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“Tonight is the final wakeup call for the @HouseGOP,” he posted on X. “If they ignore or attempt to explain away why they lost, they will lose in November as well.”
On Wednesday morning, House Republicans attempted to explain away the loss.
Walking out of the Republican caucus meeting in the Capitol basement, Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio), explained that part of the district was in the “liberal cesspool” of New York City — while at the same time argued that the vanquished Republican “should have embraced Trump.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) attributed it to “a bunch of stupid decisions” by a “bad campaign.”
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“Snow played a factor,” offered Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.).
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Rep. Marc Molinaro (R.-N.Y.), wearing a tie with an ice-cream-cone pattern, sugarcoated it by saying “special elections suck.”
“Let’s not try to make this into some big narrative on November,” proposed endangered Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.).
The loss had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that House Republicans, after 14 months in the majority, had produced nothing but mayhem! To judge from House GOP leaders’ message at their Wednesday morning news conference, the only thing they had to do differently was to call President Biden senile more often.
House Republican Caucus Chairwoman Elise Stefanik (N.Y.) led off with her view that the president’s “deteriorating mental state” left him “mentally unfit” to serve.
Majority Whip Tom Emmer (Minn.) concurred that Biden was “unfit” and had “zero business occupying the Oval Office.”
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And Speaker Mike Johnson, leaning as the others did on the medical expertise of special counsel Robert Hur, a Republican lawyer, opined: “A man too incapable of being held accountable for mishandling classified information is certainly unfit for the Oval Office.”
To emphasize the point, Republicans invited to the microphone Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.), who as the White House physician was known as the “candyman” for his liberal dispensing of pills. “We need a cognitive test,” the doctor ordered.
But if there is anybody in public life whose actions scream out for the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, it is Johnson. A couple of weeks ago, the Louisiana Republican got Israel and Iran mixed up in a “Meet the Press” appearance. Now he seems to be forgetting what he did just last week.
On Monday, Johnson issued a statement rejecting out of hand an emergency foreign aid package that was sailing through the Senate en route to passage by an overwhelming, bipartisan vote of 70-29. “House Republicans were crystal clear from the very beginning of discussions that any so-called national security supplemental legislation must recognize that national security begins at our own border,” he wrote.
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Apparently, he just plum forgot that he was the one who, a week earlier, had killed a bipartisan border security bill — the toughest in a generation — that he had originally demanded but now called “dead on arrival.” He had earlier said that congressional action was indispensable but now claimed Biden already had “all the tools and the executive authority necessary” without legislation.
Mr. Speaker, please remember these words: Person. Man. Woman. Camera. TV.
If Johnson has not taken leave of his mental faculties, the alternative is worse: He is deliberately and knowingly sabotaging the functioning of the U.S. government because he thinks it in his interest.
Last week, he killed border security. Now, he’s blocking aid to Ukraine. He told Republicans Wednesday that there’s “no rush” to get military aid to Ukraine as it struggles to hold off Russian invaders. He proposed discussing the legislation at the House GOP retreat — a month from now.
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It’s not as though he has anything better to do. GOP leaders this week scheduled a vote on a bill, desired by New York Republicans, to expand deductions for state and local taxes. But 18 Republicans blocked it from being taken up for debate — the sixth time during this Congress that a “rule” for debate had failed. Before these guys took over, it hadn’t happened in more than 20 years.
The majority also abandoned (for a second time) plans to renew the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act this week because of more GOP infighting. With hard-liners howling about the “deep state” spying on ordinary Americans, Republican leaders pulled the bill from the floor, canceled votes and left for recess a day early.
The House isn’t scheduled to reconvene until Feb. 28, barely 24 hours before the government shuts down without congressional action. And the House still has no spending plan.
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At Wednesday morning’s news conference, PBS’s Lisa Desjardins asked Johnson pointedly about his plans for border security and Ukraine: “Are you actually going to do nothing?”
Replied the speaker: “We are not going to be forced into action by the Senate.” Nor, apparently, by anything else.
Finally, after lawmakers had already left town for their break, House Republicans’ allegations of bribery and corruption against Biden unraveled when a special prosecutor announced that the FBI informant at the heart of their case had been indicted for providing “false derogatory information to the FBI” about the president and his son, Hunter. The informant’s story about the Bidens had been a “fabrication,” the indictment charged.
The week’s lone accomplishment for House Republicans: Impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on the second try, and even though the Senate will quickly set aside the error-laced articles. Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer (N.D.) has called it “the worst, dumbest exercise and use of time.”
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Even that dubious achievement, passed by a single vote, required a legislative sleight-of-hand, scheduling the vote right after Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) returned from weeks of cancer treatment and about 90 minutes before the polls closed in New York, which gave Democrats an additional seat in the House.
