The House Speaker has played for centuries among political leaders in the United States, as the only partisan figure in Congress that is also explicitly empowered by the Constitution to direct the legislative branch.
One would not necessarily know that when observing the recent behavior of the speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, who drives less as the autonomous chief of a government coeual branch and more as a junior partner of President Trump.
In the last two weeks, Mr. Johnson withdrew the president of the Chamber Intelligence Committee, representative Michael R. Turner of Ohio, acting at the request of Mar-a-Lago. He stayed behind Mr. Trump and vice president JD Vance in the White House, RELATING THE FIRST MOMENT OF Mr. VANCE IN THE OVAL OFFICE as if he were a member of the White House staff.
“I told him and President Trump that I had to capture the moment in the video,” Johnson wrote online in a vertiginous title of his viral video last week.
On Monday, when Mr. Johnson and the Republicans of the House of Representatives carried out their annual retirement at Trump’s doral national questionable that the president has made that elude Congress avoid.
“We support the president’s initiative, obviously, 100 percent,” he said about Trump’s decision to review the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He stood up for the president’s decision to fire more than a dozen general inspectors who supervised government agencies without giving Congress the required 30 -day notice about such removals.
“Sometimes you need a new appearance,” said Johnson.
And when it came to Trump’s weekend words war with Colombia about accept Congress will support the White House. “
With that, any past claim that the party had its own agenda beyond Trump’s priorities was firmly dispensed with. It is a break with the past, when the speakers of both parties have been territorial about the prerogatives of Congress, even if sometimes it meant challenging its own president.
Molly Reynolds, a leading member in government studies at the Brookings institution, said that the majority of the too thin camera leaves Mr. Johnson, a relatively inexperienced speaker, with little freedom to play his institutional role.
“You have to discover how to work with Trump more effectively to take the Chamber’s Republican Conference to an agreement on things,” he said. “You need to find out if there is a way that Trump is useful to do so.”
Until now, Mr. Johnson has been doing it mainly acting as the president’s legislative valet. That has been your strategy for a while. On the night of the elections, he ran out of his own victory party in Shreveport, Louisiana, and flew to the Trump Mar-Lago Finca in Florida for the real celebration.
More recently, he said not “second would” guess “the decision of Mr. Trump to forgive violent criminals who attacked police officers in the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The amount of energy concentrated in the speaker’s office has decreased and fluid throughout history. But in recent decades, the power of Congress has been centralized in the speaker’s office, and until recently its occupant acted, at least, as an institutional leader.
Mr. Johnson, on the contrary, has been effectively installed as a member of the president’s entourage and, as a consequence, has reduced the stature of the office he has.
In a viral photograph of Mr. Trump taken just after the elections, the president -elect sat on his plane eating McDonald’s with Elon Musk, his son Donald Trump Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his choice to serve as secretary of health.
Mr. Johnson was also in the image, but not in a seat at the Cool Kids table. In the photoHe is perched on Mr. Kennedy’s shoulder, inclined to get into the frame and wearing a bit like a fifth wheel when the group went to Madison Square Garden for an UFC fight on Saturday night.
The Democrats argue that Mr. Johnson’s approach is eroding the power of his own position and the same congress.
“This relationship decreases the constitutional position of the speaker,” said representative Jamie Raskin, Maryland’s Democrat. “The president is not the head of the speaker, the congress or the nation. The speaker is not the man on the right of the president, the camp assistant, the little friend or the lower officer. “
Former President Nancy Pelosi was a vital partner for two democratic presidents. But he had his own powerful power base in Capitol Hill, sometimes he distanced himself from President Barack Obama, even in his plan to leave 50,000 US troops in Iraq and his decision not to process the officials of the Bush administration involved in torture.
He also strongly retreated the administration of Obama when he wanted to pursue a smaller and fragmentary medical care review, pressing instead for a comprehensive plan. (She won).
“The incredibly reduced accommodation that began with Kevin McCarthy unfortunately has continued with Mike Johnson,” said Mrs. Pelosi, referring to Mr. Johnson’s predecessor, whom Trump nicknamed “My Kevin.” “When the speaker tells the president that the Republicans of the House of Representatives are a rubber seal for him, members lose influence in any debate on the policy that may affect their districts.”
He pointed out that when he held the position under Democratic presidents, both Obama and President Joseph R. Biden Jr., there were disagreements. But, he said, “they always respected that the vote is a privilege of the chamber members who are responsible for their components in a way that were not.”
Even former speaker Newt Giningrich, a Republican who is free of how Mr. Johnson is playing an impossible hand, compared his behavior filming Mr. Vance in the Oval office with that of a worshipe spouse who was just trying to have fun.
“It’s like my wife, she takes photos of everything. If she does not take a photo, it is as if it had not happened, “said Mr. Giningrich, who called the” cute “moment.
“This guy received his work he did not ask, he has suffered endless pain from the members of his conference,” he said, “so he has fun.”
Strategically, said Mr. Giningrich, Mr. Johnson’s approach to embrace Trump Close since Republicans need to maintain control of the congress after the medium -term elections of 2026.
He also pointed out that in what can be the largest legislative decision of the year, either to put all the immigration, tax cuts and party cost cuts or divide them into two, the speaker seems to be out and leaving Mr. Trump to press for a large bill. (Republican Senate leaders have been pressing for two).
“Trump is like FDR or Lyndon Johnson in the intensity of his support and the emotional depth of having survived the shooting,” Giningrich said in an interview. “You want Trump and the Republicans of the Chamber to be part of the same choir.”
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