Mike Johnson’s Pathetic Apology Tour
The sad-sack speaker is so, so sorry for helping to keep the government open.
MIKE JOHNSON, THE SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE, has embarked on an apology tour. For the past week, he’s been doing interviews on right-wing radio and TV, hoping to soothe conservatives who are angry at him for cutting deals with Democrats to keep the government open. Johnson is trying to explain why he hasn’t taken a harder line. His excuses say a lot about the sickness of the Republican base—and the cravenness of the speaker who’s contorting himself to appease it.
Here are some of the alibis Johnson is peddling.
1. We barely have a majority.
In every interview, Johnson points out that the GOP’s margin over House Democrats, which used to be nine seats, has dwindled in the last year. It will soon be down to one. With such a small margin, and with unreliable support from hardliners on the right, Johnson says he can’t get much done.
But why has the Republican conference shrunk? Why have several of its members ditched Johnson? On Thursday, in an interview with Charlie Kirk, Johnson pleaded that Rep. Ken Buck—who was ostracized within the party for spurning its lies about the 2020 election—“didn’t give me a lot of notice” that he was leaving. “He called me about twenty minutes before he made it public,” Johnson groused. Kirk pointed out that other Republicans had left for jobs in the media: “We’re losing members to cable news sponsorships.” In fact, Johnson’s next interview, three days later, was with one of those former members: Trey Gowdy, who left Congress a few years ago and now hosts a show on Fox News.
What Johnson and his interviewers are describing—a party losing control of Congress because its members don’t trust one another, would rather opine than legislate, or have lost faith that their colleagues are serious about legislating or telling the truth—is not a governing party. It’s deeply dysfunctional in ways that inhibit Congress from meeting its basic responsibilities.
2. I inherited a mess.
Three weeks ago, Johnson scolded President Joe Biden for using his State of the Union speech to blame America’s troubles on his “predecessor.” But on Monday, Johnson blamed his own troubles—in particular, his agreement to budget parameters opposed by many conservatives—on former Speaker Kevin McCarthy. “I was hemmed in by the top-line spending numbers that my predecessor negotiated,” Johnson told radio talk-show host Moon Griffon. “I inherited all this. . . . They handed me the reins of this stagecoach going off the cliff.” This excuse, like the one about small margins, is an indictment of the party’s chaos and infighting.
3. We won some concessions.
Johnson pointed out that in the budget negotiations, he had extracted concessions from Democrats. He reminded Kirk that Congress had cut “$50 million in military DEI programs” and had inserted language that allowed “only American flags and other official flags to fly over U.S. diplomatic facilities. No more rainbows and everything else.” But these items illustrate how petty and culturally preoccupied the GOP has become. Who needs solvency when you can own the gays?
4. A shutdown would hurt Republicans politically.
Some interviewers asked Johnson why Republicans shouldn’t shut down the government. He explained that shutdowns have always hurt the GOP because people suffer and get angry when federal paychecks stop, flights get canceled, and other functions—agents patrolling the border, for example—are halted or curtailed. He pointed out that polls show Republicans would again take the blame. But this is a hard message to sell to right-wing audiences because they live in their own mediasphere. They don’t understand how different they are from the broader population.
5. We need to move the ball.
Johnson used a football metaphor to make his case for incrementalism. “I can’t throw a Hail Mary pass on every single play,” he told Gowdy. Instead, the speaker said his strategy is “three yards and a cloud of dust,” working to “get the next first down [and] keep moving.” But that metaphor implies steady progress, which hardly describes the record of Republicans since they retook control of the House fifteen months ago. The patience of their fans has worn out.
6. I love my backstabbers.
Two weeks ago, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene filed a motion to oust Johnson from his leadership job. “Speaker Johnson has betrayed our conference,” she declared. But Johnson pretends he and Greene are BFFs. “She and I exchanged text messages even today,” he told Gowdy. On Monday, appearing on Newsmax, Johnson assured Eric Bolling: “Marjorie’s a friend. She’s frustrated, and so am I.” On Fox News, Johnson told Sean Hannity that Greene was “trying to send a message. I respect the message.” With these obsequious responses, Johnson is sending a message of his own: He’s too weak, politically and morally, to stand up to the hard right.
7. I tried to save George Santos.
In December, after the House Ethics Committee found “overwhelming evidence” implicating then-Rep. George Santos in crimes, the House voted to expel him. His unfitness was so obvious that nearly half the Republican conference joined in that vote. But now that the GOP’s majority has dwindled, Johnson is pleading that he tried to rescue Santos. “I voted against the Santos expel motion,” the speaker told Kirk. He added that when some House Republicans brought the motion to expel Santos, “I tried to talk them out of it.” You might think a man of Johnson’s professed Christian piety would care about officeholders’ integrity. But all Johnson focused on was preserving the Republican majority.
8. We’re making Democrats do things our way.
As my colleague Andrew Egger has pointed out, Johnson wants to send aid to Ukraine, but he knows that half of his conference and most of his party’s Trumpist base are against it. So the speaker is trying to convince them that the aid will be done in a way liberals don’t like. In his interviews, he promised that Republicans would impose “new concepts” on the aid: It would be a loan, not a grant; it would be financed in part by repossessing assets of Russian oligarchs; and it would be accompanied by boosting U.S. energy exports.
Why does Johnson specify these conditions? First, he knows his party cares more about money than about defending an ally. And second, he’s signaling to his Republican colleagues that he won’t give in on this Democratic-coded issue without making the other party hurt for it.
9. Don’t make me work with Democrats.
Johnson warned the hard-right faction in his conference that by thwarting his proposed rules for bringing legislation to the floor—and by pushing Congress to the brink of a shutdown, which would then require a two-thirds vote to reopen the government—they were forcing him into the arms of Democrats, who would demand liberal policies in exchange for cooperating. In the old days, bipartisanship was a boast. In today’s GOP, it’s raised as an apocalyptic threat.
10. The kingdom of heaven is coming.
Through the centuries, religious leaders have encouraged believers by promising joy in the afterlife. Johnson is telling right-wing audiences that they, too, must be patient, because all the woes of this broken world will be healed in the 2024 election. “I’m trying to be an ambassador of hope on Easter Sunday,” the speaker told Gowdy. To Bolling, he added:
It’s very hopeful. We’re going through the valley, but it is much brighter on the other side. I’m absolutely convinced we’re going to grow the House majority, we are going to win the Senate, and we’re going to win the White House, as well. And we’re going to turn this thing 180 degrees. November can’t get here soon enough.
TWO MOMENTS FROM THE APOLOGY TOUR are particularly disconcerting. One happened on Newsmax, when Bolling asked Johnson to address a rumor. “I’ve had two congressmen . . . call me, saying there’s someone on the Democrat side that’s paying off some of these [Republican] members to leave, to leave you with less of a majority,” said Bolling. Johnson said he didn’t think the rumor was true. But the circulation of this conspiracy theory among Republican lawmakers—and the fact that Bolling took it seriously, or at least thought his audience would—shows the extent of the party’s illness. Instead of facing the real problem—Republican lawmakers hate their jobs so much that they’re abandoning Johnson and the conference—the Republican base is sinking deeper into paranoia.
The other exchange took place in Johnson’s interview with Kirk. The speaker worried that a shutdown would go on for a long time because lawmakers who think they way he does would refuse to end it. “I come from the conservative movement myself. I’m a hardliner myself,” Johnson told Kirk. “A bunch of my friends would never join in the vote to reopen the government.”
That’s how derelict and dangerous the House GOP has become. The speaker is afraid to leave the fate of the nation to people like himself.