Coalition Government

Mike Johnson suddenly got it.

The accidental Speaker of the House was, shall we say, reluctant to provide military aid for Ukraine. Then two things happened.  The first thing is that Johnson saw intelligence that showed that Ukraine would end likely end up as a republic in the Russian Federation if it didn't get U.S. aid and that Poland or Lithuania might be next.  The second thing is that one of Johnson's sns has been accepted at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, and the possibility of this son getting into a war in Eastern Europe suddenly got real.  He placed the billon the floor and it passed with the votes of anti-Trump Republicans and Democrats.  

Thus the Democrats and the non-MAGA Republican wing have formed a coalition government in the House of Representatives.

The U.S. constitutional system, of course, isn't meant to support coalition governments, at least not in the European sense. In European countries, multiple parties win seats in Parliament and there is usually no clear-cut majority, so likeminded parties have to form a coalition to pick a prime minister to present his or her credentials to the head of state.  Here, two parties win seats in the House and the Senate and partisan majorities run the shows.  The President - both the head of government and the head of state - is separately elected.   But it is possible for  two of a minimum of three parties to win enough seats in either House of Congress to deny the party that gets the most seats a majority.  That happened in the 34th Congress of 1855 and 1856, when the Democrats lost control of the House in the 1854 midterms and the Whig Party was ceding the role of opposition to the Democrats to the new Republican Party and the American, or Know-Nothing, Party.  The Republicans got the most House seats but not a majority, so the Republicans and the Know-Nothings, along with Whigs and other minor parties, formed a coalition to run the House.

Such deal-making is normal when ther eare three or more parties, but the fact that we're seeing something similar in the 118th Congress when there are only two parties and the Democratic minority is united says a lot about how fractured the Republican Party is.

And the problem is not Mike Johnson.

Putin It On the Line

Even though the Senate passed a military aid package for Ukraine that also includes military aid for Israel and the Indo-Pacific region, and humanitarian aid for the Palestinians, Mike Johnson refuses to let the aid come up for a vote in the House until President Biden and congressional Democrats address the southern border.  They did that already, and Mike Johnson wouldn't let that come to a vote either.  Why?  Ask Mike Johnson.  I would love to hear his answer, because I know it won't include the sentence "Trump told me not to."  Even though that's the actual answer.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are letting Vladimir Putin become the most powerful leader in the Eastern Hemisphere.  And Trump will let him become the most powerful leader in the world if he himself gets back in power as a result of this year's U.S. presidential election.  But, that's probably going to happen . . . because Americans only care about the economy and think Trump will do a better job on the economy than Joe Biden by twenty points. 

House Democrats hope to get enough pro-Ukraine Republicans to sign a discharge petition to allow the Senate bill to come to a vote in the House, but pundits say the odds are against that.  How many GOP votes do the Democrats need to pass a discharge petition?

Five.

Five.  Only five.

And that's a long shot? 

And by the way, progressive Democrats, especially a certain bird from the Bronx (I won't mention her name, but her initials are A-O-C) also might oppose the bill because it gives military aid to the Israelis.  And oh yeah, I didn't want to bring it up, but the left famously ignored the struggle against Communism in Poland in the 1980s because they couldn't conceive the possibility that you could support Solidarity in Poland and the fight against apartheid in South Africa at the same time.  Or maybe they just didn't care about the Poles.

Gosh darn it, Putin is planning to put a weapon in space that can destroy American satellites!  And Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, just got killed while living in a penal colony north of the Arctic Circle.  And President Biden can't get the support of House Republicans to help Ukraine?  How is he going to get aid to the Ukrainians?  We need a way to funnel aid to Ukraine under the table without anyone, not even the President, aware of it.

Dammit, we need Oliver North!

It's a thought.

What the House of Representatives Did This Week

The U.S. House of Representatives continues to be very busy as it concludes the first session of the 118th Congress.  Which is precisely why the House didn't have time to vote on badly needed aid to Ukraine to the tune of $61 billion, despite a live-and-in-person plea from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to House Speaker Mike Johnson, or cut a deal with President Biden on border security.

What was so urgent that they had to put aside such important business? They had to vote on an impeachment inquiry against President Biden, which passed 221-212, based on evidence of . . . nothing. 

I think I'll check my passport now . . ..

Breakdowns and Shutdowns

U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson faced his first test, and he apparently failed.

He wanted a vote on a continuing resolution to avoid a shutdown and keep government spending at current levels for the time being, with no additional aid to Israel and Ukraine, to allow Congress to negotiate a more permanent budget deal.  But members of his own fellow Republicans - mostly from the MAGA wing - voted against it, as they want to see immediate and drastic cuts in domestic spending.  Johnson needed help from the Democrats to pass such a resolution, and Democrats, recognizing the need for a continuing resolution, helped it pass.

