald Reagan must be wondering: What in God’s name has happened to my once resolute, tyrantopposing party?

Let’s hope voters are discerning enough to assign responsibility where it belongs.

At a time when this country badly needs a functional government, one half of Congress is all but paralyzed.