Johnson’s growing debris field of legislative wreckage has already led to some dire consequences in the real world. As The Post’s Nick Miroff first reported, the killing of the border-security bill, which would have sent $6 billion in emergency funding to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has forced ICE to prepare plans to release thousands of migrants from detention to cover a budget shortfall.
The abandonment of Ukraine will have even graver consequences.
Writing in the Hill on Wednesday, British Foreign Secretary David Cameron, the Conservative former prime minister, thanked the Senate for acting and pleaded with those blocking the aid. “I believe our joint history shows the folly of giving in to tyrants in Europe who believe in redrawing boundaries by force,” he wrote. “I do not want us to show the weakness displayed against Hitler in the 1930s. He came back for more, costing us far more lives to stop his aggression.”
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Asked about Cameron’s words by Britain’s Sky News, Greene replied: “David Cameron needs to worry about his own country, and frankly he can kiss my a--.”
In that, Congresswoman Space Lasers has an ally in Donald Trump, who threatened anew to blow up NATO and said he would not protect allies attacked by Russia if they don’t spend more for their own defense. Instead, he would “encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want.”
On Tuesday morning, 22 Senate Republicans, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, defied Trump and stood by Ukraine.
“Why am I so focused on this vote?” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), one of the honorable 22, asked on the Senate floor. “Because I don’t want to be on the pages of history that we will regret if we walk away. You will see the alliance that is supporting Ukraine crumble. You will ultimately see China become emboldened, and I am not going to be on that page of history.”
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Another of the 22, Sen. Jerry Moran (Kan.), urged his colleagues not to undo in a moment all that had been built, at the cost of great blood and treasure, in the postwar years. “We owe something to those who served,” he said. “We owe them to live up to our responsibilities to preserve what they have defended and protected and made available to me, to Americans today.”
Invoking Trump’s nativist phrase, Moran went on: “I believe in America First. But, unfortunately, America First means we have to engage in the world. Taking a sober view of history, there should be no doubt of the importance of the outcome in Ukraine … and what it means to the United States.”
Cutting and running in Ukraine, and abandoning an ally to Vladimir Putin’s depredations, would, as Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) memorably put it, “echo throughout the history of this country and the history of the world for generations,” as surely as the appeasement of Hitler in 1938.
And King said that before House Intelligence Committee Chairman Michael R. Turner (R-Ohio) sounded a public alarm Wednesday about a “serious national security threat” that turned out to be a new Russian nuclear weapon that could be used in space against satellites.
Eugene Robinson: Move aside, Johnson and McConnell. Trump is now in charge.
Opponents answered with Russian propaganda. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), echoing Putin, claimed that “Russia is open to a peace agreement, while it is DC warmongers who want to prolong the war.” He also claimed that Ukraine “can’t win” against Russia.
On the Senate floor, J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), blended his isolationism with a vulgar appeal to ethno-nationalism. “Not a single country — not even the U.S. — within the NATO alliance has birthrates at replacement level,” he complained. “We don’t have enough families and children to continue as a nation and yet we’re talking about problems 6,000 miles away.”
Maybe, deep down, Johnson recognizes the moral urgency of helping Ukraine, and the cramped arguments of Putin’s apologists. But it doesn’t really matter what he believes, because by his actions he is choosing his own job security over national security. One of the anti-Ukraine zealots, Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), told CNN’s Manu Raju that Johnson would face a motion to vacate his speakership if he let the Senate’s aid package come to a vote, and that this is “not an empty threat.”
Though the foreign aid bill would pass the House easily, Johnson blocks it from getting a vote to preserve his own weak speakership. Is it any wonder that veteran lawmakers are running for the exit? This week, Chairman Mike Gallagher of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and Chairman Mark Green of the Homeland Security Committee announced their retirements, joining Financial Services Chairman Patrick T. McHenry, Appropriations Chairwoman Kay Granger, and Energy and Commerce Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers.
Gallagher announced he was quitting just a few days after he opposed the Mayorkas impeachment on grounds that it would “pry open the Pandora’s box of perpetual impeachment.” The zealots were already threatening to excommunicate him in the Liz Cheney tradition. “I firmly don’t believe that the best use for the next chapter of my career is staying in Congress for another decade,” Gallagher told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
A year ago, I celebrated Gallagher as a leader who “puts country before party” in the “bipartisan, serious and productive” way he ran his committee: “Gallagher is exactly the sort of person you want in this role as China’s growing aggression pushes us toward a new cold war. A 39-year-old Princeton graduate and former Marine captain with a PhD in international relations, he noted with satisfaction this week that his panel has ‘no bomb throwers.’”
Alas, there is no place for such a man in this House GOP caucus. Only bomb throwers need apply.
