Donald Trump and His Speaker-Puppet
I want to talk about some implications of this Annie Karni story, describing the background to what is plain as day: Donald Trump, who jokes in private that he — not Mike Johnson — is the Speaker of the House, runs the nominal Speaker.
Karni pitches the story in terms of Johnson’s “decision” to keep the House on vacation for the entirety of the government shutdown. But it has larger implications of the possibility of peeling Republican Congresspeople away from Trump.
He has argued that the House, which under the Constitution has the sole power to initiate spending legislation, has no reason to meet as long as Senate Democrats are blocking a bill to reopen the government. He has refused to swear in Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat who won election a month ago and has sued in federal court to be allowed to take her seat, claiming he lacks the power to do so.
His strategy of indefinite hiatus means that Mr. Johnson has not engaged in the typical political theater that speakers often employ during shutdown fights to jam the party out of power: scheduling tricky votes on bills to reopen parks or pay certain categories of federal workers, like agents for Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Customs and Border Protection.
[snip]
The absenteeism, people around Mr. Johnson said, is a strategic calculation that the best way to keep his unruly rank and file in line is to place them on an extended leave.
[snip]
Mr. Johnson appears to be using the considerable power of the speakership to render the House irrelevant.
Karni quotes New Gingrich saying that the strategy serves to prevent other issues from “clutter[ing] up” Republican messaging on the shutdown. And while Karni provides an incomplete census of those complaining about this strategy, she doesn’t explain what that other clutter might be.
- Kevin Kiley, who’ll likely be ousted if the CA redistricting passes
- Far right Texan Beth Van Duyne, who thinks they need to come back to work
- Elise Stefanik, who wants to pay the troops
- Steve Bannon, who wants to codify some of what Trump did with EOs
Stefanik’s concern, paying the troops, suggests a potentially much bigger concern, such as that Trump is sending service members into a wildly stupid, illegal war in Venezuela without any legal cover.
Given Johnson’s refusal to swear in Adelita Grijalva, one of those other issues is Epstein.
Johnson’s utter silence on a Trump pardon recipient, Christopher Moynihan, threatening Hakeem Jeffries, and Johnson’s cheerleading for George Santos’ commutation hints at another one: the way that Trump’s corruption fosters crime.
Another thing keeping the House on vacation keeps buried is healthcare, which Karni elsewhere describes as “a political vulnerability for the party.” CNN reports more members getting squeamish about the impending healthcare increases.
And Trump’s selections about what to fund and not to fund — his decision to reopen Farm Services Agency, so it can keep farmers afloat while his trade war kills their markets, but not SNAP, are an attempt to game this process. But thus far he has proven wildly tone deaf about what his members are really exposed to. SNAP may be one such example.
All that’s to say that if members were in town, then they might be pushing back more aggressively against Speaker Mike and through him, Trump.
Trump, though, really is trying to neuter Congress. His demands that Republican state after Republican (or, in the case of North Carolina, swing) state redistrict, effectively eliminating democracy and enshrining polarization at the state level would serve his interest in completely defunding blue states which also happen to pay the bills for red states.
Perhaps most tellingly, Trump says that the Big Ugly Bill (Karni focuses on the tax cut part of it, not the creation of a goon army currently invading blue cities) was the only piece of legislation he needed Congress to pass.
Mr. Trump, [] has an iron grip on congressional Republicans and this week told G.O.P. senators that after they pushed through his marquee tax cut law, “We don’t need to pass any more bills.”
Republicans would do well to consider the implications of this, particularly as Trump and Russ Vought continue to violate funding rules. Congress has funded his army. There’s no reason to believe they’ll be entirely immune from targeting by it, as LaMonica McIver already has been.
This all underscores one reason voters should be focusing on Republicans, not Democrats, in the weeks ahead, as SNAP shuts down and a second DOD paycheck arrives. Because Trump really is proposing he proceed without his Republican members of Congress — or without them serving any real function. And at least some of these Republicans do care (or can be made to care) that Trump is destroying their communities.
Can we dare hope for a ‘jailbreak’ from these Repub clods?
What scares me more than anything is that Repub reps and Senators don’t seem to care how their policies and actions are polling for the 2026 mid-terms.
They are still in deep shit denial. The breaks will trickle in for a while.
Health care premium increases may move a few. Hungry children perhaps a few.
Their own impending demise? We can hope.
or they’ve been told on the QT that it is all irrelevant, because there won’t be any more elections or voting — “so don’t worry.”
Maybe I have missed it, but with the “wildly stupid, illegal war in Venezuela” and the blowing up of all the boats without due process, why haven’t democratic leaders been publicly warning the military that even though the Supreme Court gave Trump immunity, those military leaders can be held accountable down the road?
