Johnson is falling into the same trap that all prior Republican leaders from both chambers always find themselves: Republicans believe they are doing the work of the American People; Democrats believe they are doing the work of the Democrat Party. Furthermore, Democrats know that Republicans think this way and use their naĂŻvetĂŠ as a weapon against them. Republicans never treat Democrats as dishonest actors, while Democrats always treat Republicans as patsies to be duped. Every time the Republican base tries to build up enough new blood in the caucus in Congress, their leadership makes moves to undermine that effort to protect themselves, and then they go back to DC to be rolled once again by Democrats.
It's demoralizing to watch it happen again and again and again, but we can't stop trying. It's about something I posted very early in my FR career: we are being forced to wander in the desert of DC politics until the last of the Watergate era generation dies off, and then we can cross the River Potomac and begin rebuilding our party.
Remember what McCarthy said when he stepped down? He said he had a deal with Pelosi to "always stand by him" should he get in trouble with his side of the aisle. Guess what? She lied to him. Democrats treat Republicans like stooges to be conned; McCarthy was being played for a mark. Nothing that McCarthy was "talking about" or was "on course" to deliver was ever going to happen.
But Democrats were certain to get their half of the "deal" delivered, leaving McCarthy empty-handed.
All Gaetz did was expose the con that is in plain sight to the rest of us. I'm saddened that it doesn't appear that Johnson is seeing it, too. Maybe he did when he began; maybe he's been dunked into the slowly boiling pot and he lost focus on the fact that he's being boiled by the Democrats once again.
Democrats in the House and Senate always coordinate their efforts in a one-two punch against Republicans. On the other hand, Republicans in the Senate have nothing but disdain for their fellow Republicans in the House. McConnell and his sycophants act like a House of Lords with the Representatives being beneath them.
Pelosi and Schumer would scheme to get bills passed, while McConnell is pressuring Johnson to abandon House bill and accept Senate bills? I always ask why? Why should Senate bills be deemed more important than House bills, especially when the House bills are original spending bills and Senate bills are amended House bills?
It's because Pelosi and Schumer see themselves as offense and defense on the same team, while McConnel sees himself with delusions of grandeur playing "iron man" ball and the House is just an obstacle in his way.
Until we can get our Senate and House to work together as one team, we will always lose to the Democrats.
Our side is stuck playing intramural ball while Democrats are coordinating across both the House and the Senate. Democrats see the "team" being the entire Congressional caucus, while Republicans see the House and Senate as being completely different leagues.
I put the blame for this on the Senate, and especially on McConnell. It's McConnell who won't work with Johnson (or even McCarthy before him). McConnell sees himself as the master deal-maker who needs nobody else's help. If only the best of both chambers would work to strategize together to counter the Democrats, we'd be in a much better place.
Because McConnell looks down on the House, the House is forced to look within itself to get by, and this limits our ability to get things done. Suddenly, factions inside the House become over-powered and we begin fighting amongst ourselves instead of aligning with the Senate before the game starts to have a unified game plan to move the ball forward.
It's not that McCarthy did or didn't (would or wouldn't, could or couldn't) get something done, it's that McConnell is not on the same team in the Senate and he would have undermined whatever McCarthy did to make his own deal to elevate his own ego.
That's why I constantly say that Republicans are being played by Democrats. If McCarthy was on track to get something passed in the House, it was because the Democrats wanted him to, to keep up the illusion of their scam.
Have you ever seen the movie The Sting? It all looks so real to the mark until the sting is pulled off. McCarthy thinks he had Pelosi's support. McCarthy is supposed to get a bill passed in the House. Great, so far.
But then Pelosi and Schumer know what McCarthy doesn't know: they know what they're going to do to that bill with McConnell in the Senate. I can assure you that it will have looked nothing like what McCarthy sent to them. And then McConnell would have pressured McCarthy to take the deal just like he did with Johnson, undermining McCarthy's authority in the House with his own caucus.
It's a win-win for Democrats: they get their agenda bill passed and they damage the credibility of the Speaker in the House, weakening the GOP for the next round of elections.
I've seen this movie before, many, many times. They keep remaking it with new actors, but the plot is always the same.
