MTG, Massie Are Too Stupid To Know They Just Gave the House To Dems

Friends, you do not need to be Nostradamus to see how the conflict du jour is going to go in the House of Representatives. All roads lead to Democratic rule — oh not *formal* Democratic rule. Things are not that far gone — yet. Give Marge Greene and the rest a couple of more months, we may be there and don’t forget November is coming up fast. Marge, untrammeled crackpot that she is, with nobody reining her in, has decided to go after Mike Johnson. She was alone in that until this morning when another bona fide kook, Tom Massie of Kentucky, came along to second her emotion and make getting rid of Johnson a genuine hate fest. So, what happens now? We will get to that in some detail but first, let us set the mood.

MAGA smells blood in the water.pic.twitter.com/XMyR2GtG5L https://t.co/4efpnQo0vp

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) April 16, 2024

You see with clarity here that the GOP conference is on another suicide mission. Marge brought the cushion (we’re talking political hari kari here, kneeling on a cushion, plunging a knife in) and then Massie has the knife and is the conference going to thrust it into Johnson’s entrails? Or, are the Democrats going to save him?

I believe the latter. This is why. Don’t forget now, the GOP will be down to a one-vote margin in the chamber as of Friday. If Democrats vote unanimously to oust Johnson, Greene and Massie would be enough to make a majority with them and disembowel the House leadership. So will they do that? No. Why am I certain? Because the Democrats have already found a way to work with Johnson and in effect work around Johnson and get what they need. Greene and Massie know this, that’s why the political theater in the first place.

Now the Democrats *could* throw in for political theater and destroy Johnson and allow the Republicans to look as awful as they are and already do. But there’s no percentage in hamstringing this Congress anymore than it already is; particularly with issues in the Middle East heating up and the war in Ukraine going on as long as it has. So this is what Democrats will do and why, according to Boiling Frog’s Nick Catoggio, whose analysis is spot on.

The House Republicans who voted to oust McCarthy had their own reasons for doing so. Rep. Matt Gaetz seems to have borne him a personal grudge but the other seven saw an opportunity to burnish their populist credentials on the cheap by moving against a leader whom the right’s populist activist class had never trusted. Not only was McCarthy a veteran of the “globalist” Paul Ryan-era House GOP, he had seemed a bit too eager to squander the House GOP’s leverage over matters like the debt ceiling by cutting deals with Joe Biden. Surely the Republican majority could find a speaker with more spine than him.

Trump maintained a love-hate relationship with McCarthy that tipped toward hatred by the end. He opted not to lobby House Republicans on the speaker’s behalf after Gaetz brought his motion to vacate; when McCarthy phoned Trump to ask why, the former president reportedly ticked through a list of grievances. McCarthy hadn’t endorsed him during the Republican presidential primary or moved to “expunge” his two House impeachments, he complained. The fact that McCarthy hadn’t clearly said that Trump was the GOP’s strongest possible nominee bothered him as well.

McCarthy ended up winning the support of nearly all House Republicans on Gaetz’s motion to vacate. But in a closely divided chamber, without the aforementioned three blocs, it wasn’t enough. Too many people were glad to see him go.

Tell me: Who’ll be glad to see Mike Johnson go?

Not Donald Trump. When Johnson showed up at Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring and agree to sign on to push a law that already exists as a law (the fact that non-citizens can’t vote, which has been on the books forever) he satisfied Trump’s needs. So Johnson is not in the same boat as McCarthy.

As disgraceful as Johnson’s actions after the last election were, in some ways his political trajectory is the opposite of McCarthy’s. McCarthy was the establishmentarian who repositioned opportunistically as a populist, Johnson is a populist who, as speaker, has repositioned as a proto-establishmentarian. (Or, to borrow a term, a MAGA “pragmatist.”) He made a deal with Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer to avert a government shutdown; he successfully lobbied his conference to renew federal authority to conduct warrantless surveillance overseas; now he’s pushing a funding bill for Ukraine despite opposition from right-wing nationalists.

And it’s not just that he’s done those things. It’s how he’s done them.

Over and over, more than 10 times in his first five months as speaker, Johnson opted to diminish the power of his own Republican majority by moving bills under the procedural tactic known as “suspension of the rules.” Knowing that the House’s populist-dominated Rules Committee would block certain legislation before it reached the floor, Johnson chose to bypass the committee and advance that legislation by invoking “suspension,” which requires the support of two-thirds of the House for passage. Massie is a member of the Rules Committee; each use of “suspension” nullifies his power to obstruct bills he opposes, which explains some of his antipathy to Johnson.

An extraordinary number of major bills have passed this year via suspension—with Democrats providing most of the two-thirds majority needed. If Ukraine aid passes, it too might rely on “suspension” (or unusual Democratic support within the Rules Committee), again with most of the votes on the floor destined to come from Hakeem Jeffries’ caucus.

Forced to choose between letting MAGA Republicans derail important legislation and passing that legislation with a bipartisan supermajority composed mostly of Democrats, Johnson has consistently and remarkably chosen the latter. So why would House Democrats want to oust him, especially given the risk that he’d be replaced by a Steve Scalise or Jim Jordan?

And that is all that would happen, is a repeat of the dysfunction and then finally, a capitulation in favor of somebody, which is how Johnson got elected in the first place. Nobody sane wants to see a repeat of that. So the Democrats will keep Johnson in possession of the gavel.

Moscow Marge will not get the aid of Democrats in crippling the House. She and Massie can’t start that little bonfire off in a closet, in their own wing of the House, but as Jared Moskowitz said earlier, “Massie wants the world to burn. I won’t stand by and watch. I have a bucket of water.”

Under Johnson, rule-by-suspension would continue and probably grow more normalized than it already is, with the left and normie right forging a de facto governing House majority while the MAGA faction cultivates its ideological purity by opposing everything. Ukraine aid will pass, at long last. And tensions within the GOP will grow more toxic—eventually, perhaps, to the point where a few more Republicans end up resigning in disgust, creating a (probably temporary) House majority for Democrats and making Jeffries speaker.

On the other hand, if Johnson is ousted with Democratic help and another leadership vacuum opens, then … Democrats also win, as Republican dysfunction would collapse into total disrepair.

It’s a win/win situation, either way. I vote for the way of least drama — although if Marge can push things to Shakespearean levels of uber angst, that’s fine. Let her. Let the hair shirts be passed out and the self-flagellation begin. Democrats still end up winning. I think that this is how all this is going to go down. Pop some corn and let’s watch.