House Republicans Are Trapped

Lyndon Baines Johnson once said of one of his political frenemies, “I want loyalty. I want him to kiss my ass in Macy's window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses. I want his pecker in my pocket.” It’s a fantasy dear to every politician, and they typically want it unconditionally and instantly without the petty little things like reciprocity.

Loyalty will be in short supply in the MAGA caucus of the U.S. House of Representatives this week because Speaker Mike Johnson—in a rare moment—did precisely the right thing. This weekend, Johnson brought Ukraine aid to the floor and passed it on a bipartisan basis.

And that’s an unforgivable sin for MAGA

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After delaying for months, Johnson decided in a show of either political courage, poll-driven opportunism, a mature appreciation of the security risk of letting Ukraine fall, moral clarity, or just a full b.s. filter with the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene — and honestly, I don’t care what drove it; I care that it got done at long last.

This weekend, I heard from friends in Ukrainian, German, and British political circles that if the vote had failed, the implications would have been very risky indeed; America, Ukraine, and the world dodged a bullet.

I’m not sending Johnson a fruit basket or getting together for pedis and gossip any time soon, but I’m glad it ended as it did. Who imagined that Mike Johnson and Hakeem Jeffries would show Americans that bipartisan legislation making Americans and the world safer was still possible?

Many in the Republican caucus breathed a sigh of relief that the aid Ukraine needed was finally out of the vortex of madness. These members are almost all pro-Trump and largely irredeemable on that front, but this little act of defiance and independence was the thin edge of a wedge that split them further from the Chaos Caucus.

Now, House Republicans find themselves in a wedge, a trap, a layover to catch meddlers in which they are indeed pinned.

For the Year Zero set of permanent ideological arsonists, they’re left brandishing their last real weapon, the threat to move to vacate the Speakership. “Nobody moves, or the Speaker gets it” was a threat from the moment Matt Gaetz, the wanna-be Che Guevara of MAGA, forced Kevin McCarthy (R-Hapless) into accepting the poison pill of the motion to vacate the rule.

The threats are now tired and counterproductive. It’s why even Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda constellation of Fox, the New York Post, and the Wall Street Journal spent the weekend tearing Marjorie Taylor Greene apart.

Source: Rupert Murdoch’s Spleen

The terrorists lost. They can’t afford to lose again.

First, if the House plunges into darkness again for another Speaker fight, the Trump Rouge won’t get a better option than Mike Johnson. They won’t put Chip Roy, Moscow Marge, or anyone else in their faction in the chair.

They could put Hakeem Jeffries in the Speaker’s office. This isn’t hypothetical or some distant possibility. It’s easy to see how driving a wedge between the Trumphadis and the less-insane members of the Caucus might lead to another immediate retirement or three. (If Democrats thought like Republicans, they’d find a big lobbying firm to make a few job offers, but I digress.)

Finally, it might produce 6 months of the worst outcome for MAGA: a coalition government that works — even tentatively and clumsily — on the basic mechanics of keeping the lights on, the predicate of their “burn it all down” ideology becomes more risible and brittle by the day.

Johnson and Jeffries will never be besties, but if they’ve arrived at some ad hoc and tacit arrangement, watching the chaos agents fail at unseating him would have been delicious…and the power of their political extortion and arson would have diminished drastically.