First, I don’t know how fucking often we have to write here how goddamn skewed and bad corporate-owned national media is in the US, that it doesn’t give Democrats equal time. You should already know you have to actively look for Democrats’ opinions and you clearly haven’t.
Example of Democratic Party congresspersons pushing back which you have ignored – note the dates:
Example of Associated Press (via PBS) covering both GOP and Dems in Senate re Venezuela, but GOP senators get the top half of the article (most readers don’t finish and note that two Dems were quoted:
Here’s a piece reported the day after the AP above, in which Democrats get the rare top billing:
One key exception: John Fetterman (D-PA), whose Democratic constituents should be hammering on him daily for his DINO bullshit. I don’t care if he’s had a stroke and it affected his cognitive powers; if he’s this badly out of step and misunderstanding the issues (Sep 3), he should quit the Senate instead of sucking up to Trump.
Military leadership clearly understands what’s going on, or did you likewise ignore the fact Admiral Alvin Holsey resigned as head of US Southern Command because of illegal commands related to Venezuela? We don’t yet know if there were other illegal commands which forced Holsey to quit.
This is on you — you indeed missed it. A lot of it.
Second, your spelling “democratic” with a little d instead of capital D is not a good look. This isn’t the first time you’ve done this, either. Take that anti-Democratic bullshit propaganda elsewhere.
Rayne,
I appreciate the feedback. I apologize for mistakenly using the small “d”; I certainly know better. But I either did not communicate my point clearly or you misunderstood it. I have seen all the types of articles you mentioned and many more like it both in the legacy media and in the progressive sites. I certainly have seen that Democratic politicians have challenged Trump and his administration on the legality of these actions, and I have read about the admiral and others who resigned or were fired.
But I was not claiming that these Democratic leaders failed to “push back” or challenge these things. My point was a more narrow one. I have yet to read of these leaders publicly warning the military leaders that they would be held accountable. I did not find a single mention of that in the articles you linked to or any others I have read. If there were some mention of that in the articles you identified I would love for you to point those places out to me. I looked through them very carefully and found no mention of a senator or other saying directly to these admirals or generals or colonels, etc. that if they continue to execute these illegal orders that they may find themselves in trouble when a new administration takes over.
Do you understand the distinction I am making?
Of course, as you point out, the media do a poor job of platforming Democratic voices, so, again, I may have missed this elsewhere. That is why I qualified my question.
You know what? *YOU* NEED TO CONTACT MEMBERS OF CONGRESS.
I could blow another 500-1000 words responding to you when this is something YOU can do to satisfy your own concerns. YOU can contact the
— House Appropriations Committee on Defense
— House Subcommittee on National Security, Department of State and Related Programs
— House Committee on Military Personnel
— House Committee on Oversight and Investigations
— House Committee on Western Hemisphere
— House Subcommittee on Military and Foreign Affairs
— Senate Subcommittee on Defense Appropriations
— Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel
and direct your concerns to the chairs and ranking members since you seem to think the military isn’t paying attention to Democratic members of congress who have pointedly said and written they believe Trump has ordered extrajudicial executions by way of illegal orders, while ignoring the resignation of Admiral Holsey.
Ditto on what Rayne posted. It seems to me that these military leaders are well aware of what is going on. But understand they are between a rock and a hard spot. What risk are you asking them to bear?
In response to Grain of Sand, absolutely, the military leaders know they are between a rock and a hard spot. And they absolutely are well aware of what is going on. (I never said, “the military isn’t paying attention to Democratic members of congress who have pointedly said and written they believe Trump has ordered extrajudicial executions by way of illegal orders.”) And the military leaders know what serious consequences CAN come from participating in these extrajudicial executions. But they do not know what serious consequences WILL come from it. They can’t know. Nobody does. That’s because we don’t know what the next Democratic administration will do. Will the next administration look forward, not back, and choose not to substantially punish the wrongdoing of the previous administration, or will they vigorously pursue it? We don’t know. What do the current military leaders think is the probability that the next administration would pursue such wrongdoing vigorously? I don’t know. But my initial point was that by making public, explicit statements about their willingness to substantially punish such wrongdoing, if they haven’t already made such public statements, the Democratic leaders might be able to shape that probability in the military leaders’ heads.
As Rayne rightly points out, I can express these concerns with Democratic leadership. But you know what else I can do? I can leave such comments on a progressive site. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Reply to thesmokies
October 27, 2025 at 11:04 am
We’re not here to carry water for you. We also have a long-established bias for action. Go contact Congress with your concerns; it’s a republic if you can keep it and use it as if it is one.
The GOP messaging everywhere, including government web pages, that the Dems are responsible for the shutdown, isn’t going to hold up much longer. People do know about SNAP, and EBT, and Medicaid, and all the stuff that The Felon Guy has pulled funding from or shut down operations. (In California, we’re hearing about National Parks. Because a lot of idjits think that they can do what they want in Yosemite, without rangers around, like BASE jumping.)
