Now, I recently told you that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is now beholden to congressional Democrats for his gavel. The Democrats came to his rescue when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia initiated a motion to vacate the chair, which is a term for creating a vacancy in the Speakership. Ten House Republicans voted to remove Johnson from power which was well more than was needed if the vote was strictly partisan.
I also told you that this means that Johnson serves at the Democrats’ pleasure. That’s true because any member of the House can bring a new motion to vacate the chair, and the motion is privileged and can be invoked at any time. So, not only can Greene or some other Republican House member move to remove Johnson again, but the same is true for all the Democrats in the House. And each time there is a vote, the Democrats have the option of ousting Johnson.
On Tuesday, Speaker Johnson traveled to a courthouse in Manhattan to demonstrate his fealty to Donald Trump who is on trial for 34 felony counts related to his hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. He attacked the case, he attacked a witness and he attacked the judge’s daughter.
As a key witness testified inside the Manhattan criminal courthouse on Tuesday morning, an increasingly familiar scene unfolded outside, as another in a parade of well-known visitors — this time House Speaker Mike Johnson — stepped to a microphone.
“This is a man who is clearly on a mission for personal revenge,” Mr. Johnson said, attacking the man on the stand, Michael D. Cohen, former fixer to Donald J. Trump. “He is someone who has a history of perjury. No one should believe a word he says in there.”
….Mr. Johnson took a shot at the judge’s daughter, a political consultant who has worked with Democratic candidates, saying she was “making millions of dollars doing online fund-raising for Democrats.”
Donald Trump is under a gag order not to attack the judge’s family members (as well as witnesses and prosecutors) after he spread false allegations about the daughter’s defunct Twitter/X account. But that hasn’t prevented surrogates like Sen. Rick Scott of Florida from falsely accusing her of raising tens of millions of dollars for Democrats. She is a political consultant who has worked for both candidates and left-leaning organizations, but she is not some massive fundraiser.
Now that Johnson has decided to join the chorus of Trump toadies attacking a sitting judge’s daughter, I think there’s good reason to revisit whether the Democrats want to be led by him. They essentially elected him the Speaker of the bipartisan majority coalition responsible for enacting must-pass legislation like appropriations, extending the debt ceiling, and providing foreign and military assistance to our allies. This coalition is made up primarily of Democrats, and they saved Johnson because his willingness to defy his own party to get needful things done.
But if he doesn’t behave himself, they can toss him. I don’t think he is behaving himself.
As much as some House gops may want to get rid of Johnson, they’d never do it under a motion initiated by a Dem. Sill plenty of other options, but that’s not a plausible scenario.
The other possibility is to wait for MTG to initiate another motion to vacate, and then simply refuse to come to the rescue. It’s not a great scenario in terms of governance, of course. At bare minimum, I’d expect Hakeem Jeffries to have a bit of a pep talk with Johnson to remind him that he’s on a very short leash if he wants to keep the Speakership.
I’d really like to know what kind if any actual communications are going back and forth between those two, or if it’s all just reading the room and making calculated moves. It’d also be interesting to know if Johnson has anybody sensible and more experienced giving him guidance.
Any Dem can go rogue though. But it sounds like the Dems have signaled they won’t save him a second time, so MTG might as well go ahead and do it again.
I don’t know whether House Dems should pull the rug on Johnson know or not, but I sure hope the Manhattan DA’s office is documenting their case that Trump is violating the court’s gag order on an almost daily basis by conspiring with his surrogates to say what he’s forbidden from saying publicly (because he’s also forbidden from conspiring with others to try to circumvent the gag order).
Also, hoping that NYC/NYS Dept. of Corrections has plans in place for where and how to detain Trump (and that those plans include, to the extent possible, treating him like any other citizen).