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On Tuesday night, after House Republicans lost a closely watched special congressional election in New York, longtime Republican pollster Frank Luntz warned them that the result was “a rejection of House Republican chaos” and a House majority that “gave voters nothing to vote for.”
“Tonight is the final wakeup call for the @HouseGOP,” he posted on X. “If they ignore or attempt to explain away why they lost, they will lose in November as well.”
On Wednesday morning, House Republicans attempted to explain away the loss.
Walking out of the Republican caucus meeting in the Capitol basement, Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio), explained that part of the district was in the “liberal cesspool” of New York City — while at the same time argued that the vanquished Republican “should have embraced Trump.”
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) attributed it to “a bunch of stupid decisions” by a “bad campaign.”
“Snow played a factor,” offered Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.).
Rep. Marc Molinaro (R.-N.Y.), wearing a tie with an ice-cream-cone pattern, sugarcoated it by saying “special elections suck.”
“Let’s not try to make this into some big narrative on November,” proposed endangered Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.).
The loss had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that House Republicans, after 14 months in the majority, had produced nothing but mayhem! To judge from House GOP leaders’ message at their Wednesday morning news conference, the only thing they had to do differently was to call President Biden senile more often.
House Republican Caucus Chairwoman Elise Stefanik (N.Y.) led off with her view that the president’s “deteriorating mental state” left him “mentally unfit” to serve.
Majority Whip Tom Emmer (Minn.) concurred that Biden was “unfit” and had “zero business occupying the Oval Office.”
And Speaker Mike Johnson, leaning as the others did on the medical expertise of special counsel Robert Hur, a Republican lawyer, opined: “A man too incapable of being held accountable for mishandling classified information is certainly unfit for the Oval Office.”
To emphasize the point, Republicans invited to the microphone Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.), who as the White House physician was known as the “candyman” for his liberal dispensing of pills. “We need a cognitive test,” the doctor ordered.
But if there is anybody in public life whose actions scream out for the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, it is Johnson. A couple of weeks ago, the Louisiana Republican got Israel and Iran mixed up in a “Meet the Press” appearance. Now he seems to be forgetting what he did just last week.
On Monday, Johnson issued a statement rejecting out of hand an emergency foreign aid package that was sailing through the Senate en route to passage by an overwhelming, bipartisan vote of 70-29. “House Republicans were crystal clear from the very beginning of discussions that any so-called national security supplemental legislation must recognize that national security begins at our own border,” he wrote.
Apparently, he just plum forgot that he was the one who, a week earlier, had killed a bipartisan border security bill — the toughest in a generation — that he had originally demanded but now called “dead on arrival.” He had earlier said that congressional action was indispensable but now claimed Biden already had “all the tools and the executive authority necessary” without legislation.
Mr. Speaker, please remember these words: Person. Man. Woman. Camera. TV.
If Johnson has not taken leave of his mental faculties, the alternative is worse: He is deliberately and knowingly sabotaging the functioning of the U.S. government because he thinks it in his interest.
Last week, he killed border security. Now, he’s blocking aid to Ukraine. He told Republicans Wednesday that there’s “no rush” to get military aid to Ukraine as it struggles to hold off Russian invaders. He proposed discussing the legislation at the House GOP retreat — a month from now.
It’s not as though he has anything better to do. GOP leaders this week scheduled a vote on a bill, desired by New York Republicans, to expand deductions for state and local taxes. But 18 Republicans blocked it from being taken up for debate — the sixth time during this Congress that a “rule” for debate had failed. Before these guys took over, it hadn’t happened in more than 20 years.
The majority also abandoned (for a second time) plans to renew the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act this week because of more GOP infighting. With hard-liners howling about the “deep state” spying on ordinary Americans, Republican leaders pulled the bill from the floor, canceled votes and left for recess a day early.
The House isn’t scheduled to reconvene until Feb. 28, barely 24 hours before the government shuts down without congressional action. And the House still has no spending plan.
At Wednesday morning’s news conference, PBS’s Lisa Desjardins asked Johnson pointedly about his plans for border security and Ukraine: “Are you actually going to do nothing?”
Replied the speaker: “We are not going to be forced into action by the Senate.” Nor, apparently, by anything else.
Finally, after lawmakers had already left town for their break, House Republicans’ allegations of bribery and corruption against Biden unraveled when a special prosecutor announced that the FBI informant at the heart of their case had been indicted for providing “false derogatory information to the FBI” about the president and his son, Hunter. The informant’s story about the Bidens had been a “fabrication,” the indictment charged.
The week’s lone accomplishment for House Republicans: Impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on the second try, and even though the Senate will quickly set aside the error-laced articles. Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer (N.D.) has called it “the worst, dumbest exercise and use of time.”
Even that dubious achievement, passed by a single vote, required a legislative sleight-of-hand, scheduling the vote right after Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) returned from weeks of cancer treatment and about 90 minutes before the polls closed in New York, which gave Democrats an additional seat in the House.
