GOP House matter
Mike Johnson’s speaking was once merely unbelievable. It appears inept now. A failed vote to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Tuesday night dealt a spectacular embarrassment to the rookie Republican leader, who is already finding it difficult to govern with a tiny, extreme, and broken majority. The drama weakened an already dubious case for impeachment, which was based more on policy differences than on high crimes and misdemeanors or treasonous offenses as defined by the constitution. It depicted a tale of a completely disordered House. It was a bold move to set up a high-stakes, televised tour de force to remove a Cabinet official for the second time ever.
However, the fundamental guideline of not bringing a bill to the floor until the numbers are absolutely certain was broken by the failure to actually pull it off by a few votes. As a result, the House leadership became a laughingstock of a situation. The setback served the interests of the White House, which takes great pleasure in depicting Johnson’s majority as more of a vehicle for Donald Trump’s political antics than as a capable administration. Furthermore, it cast significant doubt on the GOP’s ability to carry out yet another politicized ploy intended to win over the former president: the impeachment of President Joe Biden.
Being incapable of ruling
The fractious and infuriated Congress seems to be losing its fundamental ability to govern, which coincided with the House GOP meltdown. Johnson and House Republicans killed the most conservative potential new immigration law in decades after months of demanding harsh changes to asylum policies to deal with a surge of undocumented migrants at the southern border. This is likely because Trump, the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, wants to demagogue the crisis until November. Constitutional democracy and American governance as a whole are now in jeopardy.
Democrats found it difficult to accept the Senate border compromise mediated by the ultra-conservative Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma, which is currently all but dead. However, the agreement’s negotiation and Biden’s willingness to carry it out were models of how government should operate. That was supposed to be a historic victory for Republicans and a humiliation for a Democratic president who had to enrage his own coalition in order to quell a crisis that threatened his reelection after he was blamed for not acting quickly enough to address the chaos at the border. However, because it fell short of the extreme demands of Trump-supporting House extremists, who sought a total closure of the border and even the suspension of legal immigration, A deal that was more conservative than anything Congress enacted under Trump was killed by Johnson. The bill’s demise was hastened by the speaker’s declaration that it would be dead on arrival in his chamber, which told Republicans in the Senate there was no sense in forcing a difficult vote against Trump.
An impending catastrophe
Another risk ahead of the March 1 deadline for spending is the GOP House’s incapacity to pass legislation, which could result in a partial government shutdown. With a series of stopgap spending measures, the crisis has been repeatedly delayed, but it’s unlikely that the current House could pass the massive amount of legislation required to fully fund government agencies in just three weeks. And these are the fundamentals of government. It is not worth considering the ramifications in the event of a serious domestic or global crisis, like the financial crisis of 2008 or the events of 9/11. It’s possible that Mayorkas will eventually face impeachment, despite the fact that the move will be pointless given the Democratic-controlled Senate. Even though there were a few defections on Tuesday, Republicans expressed confidence that they would have the majority once Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who has been away for cancer treatment, returns. However, Tuesday’s confusion demonstrates that an extreme and exhibitionist-dominated House majority is not a workable majority. The party that took fifteen rounds of voting to elect California’s Kevin McCarthy as speaker when it first came to power in 2023, then dismissed him eight months later for attempting to prevent a government shutdown, is getting even more illogical.
His base for the 2024 campaign is his broad assertion that presidents are above the law, unlike any other American, and his fabrication that he won the 2020 election. The US Supreme Court, which is currently debating one of Trump’s cases regarding his eligibility to vote on Thursday, will probably become even more entangled in the contentious politics of this election year as a result of an appeals court decision that rejected his requests for immunity on Tuesday. However, tens of millions of Americans continue to support Trump as a legitimate presidential candidate, accepting his claims that he was duped out of office and that Biden has failed to ensure their safety by refusing to close the border, despite the president’s insistence that he lacks the authority to do so.
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