Okay, I’m going to risk some of the goodwill I’ve hopefully got banked here at the CO site by discussing an issue that is toxic on our side right now, and that will likely make many of you mad. But if you’ll hang with me through the first part of the column, I’ve got a few stories to celebrate, too.
(You’ve heard the old cliché “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” Today’s column is going to be medicine first, and a little bit of sugar afterwards.)
To the medicine: I think it would be politically suicidal to try to oust Mike Johnson from the Speakership right now.
No, he’s not conservative enough for me. Neither is Kevin McCarthy, or roughly 97% of Republican office holders. Or Donald Trump, for that matter.
So I not only empathize with those amongst us who were dissatisfied with McCarthy, and now with Johnson – I am one of those! But at the same time, many on our side don’t seem to recognize the most basic political reality: we have 51% of one house of congress, and the Dems have the White House and the Senate.
It’s especially aggravating to read conservatives on other sites blasting Johnson for not closing our border, or saying, “We need to secure our border before we do anything else!”
If we were living on a planet where Mike Johnson had the ability to close our border, and he sided with the Dems and refused to do it, I’d be with those conservatives: “He’s a traitor, and should be run out of town!”
But we do not live on that planet. And Mike Johnson – or Kevin McCarthy, Donald Trump, or even the great and powerful CO – can do absolutely nothing to close our border right now. If Johnson pushed a “close the border” bill through the House it would win by one vote. Then the Senate would toss it aside the way they did with the Mayorkas impeachment.
But hey, we’re optimists, right? What if it turned out that Fetterman’s recent brain damage was caused by a virus, and half the Senate caught it, and their recovery was super-fast, so that half of them became marginally sane, and they passed the Johnson border bill?
Then the earthly remains of Joe Biden would veto it, and we would accomplish nothing.
Having said that, I’d still like Johnson to push and pass such a bill, purely to gain some justified political advantage. In general, I think we should force the Dems to take every unpopular vote we can, and then bludgeon them with those votes in November.
(Pass an “at least prohibit abortion in the last trimester” bill, and a “don’t allow warped Munchausen parents to sexually mutilate their sexually confused kids” bill, and a “don’t release serial murderers so they can immediately murder again” bill. And force the Dems to vote for aborting babies half-way down the birth canal, castrating kids, and facilitating the murder of more Americans.)
But let’s not pretend that Johnson is fumbling away a non-existent potential victory.
The latest exaggerated Breitbart headline I saw said that by garnering Dem votes for the Ukraine bill (along with 185 GOP votes, which aren’t mentioned), Johnson “has allowed the Dems to seize congress.” (I’m not discussing the wisdom of the Ukraine bill here, which I think has only gray options, and is all Biden’s fault.)
Really? If that’s true, then by that standard, Matt Gaetz and his small band collaborated with the Dems to oust McCarthy, despite nearly all Republican votes. And if MTG and another tiny group decide to toss Johnson out, they’ll be siding with the Dems again.
But forget all that emotional sturm und drang. Just out of Machiavellian self-interest, it is incredibly stupid and self-destructive to overthrow your own speaker when you have no one better to take his place!
Not only will it cause a ballistic circle jerk of Republicans shooting at each other, it will also turn off the independents who are desperately looking for an alternative to the late Joe Biden, and will make a loss in November more likely. (Then everybody who hated McCarthy and Johnson can happily settle in to the final six months before the election under Speaker Jeffries, and total Dem control of congress and the WH!)
So what should we do? 1. If any Republican is speaker when the dust clears, we must immediately get rid of the new rule that a tiny number of GOP pols can overthrow a speaker. If you can’t get a majority of your party to agree that a speaker has to go, suck it up.
The Dems would never cripple themselves with such a rule, which is part of the reason that – despite having the most idiotic and dysfunctional agenda since the Trojans tugged that big horse within their city walls – they’ve managed to push through their terrible legislation with very thin margins in the house, while the GOP’s much more rational legislation has languished.
Seriously. At any given moment, at least several dozen House Dems are not just opposed to their party leadership’s agenda, they are certifiably bat guano crazy. Hank Johnson thinks Guam is in danger of capsizing, Sheila Jackson Lee thinks that the moon is made of gas and the sun is “a very strong heat” on which human life would be difficult. (Just think of how much sun screen you’d have to use every single day you were living on the sun, people!) The squad is a bunch of mouth-breathing anti-Semites, and etc. and etc.
And yet Imhotep Pelosi was able to either whip her stupidest colleagues into line, or else ignore and marginalize them. Even though her brains were pulled out of her skull through her nose when she was first mummified several millenia ago, she would never have been stupid enough to give a group of 3-5 of her most volatile members the chance to scuttle her agenda any time they got their burkas in a bunch.
2. Win the WH and Senate in November!
3. Win a large enough majority in the House so that you can let your camera-hogging marginal characters (I think MTG, Boebert and Gaetz – and sadly for me, Massie – are amongst those, but your mileage may vary) say and do what they want, without the power of the whip hand to paralyze all action in the House.
Okay, if any of you are still with me, and aren’t already typing your comments (“Dear Jackass, You are neither hilarious nor a genius! Good day sir!”), let’s move on to other news. (By the way, the last video I made – it’s called “Buckley and CS Lewis on this election” – touches on similar issues, i.e. a call for us to have grace with each other and our imperfect leaders as we head into this election season. You can see it at my website – Martinsimpsonwriting.com – under “Videos.”)
One bit of very good news came on Friday, when the Trump campaign and the RNC unveiled a “massive election integrity program, involving more than 100,000 volunteers and attorneys working in each battleground state, and overseeing voting and ballot handling and counting.
Yes! Many people have been begging for this sort of effort (I mentioned it in my March 8th column), and if it is as robust as it sounds, it might go a long way toward making up for the inexplicable decision to support Ronna Romney for at least two election cycles and 4 years too many! My gut tells me that the single biggest threat to a Trump victory is the left possibly rigging the election and 2020-style ballot shenanigans, so this new effort is just what Dr. Simpson ordered.
(Now if we can just get Trump to stop telling his base to NOT vote early or by mail!)
There’s even a bit of good news involving Joey Gaffes this week. He was feeling a little down because five times he had said, “Don’t!” as a stern warning for Iran not to attack Israel.
Annnndddd… they attacked Israel with 320 drones and missiles.
But he said, “Don’t!” one more time, this time directed at Israel, along with this admonishment: “Don’t move on Haifa.” And to their great credit – and Biden’s relief – Israel took his advice and did not attack Haifa.
Which is… a city in Israel.
(I think he might have meant “Rafah,” which is a terrorist-infested city in Gaza. And which, come to think of it, sounds like the kind of burg that Biden would like to protect, since his ululating base voters in Dearborn MI are quite fond of those gang-raping jihadists in Rafah… and much less fond of the peace-loving Israelis in Haifa.)
But hey, Biden called on the IDF not to hit their own cities, and they didn’t, and that’s the closest thing to a win Biden has had for a while.
Ooh, except that while his favorite uncle was definitely shot out of the sky and then eaten by cannibals, Joe has been unmolested by cannibals for all 124 years he’s been on this planet.
Rumors that the cannibals took one look at him and said, “Too stringy. Plus that brain thing he’s got might be catching, like Mad Cow Disease,” have not been confirmed.
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 