It must have felt so good when Mike Johnson began his daily routine Thursday refreshing the home page of The New York Times and seeing his face at the very top accompanied by an article heralding him as “Speaker of the whole House” following Democrats’ rescue of his job.
If this isn’t what he lives for, I’m not sure what is. It’s certainly not to do anything remotely in the interest of Republican voters.
Since he was elected speaker six months ago, Johnson’s victories are limited to voting to fully fund Joe Biden’s back-breaking agenda, heaping 60 billion more taxpayer dollars into a corrupt slush fund (sometimes called “Ukraine”) and giving up any leverage Republicans had in forcing the administration to address the nation’s most urgent problem — the bleeding Southern border. Oh, plus he re-authorized warrantless spying on Americans.
To be fair, he can’t say he got nothing out of it. For fulfilling their complete wishlist, Democrats and the media did compare Johnson to Churchill. He also declared himself a “wartime speaker.”
Those prizes proved to be short-lived. After Biden announced this week that he would halt additional offensive military equipment if Israel advances ground troops in Rafah, Johnson ran to his other favorite publication, Politico, to say this wasn’t what he had hoped the president would do.
“I went straight to the White House and I said … ‘Somebody’s going to have to explain this to me, because it’s very different than what I was told,'” said Johnson. “And they said, ‘Oh, this has nothing to do with the supplemental package that you all passed.’ … So this statement by the president tonight, I just want to — I hope, I believe he’s off-script. I don’t think that’s something that staff told him to say.”
In other words, he went straight to the White House to give them a piece of his mind and, to that, some Biden official stifled a laugh and said, Yeah, yeah, don’t worry McChurchill, it’ll all work out in the end.
Mike Johnson, you were duped because you’re a fool. Democrats can hardly believe their luck at how easy you’ve made their jobs. All that prayer only gets you so far. At some point, you have to actually do something, anything, that advances your own agenda.
Admittedly, that’s fairly difficult when you barely hold a majority, but contrary to what you might think, the answer to that problem isn’t, “Well, let’s at least do everything the president and his party want!” Johnson says he feels betrayed, like he didn’t get what was promised. Imagine that.