The problem isn't McCarthy or Johnson per se, the problem is that the House and Senate on our side refuse to coordinate and cooperate.
Regarding shutdowns, you must remember several things:
- Mitch McConnell has vowed to NEVER allow a government shutdown. The Senate is his Preciousssssss, and he would do anything to keep a government shutdown from happening.
- See: 8/7/2022 - Trump says McConnell âgot played like a fiddleâ on Democrats spending bill
Former President Trump laid into Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Sunday after Senate Democrats passed their long-awaited health care, tax and climate package. âMitch McConnell got played like a fiddle with the vote today by the Senate Democrats,â Trump wrote on Truth Social.
âFirst he gave them the fake Infrastructure Bill, then Guns, never used the Debt Ceiling for negotiating purposes (gave it away for NOTHING!), and now this,â Trump said. âMitch doesnât have a clue â he is sooo bad for the Republican Party!â
- See: 7/9/2022 - âWe Got Our Ass Kickedâ: John Kennedy Laments Senate Republican Loss to Democrats on CHIPS, Reconciliation
Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) said on Thursday that Senate Republicans got tricked into passing a semiconductor bill after believing that a Democrat reconciliation bill was dead. While Republicans were split on the merits of the legislation, most Republicans, including House Republican leadership, did not want to pass the CHIPS legislation if Democrats were to pursue a reconciliation bill to pass climate change, Obamacare, and other leftist priorities.
The same day that the Senate passed the CHIPS bill, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) announced a deal on the Inflation Reduction Act, a bill that would aim to reduce the deficit, raise taxes, and boost climate change and Obamacare spending.
Announcing the deal immediately after Senate Republicans backed the CHIPS bill left many GOP lawmakers with egg on their faces.
"We got our ass kicked. Itâs just that simple. Looks to me like we got rinky-dooâd. Thatâs a Louisiana word for 'screwed.' And we got our ass kicked. Thatâs the way my people back home see it," Kennedy said...
McConnell also lost to Schumer on a debt ceiling fight in 2021, which led to a deal to temporarily create a carveout for the legislative filibuster. One former senior GOP aide said the deal was to save McConnellâs "ego."
- Knowing #1, Pelosi and Schumer always scheme to stall Republicans in the House and Senate in order to create debt ceiling crises because they know that McConnell is the weak link in that chain.
I don't know why McCarthy took so long in the House to get his spending bills worked out before slamming his side with it as the debt ceiling crisis loomed. Perhaps he was counting on Pelosi's promise to "always stand by him?" Perhaps he didn't see how he was being manipulated into wasting time over the summer in order to create the debt ceiling crisis that Democrats would then exploit in the Senate?
- Can't you see how Johnson is being manipulated into the same trap by Democrats? They drag out and delay in the House until deadlines loom, and then rely on McConnell in the Senate to react as he's been conditioned to. That's why McConnell was pressuring Johnson to comply with the Senate-side bill over Johnson's House bill.
- Can't you see how things might be different if our side coordinated between the two chambers, compared notes, told each other what the Democrats are doing on their side of the aisle in their respective chambers?
Because you know that's what Pelosi and Schumer are doing. It's why our side is always caught by surprise -- because our side in the Senate thinks the House is beneath them. That's why our side thinks it has to be the Senate bill that "fixes" what the peons in the House did.
And THAT's why Johnson is in the predicament that he's in right now.
I already explained how Schumer took a simple House bill to give a tax break to veterans who are first-time homebuyers and turned it into Obamacare.
Do you think they waited for the House to send them Obamacare? Did the House "control the purse strings" on Obamacare? Pelosi couldn't get Obamacare out of the House, so Schumer in the Senate had to take the initiative, and he did.
Just look at yesterday, when the Senate -- for the first time in 235 years -- dismissed an impeachment instead of holding a trial. Do you think someone who thinks like this is bothered by the "purse strings" in the House?
Look at the bigger picture I'm painting.
McConnell has a "tell" and the Democrats know how to get him to go "all in" on a deal when they are holding a pair of twos (yes, I know I'm mixing my metaphors again, but I'm trying to get everyone to see any way I can). They know his fanatical devotion to the "traditions" and historicity of the Senate and his part in it, and they use that to manipulate his behavior. I already showed you several recent examples of McConnell getting played by Schumer.
