Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA via AP Images
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) at the Capitol earlier today
The day after tomorrow, Saturday Night Live will have some competition, as C-SPAN will have a similarly farcical show running in prime time.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has scheduled votes on four bills—a $60 billion appropriation to Ukraine, $26 billion to Israel, $8 billion to Taiwan, and the GOP’s perennial military-to-the-border bill—for Saturday night as well. The first three have already passed the Senate in slightly different forms, and President Biden has said he’d sign them into law forthwith.
But it’s the overture to this performance, rather than the debates and votes on these four bills, that should be the comedic highlight.
The show must begin with voting on a rule to permit those bills to come to the floor. The Freedom Caucus, home to the greatest collection of strategic buffoons in modern American history, will oppose that rule in itself, and may also try to derail it by challenging Johnson’s Speakership. In turn, they may be subjected to a counterattack by fellow Republicans, who, while sharing much of the Freedomniks’ Trumpian impulses, don’t like being jerked around by the dozen or so Freedomniks who insist on ultra-Trumpism at every turn. A number of those fellow Republicans—perhaps even a majority—would like to undo the deals Kevin McCarthy cut with the Freedomniks as the price for his winning the Speakership. Those deals enabled a single member to compel a vote of confidence on the Speaker (which currently endangers Johnson), and put three of those Freedomniks on the House Rules Committee, where they have the power to permit or block a bill from coming to the House floor. Fearing that their fellow party-mates, including Speaker Johnson himself, will turn against them, trying to pass, say, a revocation of those deals by a sudden floor vote, the Freedomniks have today created their Floor Action Response Team (immediately rebranded as FART by aficionados of le mot juste) to defend their hard-won teensy-tiny-minority rule.
Not all these intraparty fights may come up on Saturday night; fight fans may be teased by the spectacle of Johnson’s continuing struggle to keep his job to keep watching C-SPAN—much as moviegoers in the early days of silent films were prodded, by a film’s closing shot of a beautiful young woman tied to tracks as the speeding train bore down on her, to return to the theater the following week to see the next episode in the serial. Those beautiful young women had (and deserved) a lot more fans than Johnson, but as with McCarthy’s struggle to win and retain his Speakership, it’s not the protagonist of the fight that matters, it’s the absurdity of the spectacle and its sundry participants.
By compelling Johnson to rely on the Democrats to come up with the votes to pass the rule to proceed, to approve those three aid packages, and perhaps, to keep him as Speaker, the Freedomniks have enabled the Democrats to effectively become the sometime co-governors of the House, at least on its most important decisions (hence, the “strategic buffoon” prize I awarded them in a previous paragraph). Using that power, the Democrats have already compelled Johnson to add $9 billion in U.S. aid to Gaza’s literally embattled and famished citizenry as a separate part of its Israeli aid package. With their majority in the House now down to just two, which will go down to a bare one in a couple of days when one Republican has said he’ll resign, and given the Freedomniks’ opposition to legislation per se, Johnson can do nothing without Democratic support. That gives the Democrats some real leverage—but only on bills that at least nine Republican senators support, since that’s the number of Republicans required if Senate Democrats are to surmount the 60-vote hurdle that any significant Senate legislation needs.
No matter who guest-hosts Saturday Night Live this week, they can’t possibly be as whacked-out as Marjorie Taylor Greene and company. C-SPAN may want to run some ads between now and Saturday night.
