No Strange New Respect For Mike Johnson
No Strange New Respect For Mike Johnson
At least not until he explains why he sacrificed thousands of lives, swaths of territory, and perhaps the future of Ukraine for nothing.
A weekend of important news has quickly overshadowed something striking that led up to it: In just the past few weeks, several House Republicans (none particularly “moderate”) have conceded that their conference is lousy with Russian influence.
On Thursday, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) admitted that Donald Trump’s enforcers in Congress “want Russia to win so badly that they want to oust the speaker over it.”
Reps. Mike Turner (R-OH) and Michael McCaul (R-TX), who chair the House intelligence and foreign affairs committees respectively, have each accused those same Republicans of mainlining Russian propaganda and echoing it on the floor of the House.
So the secret is out.
It’s on one level a penetrating glimpse into the obvious—Republican affinity for Russia and Vladimir Putin has been undisguised and growing since Trump took over the party years ago. On another level it’s satisfying: A pincer movement of MAGA loyalists and left-wing critics of the Democratic Party has spent years mocking liberals over their supposed obsession with Russia, only for a group of somewhat-less-deranged Republicans to admit the truth quite openly.
Hostilities between the two GOP factions boiled over Saturday when the House finally passed legislation that will provide $61 billion in military aid to Ukraine, after MAGA—and its handpicked speaker, Mike Johnson—starved Kyiv for more than half a year on Trump’s orders. In the wake of that development, liberals and Democrats have praised Johnson (some more reluctantly than others) for having an open mind and ultimately doing the right thing, though his speakership was at risk. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine even singled out Johnson publicly for a note of personal thanks.
I understand the collective sense of relief. But I’m also left feeling like we’ve agreed to conceal the elephant in the room with little more than a knowing nod. Why’d Johnson ultimately abandon the Russia-loyalists in his conference, and does he agree with Crenshaw, McCaul, Turner et al that his old faction is compromised? If so, what does he, as a leader of his party, plan to do about it? Or does he intend to let this big breach in the U.S. government fester for whatever strategic advantage it may provide the Republican Party.
By way of analogy: If you drain your retirement savings to pay off the mob, but win it all back gambling, on one level it’s no harm no foul. On another level it raises some important questions about who you are!
Obviously getting aid to Ukraine is the most urgent imperative. But at some point soon we should have a conversation about who was doing what since our last tranche of Ukraine aid lapsed months ago, and why they were doing it.