Johnson’s growing debris field of legislative wreckage has already led to some dire consequences in the real world. As The Post’s Nick Miroff first reported, the killing of the border-security bill, which would have sent $6 billion in emergency funding to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has forced ICE to prepare plans to release thousands of migrants from detention to cover a budget shortfall.
The abandonment of Ukraine will have even graver consequences.
Writing in the Hill on Wednesday, British Foreign Secretary David Cameron, the Conservative former prime minister, thanked the Senate for acting and pleaded with those blocking the aid. “I believe our joint history shows the folly of giving in to tyrants in Europe who believe in redrawing boundaries by force,” he wrote. “I do not want us to show the weakness displayed against Hitler in the 1930s. He came back for more, costing us far more lives to stop his aggression.”
Asked about Cameron’s words by Britain’s Sky News, Greene replied: “David Cameron needs to worry about his own country, and frankly he can kiss my a--.”
In that, Congresswoman Space Lasers has an ally in Donald Trump, who threatened anew to blow up NATO and said he would not protect allies attacked by Russia if they don’t spend more for their own defense. Instead, he would “encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want.”
On Tuesday morning, 22 Senate Republicans, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, defied Trump and stood by Ukraine.
“Why am I so focused on this vote?” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), one of the honorable 22, asked on the Senate floor. “Because I don’t want to be on the pages of history that we will regret if we walk away. You will see the alliance that is supporting Ukraine crumble. You will ultimately see China become emboldened, and I am not going to be on that page of history.”
Another of the 22, Sen. Jerry Moran (Kan.), urged his colleagues not to undo in a moment all that had been built, at the cost of great blood and treasure, in the postwar years. “We owe something to those who served,” he said. “We owe them to live up to our responsibilities to preserve what they have defended and protected and made available to me, to Americans today.”
Invoking Trump’s nativist phrase, Moran went on: “I believe in America First. But, unfortunately, America First means we have to engage in the world. Taking a sober view of history, there should be no doubt of the importance of the outcome in Ukraine … and what it means to the United States.”
Cutting and running in Ukraine, and abandoning an ally to Vladimir Putin’s depredations, would, as Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) memorably put it, “echo throughout the history of this country and the history of the world for generations,” as surely as the appeasement of Hitler in 1938.
And King said that before House Intelligence Committee Chairman Michael R. Turner (R-Ohio) sounded a public alarm Wednesday about a “serious national security threat” that turned out to be a new Russian nuclear weapon that could be used in space against satellites.
Eugene Robinson: Move aside, Johnson and McConnell. Trump is now in charge.
Opponents answered with Russian propaganda. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), echoing Putin, claimed that “Russia is open to a peace agreement, while it is DC warmongers who want to prolong the war.” He also claimed that Ukraine “can’t win” against Russia.
On the Senate floor, J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), blended his isolationism with a vulgar appeal to ethno-nationalism. “Not a single country — not even the U.S. — within the NATO alliance has birthrates at replacement level,” he complained. “We don’t have enough families and children to continue as a nation and yet we’re talking about problems 6,000 miles away.”
Maybe, deep down, Johnson recognizes the moral urgency of helping Ukraine, and the cramped arguments of Putin’s apologists. But it doesn’t really matter what he believes, because by his actions he is choosing his own job security over national security. One of the anti-Ukraine zealots, Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), told CNN’s Manu Raju that Johnson would face a motion to vacate his speakership if he let the Senate’s aid package come to a vote, and that this is “not an empty threat.”
Though the foreign aid bill would pass the House easily, Johnson blocks it from getting a vote to preserve his own weak speakership. Is it any wonder that veteran lawmakers are running for the exit? This week, Chairman Mike Gallagher of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and Chairman Mark Green of the Homeland Security Committee announced their retirements, joining Financial Services Chairman Patrick T. McHenry, Appropriations Chairwoman Kay Granger, and Energy and Commerce Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers.
Gallagher announced he was quitting just a few days after he opposed the Mayorkas impeachment on grounds that it would “pry open the Pandora’s box of perpetual impeachment.” The zealots were already threatening to excommunicate him in the Liz Cheney tradition. “I firmly don’t believe that the best use for the next chapter of my career is staying in Congress for another decade,” Gallagher told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
A year ago, I celebrated Gallagher as a leader who “puts country before party” in the “bipartisan, serious and productive” way he ran his committee: “Gallagher is exactly the sort of person you want in this role as China’s growing aggression pushes us toward a new cold war. A 39-year-old Princeton graduate and former Marine captain with a PhD in international relations, he noted with satisfaction this week that his panel has ‘no bomb throwers.’”
Alas, there is no place for such a man in this House GOP caucus. Only bomb throwers need apply.
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