For things that are truly originating in the House, Democrats know they have McConnell in the Senate to do what they need done because they know his "tell." For things that originate in the Senate (or are amended in the Senate), they know they have McConnell to pressure the House to go along.
For truly maverick things that come out of the House, Democrats know how to control the Overton Window. If you see Johnson making deals or decisions that go against his prior promises, it's probably because the Democrats use their minority powers in the House to change the set of available choices available to Johnson, widening them or narrowing them, to limit the range of options he has to get things done. They can open up the window to see what course he's going to follow, and then narrow his options to trap him in a Box Canyon (yes, another metaphor) where he has only one or two ways out.
The reason they're so good at it is that Republicans don't coordinate between the House and the Senate the way that Democrats do, and that's also on McConnell. He's never been good at bringing in others who are outside of his personal network of sycophant devotees. I showed an example of Democrats throwing a bone to McConnell to boost his ego after suffering a humiliating defeat. They want to keep him in place, because he's their ace up their sleeve (back to a prior metaphor).
It doesn't matter if it was Boehner, or Ryan, or McCarthy, or Johnson, or whoever follows. The Democrats control the rhythm of Congress because they control McConnell. Put any other Republican in the Speakership and the road still goes through McConnell. Until McConnell goes, nothing will change.
I don't blame Gaetz for trying to shake things up; he did have a personal vendetta against McCarthy, but McCarthy got too cozy with Pelosi and believed her promises just like Boehner and Ryan before him. I believe that any failures perceived in Johnson are actually failures of the environment that Congressional Republicans find themselves in, built by Lott and Frist and McConnell, and it won't matter who Republicans replace Johnson with as long as McConnell remains in the Senate or his sycophants keep the "tradition" alive after he leaves.
We need a Summit meeting between the House and the Senate Republicans to come to a new, modern, 21st century understanding of their rules of engagement or we're going to be doomed to forever being stung by the Democrats on deal after deal after deal.
Look up the Reconciliation procedure to see why Democrats push so hard for single omnibus bills.
Democrats can't control the vote on separate budget bills from the House because they can't get enough votes for cloture in the Senate. To get around that, they force everything into single omnibus bills that they can push through the reconciliation process that only requires a simple majority in the Senate to pass, but they can only do it once a year per revenue, spending, and debt ceiling bill.
The longer that Senate Democrats fail to act on House bills, the shorter the time becomes to pass a budget or hit the debt ceiling. Democrats and the LAAP-dog media always blame Republicans for "shutting down the government" saying that Republicans won't send them something that will pass in the Senate.
This puts pressure on the House to either send the Senate what Democrats want, or Democrats will use reconciliation to amend one massive omnibus spending bill via reconciliation and send it back to the House, again blaming them for a government shutdown if they don't pass the Senate bill.
The limit of one spending, one revenue, and one debt ceiling bill in the Senate makes the Democrats strategize how to use this streamlined process for maximum impact for Democrats. That's where the brinksmanship comes in. They can take separate revenue bills from the House and amend them together with Democrat pet budget items into one massive bill that only requires a simple majority in the Senate to pass, and then force the House to accept the Democrat bill or shut down the government (or Ukraine will die, or the Israeli hostages will die...).
See this article from earlier today: Chuck Schumer brags to Senators about Mike Johnson giving Dems everything they wanted on Ukraine, foreign aid: report
Excerpt:
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer bragged on the Senate floor on Wednesday about how House Speaker Mike Johnson gave into Democratic demands in foreign aid packages. Human Events' Jack Posobiec said he heard from a senior Republican official that Schumer "was just on the Senate floor bragging to other members about Speaker Johnson giving Democrats everything they wanted in the Ukraine and foreign aid packages."
You may say that this is simply Johnson being weak, ineffective, spineless, and should go.
I say that it doesn't matter if it were Johnson, McCarthy, or anyone else. Just look at how Schumer was reportedly "bragging" about what he had done [again]. Schumer wouldn't be bragging if he wasn't showing off another win. Schumer was bragging because he knows how to sting the Republicans.
Republicans will never break out of this death spiral until they get rid of Senate leadership and start working together between both chambers to stop the Democrats at their game.
