Is Mike Johnson getting too big for his britches?
Photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
Most government-shutdown threats eventually fade. But still, the speed with which House Speaker Mike Johnson backed away from a demand that Democrats accept Donald Trump’s silly and redundant legislation making illegal noncitizen voting really illegal was downright Olympian. Having failed twice to get even his own caucus to support a stopgap spending bill with the so-called SAVE Act attached, Johnson folded like a cheap suit, and over the weekend quietly agreed to a three-month stopgap bill that will more or less continue the status quo until December 20.
This retreat from MAGA principle is in direct defiance of orders from Trump, who thundered on September 20:
But will Trump exact a terrible price for this betrayal, maybe tossing Johnson over the side if he tries to hang onto his gavel after Election Day? It’s unclear; Johnson himself met privately with Trump last week and told us the former president “understands the situation.” On the other hand, Politico Playbook reports that the GOP presidential nominee strongly disagrees with the prevailing congressional Republican sentiment that a pre-election government shutdown would be very bad for the entire ticket:
A government shutdown just five weeks before Election Day would be disastrous, the conventional thinking goes, reminding voters of the chaos that has marked GOP governance in the Trump era.
But that, of course, wasn’t Trump’s thinking, according to three Republicans with insight.
The former president had convinced himself that a shutdown over voting laws would usher in a GOP wave, enabling him to not only reclaim the White House but land substantial majorities in Congress.
Trump, after all, had been burned by the 35-day-shutdown over his demands for a border wall at the end of 2018, with voters overwhelmingly blaming him as president for the chaos that ensued. Therefore, he reasoned, Joe Biden, Harris and the Democrats would take the heat this time around, since they’re the ones in power.
In Trump’s mind, anything bad that happens right now is good for him. But he does have some other fish to fry right now, so it seems unlikely that he’ll blow up the House GOP right now out of anger at Johnson, who, after all, helped him make the whole ridiculous noncitizen-voting hoax a national story.
It is generally understood that if Republicans lose control of the House in November, Johnson is a goner as Speaker. If they hang on and Trump wins too, he will hold his gavel precisely so long as the 47th president continues to let him do so. For now, Congress appears to have successfully kicked the can down the road until the next government-shutdown threat appears right before Christmas. And there’s no telling what will have happened to the American political system in the meantime.
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