Johnson tried a typical Republican party trick of offering a proposal he figured the Democrats wouldn't support, thus allowing the government to shut down, but with several Republicans in the House already opposed to this strategy, he allowed the resolution to pass.  The Senate has indicated that it will pass it as well.

Government shutdowns have been part and parcel of politics in Washington since 1981, when President Reagan vetoed a continuing resolution to keep the government open while both houses of Congress were negotiating in good faith to come up wit ha budget.  That had been standard procedure before the 1980s, but Reagan wanted to use the threat of the government running out of money to force cuts he felt were necessary.  The ploy only caused chaos, and chaos eventually became a Republican tool.  For the most part, though, Republicans rarely pay a political price for causing government shutdowns.  Although the public largely blamed Republicans for the 2013 government shutdown, the party was rewarded with control of the Senate and an expanded majority in the House the following year. 

So if you think Democrats should have let the GOP allow the government to shut down so that the Democrats would have a political issue to run on in 2024, think again.  A shutdown is the last thing Democrats or the country needs right now.  

A Dick Named Johnson

When James Michael Johnson of Louisiana, the new Speaker of the House, took questions from reporters after being elevated to the job, ABC News reporter Rachel Scott asked Johnson, who had members of the House Republican conference behind him, about his role in attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election, which included circulating a petition of support for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's lawsuit against states won by Joe Biden to get the outcome reversed.  Republican House members jeered and laughed, and North Carolina congresswoman Virginia Foxx told Scott, who is black, to "shut up."

This is where we are now.  We have in Mike Johnson a House Speaker who tried to help Donald Trump negate the results of the 2020 presidential election, is against gun control (and said prayer could help the residents of Lewiston, Maine overcome the trauma of the mass shootings that just took place there), is in favor of a federal abortion ban, supported the 2017 ax reform law that benefited the wealthy, and is very clear on is position on the rights of non-heterosexuals.  He thinks they don't have any.   

Republican House members who said they wouldn't vote for an election denier as Speaker went ahead and voted for Johnson mainly because they liked him personally, whereas they personally despised Jim Jordan.  Never mind that Johnson is merely Jordan with his suitcoat on - unless the House GOP unanimously got behind one of their own to be Speaker, they were looking at a power-sharing agreement with the Democrats - and House Republicans would rather chew whole rolls of tin foil than agree to share power with House Democrats, especially when they're led by a black guy from Brooklyn named Hakeem.

And so House Republicans now have a MAGA man in charge of the whole House of Representatives and it will be much easier for them to advance their anti-democratic agenda - and, if they keep the House in 2024, they'll have a Speaker who aid and abet Donald Trump to ensure he gets to be President whether he wins or loses the presidential election.  Fortunately, Scott doesn't know a twit abut running anything, but. unfortunately, he'll get plenty of help from his fellow Louisianian Steve Scalise, the House Republican leader, who once called himself "David Duke without the baggage." 

And if (when?) Trump is President in 2025, and Rachel Scott asks Trump or a high-ranking Republican a question he doesn't like, she won't be told to shut up.  Instead, she'll be accosted by two men in black suits and sunglasses and led out of the press room, and she will never be seen again.

Closed Until Further Notice

We perfected mass-producing cars until the Japanese figured out how to mass-produce cars better and with less expense, we made the best movies until the French figured out how to make better movies, and we invented rock and roll but the British improved on it.  And now we Americans, having invented modern democracy, have seen other governments do democracy better than we have.

Yes, we have no Speaker of the House.  But we have many bananas . . . especially in the House.

Jim Jordan ended his bid for the speakership when it became apparent that he couldn't get the thin Republican House majority to support him.  Eight House Republicans put up their names for Speaker, and Republicans chose Tom Emmer of Minnesota as their Speaker nominee yesterday morning only to see Emmer drop out yesterday afternoon, with Mike Johnson of Louisiana standing for the speakership in his stead. It seems that no Republican can win the necessary 217 votes to become Speaker, and Republicans refuse to cut a deal with the Democrats that would allow a Republican Speaker but give the Democrats any leverage in helping to run the government.  (Republicans don't want to work with Democrats; they want to neuter them.)  There's a war in Israel, there's a war in Ukraine, China is on the march, the Islamic revolutionary government in Iran - made possible by the United States after we put the Shah back on the throne absent the wished of Iranians in 1953 to prevent a Communist takeover that would align Iran with the Russians - is now working in concert with . . . the Russians.  (Its funny, how foreign policy mistakes we Americans made seventy years ago still come back to bite us in the fanny.)  And we still can't get the House working again.

I'm thinking of taking a hiatus from this blog.  I comment a lot on current events, and these events going on at the moment are likely to stay current for awhile with no change whatsoever.