This special Saturday edition of PN is made possible by paid subscribers. Become one ⬇️
Mike Johnson, the theoretical speaker of the House, announced last Thursday he’s canceling votes for the last two weeks of September. This leaves just four days of legislative business before the midterms.
His spin is that House Republicans are now free to campaign in their districts, where they can boast to voters about how little they’ve done to address the harm President Trump has inflicted on the nation. This might seem a strange choice: Although Trump and his MAGA goons have openly tried to rig the upcoming midterms, particularly through racial gerrymanders, Democrats are still favored to win back the House. That means Johnson’s tenure as speaker is likely all over but the crying, and he’ll have little to show for it beyond a Wikipedia entry.
That reality hasn’t stopped Johnson from shamelessly lying about his record. He told Fox News last December, “We’ve had one of the most productive Congresses in the history of the institution.” He repeated this wish-casting nonsense in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, ludicrously claiming 2025 was “one of the most productive first years of any Congress in our lifetimes.”
But Johnson isn’t closing the store early for a legislative victory lap. He’s trying to avoid a vote on the Epstein Transparency Act II, which would permit Epstein’s victims, state attorneys general, and members of Congress to sue the Justice Department for failing to disclose documents as required under last year’s original Epstein Transparency Act.
Republican Rep. Thomas Massie has started collecting signatures for a discharge petition that would bypass the speaker and force a vote on the floor. When Massie suggested Johnson might end the House session early to avoid the vote, Johnson mocked the accusation as “stupid” and “nonsensical.” Now, he’s running scared.
This latest showcase of the speaker’s fecklessness leads to an obvious conclusion: Johnson struggles at the basic blocking and tackling of his job.
He constantly loses votes he shouldn’t. Even a performative resolution denouncing socialism and supporting the SAVE America Act almost failed to get to the floor because of internal party squabbling. It was salvaged only because moderate Democratic Reps. Jared Golden and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez crossed party lines and voted with Republicans to pass the necessary procedural rule to start debate.
Johnson has a slim majority, yes, but he lacks former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s skill at keeping members in line. The recent defection of the Democratic moderates was a rare lapse for Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who mostly keeps his diverse caucus unified, whereas Johnson frequently endures public humiliation. He’s set a record for the number of rules vote failures, and he’s been forced to pull legislation from the floor once it was clear he lacked the votes. (Pelosi has mocked his apparent weak command of his members.)
There’s another unfortunate record that Johnson has set: Since 2023, the number of successful discharge petitions that brought bills to the floor over the speaker’s objections have matched those passed over the past four decades.
It’s said that the speaker’s job is “like herding cats,” but Johnson just lets the more feral members run wild. Meanwhile, he’s completely surrendered the House’s constitutional role as a co-equal branch of government, and when the pressures mount, his solution is usually to flee the premises.
The Article 1 crisis
Republicans have held a trifecta in government for nearly two years, yet they’ve accomplished little legislatively, aside from the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which is so unpopular that Democrats talk about it now more than Republicans do.
This do-nothing Congress is not a surprise, considering Trump is interested solely in enriching himself, maintaining power, pursuing personal vendettas, and transforming the White House into a gaudy designer imposter Taj Mahal. Last year, only 38 bills became law, compared to 76 in 2021 and 74 in 2017. It makes for an embarrassing contrast to what Pelosi achieved as speaker under President Biden with a similarly thin majority.
Former House Speaker Paul Ryan often spoke about Trump as a means to an end, a knowing deal with the devil, to advance his own agenda, as former Senate leader Mitch McConnell did with the federal judiciary. Defending their working relationship during a 2018 interview, Ryan said, “[Trump] gave us the ability to get historic things in law that we’ve been trying to get for a generation.”
Conversely, Johnson doesn’t seem to have any specific agenda beyond serving Trump’s interests. Trump himself has boasted that he’s effectively “the speaker and the president.” If Todd Blanche has reduced the attorney general position to Trump’s personal lawyer, Johnson has transformed the speakership into Trump’s personal hype man and lap dog.
For instance, in January, Johnson echoed Trump’s complaints about not winning the Nobel Prize and laughably suggested this likely war criminal was “probably the most deserving individual in the history of the prize.” Sorry, Dr. King!
