As he should.
As he should
‘L isten,” Speaker Johnson said earlier this week at his press conference. “My philosophy is you do the right thing and you let the chips fall where they may.” Then, he threw caution to the wind. “If I operated out of fear over a motion to vacate,” he proposed, “I would never be able to do my job.”
He can be taught!
When applied to specific public policies, the injunction to “do the right thing” is invariably a euphemism for “follow my personal ideological judgment.” When applied to institutions or systems or processes, however, it can actually mean something concrete. So it may here. As he seems to comprehend, Speaker Johnson is responsible for the entire House of Representatives, not solely for the Republican caucus — and certainly not solely for the tiny sliver of the Republican caucus that believes, à la the Squad, that it will be able to get its own way by being obstreperous and absurd. If, in time, Johnson proves as serious in purpose as he has become in tone, he may well have signaled a welcome shift in the operation of our national legislature.
Writing these words, I can already feel the heat: “But Charles, the debt, the fecklessness, the swamp!” And, of course, I agree. But I am not engaged here in a dispute over the problem; I am engaged in a dispute over the solution. I, too, would like to see some profound changes in Washington, D.C. — although, full disclosure, cutting aid to Ukraine or Israel is not among them. I simply don’t believe that turning the House into a playground while whittling the Republicans’ majority down to zero is the best way to go about getting those changes made. I am sure that Marjorie Taylor Greene feels jolly good about herself when she goes to sleep at night. But in the light of day, what, precisely, has she achieved? Has the budget deficit been closed? Has her agenda been advanced? Have any of the objections that we might share been addressed? They have not.
Over the last decade or so, politicians in both parties have managed to convince the loudest and most gullible members of their bases that the only thing that stands in the way of the total victory of their faction is the willingness of their legislators to “fight.” In this view, the number of representatives or senators the parties have does not matter, nor whether they control the presidency, nor whether their aims are consonant with the terms of the U.S. Constitution; the problem is always held to be a lack of moral fiber on the part of those who have been sent to D.C. Last year, a handful of Republicans removed Speaker Kevin McCarthy in the hope that their chosen replacement might possess superpowers that enabled him to overcome the stubborn facts that the Democrats control the Senate and that Joe Biden is the president of the United States. Now, the same few are talking themselves into the idea that if they replace Mike Johnson, too, they might finally hit upon that elusive magic bullet.
This is nonsense. The reason that the Republican Party is struggling to advance its agenda at the federal level is that the Republican Party does not have enough elected officials at the federal level, and the reason that the Republican Party does not have enough elected officials at the federal level is that the Republican Party has not won enough elections at the federal level. Complaining about Speaker Johnson’s behavior, Representative Debbie Lesko (R., Ariz.) said, “He’s not listening to us.” It would be more reasonable, though, to assume that Speaker Johnson is listening but that he doesn’t agree. Debbie Lesko has only Debbie Lesko to think about. Speaker Johnson has 434 others to consider. Certainly, Debbie Lesko’s concerns ought not to be less important than anyone else’s. But they ought not to be more important, either. The size of the Republican majority in the House is now one. There are 435 of those ones, you know.
One of the cardinal rules of conservatism — and of success in politics, for that matter — is that one must always start from where one actually is. The Republican Party may be correct on a whole host of questions, but, for whatever reason, it has not managed to convince the public that it is so correct that it ought to be given untrammeled control over the government. Until it does, it will have to work with the others, and its speaker will have to reject the fantasies of the fringe, to proceed with reference to political reality, and to let others throw the chips around wildly — as they may, and undoubtedly will.