History will record Mike Johnson as one of the sorriest characters in modern politics. He was plucked from the utter obscurity in which he deservedly resided, being an inconsequential milquetoast from a southern state, and made one of the most powerful people in government and second in line to the presidency, due to a complete fluke. Matt Gaetz had engineered a coup d’etat against Kevin McCarthy, out of pure cussedness more than anything else, and after weeks of stalemate and inaction in the House, Johnson was selected simply because he had fewer enemies than anybody else and everybody was dog tired.
Since that time Johnson has been buffeted to and fro by the winds of fortune and chance, one day appearing to be actually a reasonable statesman and voting to protect Ukraine and further Russian incursion into Europe and then there are days like today where Johnson is toeing the MAGA line.
SPEAKER JOHNSON: By our estimate, it may be close to 17 MILLION illegals come across the border since Joe Biden took office.
(That's more than the COMBINED populations of 14 states) pic.twitter.com/PhZVvARbwh
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) May 23, 2024
Gee, I wonder where all those immigrants are housed? Are they under the bed? In the rafters of the garage, waiting to pounce like Batman on the unsuspecting? This is truly incredible. But this is the card that Johnson has chosen to play. And it’s not just Johnson. The entire GOP has gone full MAGA. Nikki Haley fell in line yesterday. The Republicans are going to pull out all the stops and it will be non stop lies and conspiracy theory from now until November. Anything to get the worst excuse for a Republican back in the White House.
Maybe this is why Johnson’s three top aides deserted him last week? Maybe they got fed up with this level of weakness? Or, more likely, they probably see the Republicans taking a beating in the fall, losing the House — again — and decided to go get another job while the gettin’ was good.
Make no mistake, Johnson HAD the opportunity to pass the border deal. He doesn’t want to, because that would take away Trump’s key talking point. So he’s lying on purpose. Even other Republicans have called him out on it.
Republican Senator James Lankford is calling B.S. on House Speaker Mike Johnson’s newest excuse for killing the border deal.
After months of brutal negotiations, the Senate on Sunday unveiled a $118 billion bipartisan agreement to address security at the U.S.-Mexico border. The deal would tighten standards for asylum, send billions in long-awaited aid to U.S. allies like Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, and would create a standard for shutting down the southern border if daily benchmarks for illegal crossings are reached. So, in other words, it does exactly what a lot of Republicans wanted.
Johnson, who declared the bill “dead on arrival,” seems keen to continue to drag out the ordeal—this time, apparently, because he felt uninvolved.
“Well, when they began to do the negotiation, I suggested immediately after taking the gavel, I suggested to the Senate leadership that the House should be involved,” Johnson said on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday.
“We should be in the room. I wanted to send the chairmen of our committees of jurisdiction to be a part of that negotiation. And they said, ‘No, no. Let the Senate take care of it. We’ll send you something … that’s palatable.’ What we’re hearing right now is not,” he continued.
But Lankford, who served as the lead GOP negotiator on the bill, claims that’s completely made up.
According to Lankford, Johnson was asked “early on” if he wanted to be “engaged on this,” reported CNN’s Manu Raju.
“He said the House has already spoken,” Lankford said, referring to House Republican bill H.R. 2, an extreme asylum-limiting immigration bill that has effectively zero chance of passing in the Democrat-controlled Senate.
Since then, Johnson has been “loosely briefed” on the Senate talks, according to Lankford, who added that if the Senate deal were already law, “the border would have literally been closed every day for the last four months.”
Moses Mikey doesn’t want the problem solved. It’s common knowledge that Trump needs to campaign on the border. Chuck Schumer told Johnson what was what.
“I say to Speaker Johnson: Don’t let the 30 hard-right people in the House who are extreme — they wanted us to default, they wanted the government not to pay its debts, they wanted … the government to shut down. They’re extremists, and they’re running your show,” Schumer said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.
“You know what the right thing to do is. You know we need to fix our border. You know that it has to be bipartisan,” he added.
Make no mistake. Johnson doesn’t want anything bipartisan. He wants to be Trump’s lapdog and pray that Trump is reelected. I don’t know what the New GOP will look like, granting for the sake of argument that there will be one, but I do know Johnson will not be a part of it. He’s old school, kow towing to Trump.
James Lankford was doing his job. He was trying to get a bi-partisan bill passed on the border. Other Republicans would have joined with him. But Lankford finds himself, as does any Republican with a jot of decency or common sense, stonewalled by MAGA and by Donald Trump’s need to get reelected, above all else.
Not to get too snarky or anything but this is the same man who could not count how many votes he needed/had to put on yet another magat shit-show in the H.o.R. Expecting him to be even as close as the nearest galaxy is to earth would be too much to hope for. He is a xtian, con, magat. Put simply he is a f*cking moron.