Mike Johnson (R-La.) starts this week looking less like speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and more like a European prime minister. Partisan politics, at least as they’ve been understood in the United States, are flipped on their head.
Johnson’s plan to sacrifice American border security to pass $95 billion in foreign aid is on its way to the Senate, powered by a coalition of House Republican and Democrat appropriators, and over the objections of both his voters and the majority of his own members. Though the backlash is building, the new coalition government is even promising to protect Johnson from members of his own party.
The trust is irrevocably broken, and the GOP’s voters are so far from the driver’s seat that they can’t even see it.
Johnson’s plan began last week with the announcement he’d be employing a rarely used procedure to vote on and then combine four foreign aid and sanction bills, packaging them and then sending them to the Senate. Though the process, nicknamed “MIRV” after the multi-warhead missiles, has been used by speakers before (including three times by Nancy Pelosi and once by John Boehner), it is fundamentally designed to bulldoze representative opposition.
Pelosi, for example, used the procedure in 2007 to combine Republicans’ much-desired Iraq War funding with Democrats’ highly coveted minimum wage increase. Over a decade later, she used it again — this time to force more COVID relief funding into funding for the operations of the broader government.
Now, Johnson is using MIRV to combine aid for Gaza, Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan, Sudan, and a host of other spending sprees, boxing out both the American right and the American left, and pushing it through to the detriment of American security.
The only way Johnson’s been able to pull it off is by establishing a new coalition outside standard party lines that have run the House of Representatives for all living memory.
The first hurdle was through the benignly named House Rules Committee, which decides how the majority’s agenda will be brought to the floor, debated, and passed. Nicknamed “the speaker’s committee,” it’s a jealously defended entry point, and those things that come from it can traditionally be regarded as the prerogative of the party.
While three Republicans on the committee rebelled against the maneuver, voting against it, four Democrats came to the speaker’s rescue, sending the MIRV to the floor. This is the first time the minority party has passed the speaker’s rule from committee since we started keeping records nearly 30 years ago.
The rebellion quickly spread, with 55 Republicans voting against the Republican rule once it came to the House floor. The final tally was 316 for, 94 against, with 165 Democrats joining with 151 Republicans to send the bills forward for debate and eventual passage.
Finally on Saturday, he passed the Ukraine part of the package with 210 Democrats joining 101 Republican yeas — against 112 Republican nays.
The practical effect of all this bobbing and weaving is Johnson has ditched the Republican Party’s broad conservative body and formed a new governing coalition to satiate his handlers in the U.S. intelligence community and send $95 billion abroad (while allowing American security to languish).
It’s almost impressive to see: The American uniparty, standing proudly exposed, trumpets blaring. The appropriators who have always existed — and always cared more about their spending than their constituents — aren’t trying to hide it today. And they’re mighty proud of it, too.
“For Republicans and Democrats who believe that supporting Ukraine against Russia’s aggression is a generation-defining priority,” Politico wrote, “Johnson’s moves … are near-Churchillian.”
“I know he takes it very personally,” neoconservative Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) said of Johnson’s decision. “He told me … ‘I want to be on the right side of history.’”
A liberal parliamentary system has been taking shape for years in the House. Johnson, for example, has used Democrats’ support to pass every single important spending bill of his speakership. In the Senate, outgoing Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has made adding Republican votes to Democrat coalitions a key to his outsized influence.
This month tops it all, though. The trust is irrevocably broken, and the GOP’s voters are so far from the driver’s seat that they can’t even see it.
Mike Johnson might begin this week with the title of speaker of the House and leader of a slim Republican majority. In real life, however, he begins this week as the leader of a newly declared center-left majority.
Opinion, Christopher-bedford