A high school friend of mine, whose parents were interned at Manzanar during WW II,
has been leading the charge to refurbish the baseball field there and after a lot of work managed to host a couple of games there at the end of last year. But, due to winter weather, high winds in the eastern Sierra, endless tumbleweed invasion and the tendency of wood to rot under such conditions, a lot of repair work had to be undertaken in order to host this year’s games there. After all that work was undertaken and completed, and games scheduled, said games were just cancelled, because…government shutdown. Manzanar is a national monument administered by the feds…
Jen Psaki interviewed Kiley. Despite a couple of tries, she couldn’t get him to commit to signing the discharge petition.
It also serves to keep important things under the radar, such as sending ‘federal monitors’ (why not have the UN do it?) to Fresno, Kern, Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside counties in response to the CA GOP chair saying they’ve ‘received reports of irregularities’ even though only MAGAs have been busted here for voter fraud (not very many of them, either). Orange county is a well-known GOP bastion despite what Katie Porter pulled off. RW counties Fresno, Kern and Riverside all use Dominion voting systems according to the CA Secretary of State, and Dominion was just acquired a couple weeks ago by St Louis based Liberty Vote. Liberty Vote is a RW outfit run by Scott Leiendecker who also runs KNOWiNK which is purportedly an electronic poll book database. It’s probably as reliable as Kobach’s Crosscheck with a similar capacity for causing ‘chaos’ to seed doubt to be ‘investigated’ to officially throw D votes out or the election to a heavily gerrymandered House which will vote by state delegation.
My suspicion is that those three Dominion machine counties are being used for a dry run to muck around with the vote, like Rove tried to do in OH for the 2012 election when SoS Husted tried to put in a patch on their voting machines in the last second before getting thwarted by Anonymous. When OH was called for Obama, remember how Rove went bonkers as if such an outcome was literally not possible because he’d rigged that election.
It’s so easy to vote by mail, and put it in a drop box or take it to a post office.
Fast, too – I don’t have to find where the nearest “voting center” is (and hope that their machines are reliable and certified).
Absentee votes are tabulated by the same machines that are used by voting-day voters.
In all states?
Totally depends on the state/precinct.
Some places — like Georgia — in-person voting takes place on touch screens which don’t leave a trustworthy paper trail, but absentee ballots are filled out on paper and scanned in.
Other places — like the precinct where I do pollwork — the in person ballots and mail-in ballots are identical, and the pollworkers will literally scan in the absentee ballots on the same machines during slow times in the voting.
The best defense we have against voting shenanigans is that every state and precinct runs their elections so completely differently that there is not one way to cheat at scale.
I worry about the Liberty/Dominion takeover, but mostly in the all-touchscreen places. Hand-marked paper ballots are the most reliable and verifiable voting method, so we need to do whatever we can to move towards that. That usually means making sure you vote absentee in locations that are otherwise touchscreen.
Mine goes straight to the registrar-recorder’s office, where they scan it – it’s paper! and then do the counting. But it being on paper means there’s a backup.
Thank you for bringing attention to the sale of Dominion to a RW outfit and the possibilities that could follow. I did not know that. And down the rabbit hole I go to get further information on Liberty Vote and the frightening things it can engineer to suppress or completely throw out votes that don’t benefit the enshrinement of an authoritarian government.
Again thank you. I know the general rule here is do your own research. But honestly, it really has become a fire hydrant going full blast of information and disinformation and so much easier to miss important information such as this unless you spend a large chunk of your day news digging and I just don’t have the time or bandwidth to do that.
I knew about the sale, but appreciate others’ focus on the implications. Agree about the blast of the fire hydrant. We are awash with water metaphors.
My preferred source for all things voting-related are the Bradblog/Bradcast by Brad Friedman — he’s been working that beat for 20 years or so now. He had a podcast on the Dominion sale last week.
https://bradblog.com/?p=15538
I’ve taken to calling him Fasctor Mike.
Or Elf on a Shelf.
The Adelita Grijalva situation is completely insane, and the reporters who let Jesus Mike lie about her being able to do constituent services even though she hasn’t been seated are not journalists, despite their fancy logos.
Where are the donors? Somebody should be running ads about it in Spanish language media nonstop. Meanwhile my fairly safe Dem rep (with a lot of Hispanic constituents) has maintained radio silence on the matter. Gah.
I saw the interview with her this weekend after they said she should be working. She’s unable to get into the system and had three laptops she was unable to access as well as her office computer in the Capital. Mike Johnson hasn’t made much sense since we learned of his porn monitoring program.
Name and shame your rep, but you’d better be certain they have made zero statements about Grijalva’s situation.