Mike Johnson needs a
cognitive test
By Dana Milbank
Columnist|
Updated February 16,
2024 at 9:32 a.m. EST|Published February 16, 2024 at 7:30 a.m. EST
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 Conference 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 on charges of 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 ass.”
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 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.
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.
Sipping coffee with colleagues before the House Republican
Conference meeting Wednesday morning, House Oversight Chairman James Comer
(R-Ky.), the man leading the probe of the Biden family’s business dealings,
remarked to colleagues: “It’s been a bad week for Joe Biden.”
But it turned out to be a much worse week for James Comer.
For the better part of the past year, Comer and his fellow
investigators have been brandishing the claims of an FBI informant about “an
alleged criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and a foreign
national relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions,” as Comer put
it.
Just last month, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan said on Fox News that
this “highly credible confidential human source” provided “the most
corroborating evidence we have.”
But that was all based on fakery, according to
the grand jury’s indictment of the
informant, Alexander Smirnov, announced Thursday evening by David
Weiss, the special counsel assigned to investigate Hunter Biden. “Despite
repeated admonishments that he must provide truthful information to the FBI and
that he must not fabricate evidence, the Defendant provided false derogatory
information to the FBI about Public Official 1” — Joe Biden — “and
Businessperson 1,” his son, the filing says.
Of course, it didn’t take a grand jury to find that
Comer’s case for Joe Biden’s impeachment had been based on a lie. Comer has
come up empty in each of his hearings and depositions over the past year.
In recent weeks, he has held closed-door depositions of
seven of Hunter Biden’s business associates. House Democrats released excerpts of those sessions showing
that all of them had said Joe Biden was not involved in his son’s business
dealings. A sampling:
“Is it fair to say that you have no firsthand knowledge
at all concerning President Biden?”
“That would be correct.”
“Does President Biden have any role whatsoever in
setting the price of Hunter’s artwork?”
“No.”
“In the times that you’ve spoken with President Biden,
have you ever discussed Hunter Biden’s business ventures with the President?”
“No.”
“During the life of your relationship with Mr. Hunter
Biden, did he ever mention his father?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Have you ever discussed business with Joe Biden?”
“I’ve never discussed business with Joe Biden ever.”
“Did Hunter ever tell you that Joe Biden was involved
in any of his business ventures in any way?”
“No.”
“You’re not aware of Joe Biden taking any official
actions to advance his son’s business interests, correct?”
“Correct.”
“Did Joe Biden at any point in time ever receive any
money from any business venture that you were involved in?”
“Absolutely not.”
Finally, this week, Comer and Co. brought in Tony
Bobulinski, a former Hunter Biden business partner, who, as HuffPost’s Arthur
Delaney pointed out, was Trump’s guest at a presidential
debate.
Bobulinksi called the president “an enabler” of his son’s
business dealings, but Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) told reporters that
Bobulinski, under questioning, said he had only two conversations with Joe
Biden and neither had anything to do with business dealings.
And now House Republicans’ “highly credible” star witness
has been indicted on charges of fabricating the story that they had put at the
center of their attempt to impeach the president.
Comer on Thursday night vowed to press on, saying his
“impeachment inquiry is not reliant” on the fabricated story.
True! It’s not reliant on anything at all.
