The Vanishing Speaker
Kevin McCarthy was nobody; Mike Johnson is even less.
For those who have not been paying too much attention to the news generally, or to Washington in particular: good for you. It’s distracting, it’s disturbing, it’s disheartening. Today the disingenuousness reached new heights, or perhaps new lows: Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La) said he had not seen the “double tap” video of the September 2 assault on a small boat off the coast of Venezuela. He was, he said, too busy to attend the Gang of Eight meeting: “I was very busy working on the healthcare thing.” So much to unpack there.
First of all: what healthcare thing would that be, Mr. Speaker? Republicans have been promising to rescind, repeal, repair, and/or replace Obamacare with something much better for fifteen years now; are we to believe that you, Mike Johnson, have involved yourself so deeply in the details of healthcare and insurance policy that we can at long last expect a proposal will be forthcoming? I’m not buying it, and neither should anyone else. (For the record: there actually is something that would be better than Obamacare and the ACA subsidies the Republicans love to hate; but Medicare for all is a nonstarter.)
In case you’ve forgotten: Johnson spent most of September and October being so busy that he didn’t have time to follow the news and would demur on any question put to him. Busy doing what? He kept Congress recessed while the government was shut down to avoid facing the Epstein discharge petition. He claims to have been busy trying to resolve the budget stalemate; with the House sent home for the duration, that seems unlikely: with whom, exactly, was he working?
But he’s a very busy man, clearly, too busy to follow the headlines or have answers to questions. Too busy, it seems, to be briefed by his staff; too busy to get a heads-up from his communications director about the obvious questions he’ll get at the podium. Too busy, in short, to be an effective leader: he is all smoke, no substance.
Sales professionals like to say, “It’s the sizzle that sells the steak.” Johnson has neither, and he’s ill equipped to sell even a simple thing, never mind a complex policy solution that stymied better men and women than he — by far — for generations.
And Speaker Johnson is definitely too busy to assert Congress’s authority as a coequal branch of government. A friend of mine remarked, “He is useless.”
Useless, in my view, would be an improvement. That, at least, would be visible.
Be careful what you wish for: a “useful” Mike Johnson (an oxymoron, I admit) probably wouldn’t be to your liking. Given political fragmentation between—and within—both parties, I’m not sure there’s a majority for much of anything. MAGA, The Squad, and everyone in between, agree on vanishingly (good word—yours!) little.
I don’t agree that he alone kept Congress closed (both parties had their seeming reasons), or for the reason you state: to avoid a vote on the Epstein Files. As noted above, Congress couldn’t pass a resolution in favor of Mothers’ Day, but passed the Epstein resolution with but one (actually quite principled) vote against. My guess is that President Trump (whose Justice Department’s decision it was) wanted political cover for whatever would be revealed: “Hey, don’t blame me, you asked for it.”
From what I read on the right, their opinion of the Speaker is in line with yours: useless would be an improvement. That may be cold comfort, yet still some comfort.