Then in March, weeks into Trump’s botched Iran war, Johnson presented Trump with an ego-soothing and entirely made up “America First” award at a National Republican Congressional Committee fundraiser. It was a golden eagle-styled participation trophy for a president with an underwater approval rating.
“The president has done so much for the American people and we want to honor him, in some small way [with] some token of our appreciation for his leadership,” Johnson said, while claiming America was in a “new golden era.”
This all makes Johnson seem less like speaker of the House and more like the mad king’s fool.
“Your obedient servant”
There was a revealing moment last year when Democratic Rep. Madeleine Dean confronted Johnson about Trump’s deranged speech to military officials where he vowed to deploy the armed forces against American cities.
"The president is mentally unwell,” Dean said. “He's not okay."
“A lot of folks on your side are too,” Johnson replied. “I don’t control him.”
The entire exchange was caught on a hot mic, which might explain the rare candor from Johnson. He doesn’t “control” Trump, but he doesn’t even try.
Ryan privately and on occasion publicly disagreed with Trump. He stated that Trump’s proposal to end birthright citizenship through executive order was “unconstitutional.” Johnson, on the other hand, has embraced Trump’s push to curtail birthright citizenship. Ryan dismissed Trump’s paranoid delusion that Obama had “spied” in his 2016 campaign, and he said that Trump “obviously shouldn’t” pardon himself. But Johnson refused to even “second-guess” Trump’s decision to pardon January 6 criminals.
Johnson is so slavishly devoted to Trump, you might as well call him “Igor.”
It’s become a sad running joke that Johnson feigns ignorance of common news events so he can avoid commenting on Trump’s latest offense. He usually claims he’s too busy and important to possess even a passing awareness of the president’s actions and public statements. His actual legislative record makes this defense especially absurd.
Well before Trump slithered back into the Oval Office, Johnson allowed the House of Representatives to become a vestigial appendage, submissive entirely to the will of a criminal defendant.
Johnson blocked a bipartisan immigration and border security bill so Trump could run against President Biden on the issue. Instead, he promoted MAGA-driven legislation to stop illegal immigrants from voting, which is already against the law. During Trump’s criminal hush money trial, Johnson — a constitutional lawyer — traveled to New York City to defend Trump as an innocent victim of Democratic “lawfare” and condemn the entire prosecution as an “atrocity” and a “travesty of justice.” When Trump was found guilty, Johnson “didn’t really need to be convinced” to use all the powers of his office to somehow help Trump overturn his conviction.
Johnson continues to use his speakership to protect Trump from accountability. He delayed swearing in Democratic Rep. Adelita Grijalva for seven weeks after she won her September 2025 special election. This was a transparent move to prevent Grijalva from providing the 218th signature needed on a discharge petition to force a House vote on releasing the Epstein files. Now, he’s about to send everyone home to avoid another Epstein vote, all on Trump’s behalf.
Even Johnson’s midterm elections pitch shows no interest in improving Americans’ lives. Instead, he’s dead set on shielding Trump and his cronies from justice. He told an audience of Christian conservatives at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in June that if Republicans lose the midterms, “Democrats will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body, and they’ll go after the president’s family, the cabinet, his donors, friends, half of you in this room will be targeted. I run the protection program. We’ll take care of you.”
There have been placeholder speakers in the past who accomplished little and were quickly forgotten, but while serving as a smiling sock puppet for MAGA fascism, Johnson has ensured a permanent but disgraceful place in history.
That’s it for this week
We’ll be back with more Monday. If you appreciate today’s free special edition of PN, please do your part to keep us free by signing up for a paid subscription.
Thanks for reading.
Has anyone noticed the similarity of Pious Mike and Edgar Bergen’s Charlie McCarthy?
The sausage making prevents any legislator from voicing such a succinct and damning recounting of the perfidy and shallowness of Johnson and by association the entire Republican party. If things are to change, we need fighters and truth-tellers. How bad does it have to get before we get more Ossoffs ? Fighting by other means requires more of those who welcome the hatred of the christo-fascists.