Speaker Johnson vows to protect the president sinking him: opinion

MS NOW analyst Steve Benen says House Speaker Mike Johnson dropped an unexpectedly corruption-friendly reason for protecting the House’s GOP majority against its near inevitable collapse in the November midterms.

“If we lose the midterms, these 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,” Johnson said — and then added out loud that “I run the protection program. We’ll take care of you.”

In the final two years of Joe Biden’s presidency, there was a Republican Congress and a Democratic president, said Benen, and Republicans “put aside any legislative ambitions and spent 2023 and 2024 … investigating all sorts of perceived controversies related to the Democratic administration.”

But after President Donald Trump returned to the White House, the GOP-led Congress completely switched gears and clanked the Congressional vehicle into protection mode.

“This time, lawmakers also abandoned their oversight responsibilities to an almost cartoonish degree, pretending not to notice any of the incumbent president’s many abuses and scandals,” said Benen.

In fact, Congressional Republicans have done so little oversight, The Washington Post reported last month, that the White House Counsel’s Office, expecting Democrats to reclaim a majority in at least one chamber, recently began “giving private briefings to the administration’s political appointees on how to best prepare for congressional oversight,” said Benen.

That same article added that the roughly 30-minute briefings have included “a PowerPoint presentation about how congressional oversight works and best practices for handling it.”

Regarding his statement, Benen notes the GOP leader did not appear to be reading from a prepared text. He was just shocking shooting GOP intent from the hip before a live audience.

“What was on his mind was a near future in which a possible House Republican majority spends 2027 and 2028 shielding the president, his team and their allies from the kind of scrutiny that Congress has a responsibility to do as a matter of course,” said Benen.

“This isn’t altogether surprising,” he added, “given everything we’ve seen from Capitol Hill over the past year and a half, but it was nevertheless remarkable to hear a sitting House speaker declare, out loud and in public, that he wants and expects to run a ‘protection program’ — a phrase more commonly associated with organized crime — on behalf of the White House.”

Republicans have already been using their majority to shield the president from the fallout of the Epstein files, with Kentucky Republican and House Oversight Chair James Comer being accused of using "a new strategy" to "contain" the ability of lawmakers to issue subpoenas against "high-profile figures in the Jeffrey Epstein investigation."

Before that, Republicans used their majority to stall the passage of a new law making the Trump administration’s release of the files legally mandatory. And after failing in that effort, Trump himself targeted Republicans who favored the release for ousting in GOP primaries.

The GOP’s labor to protect Trump from incrimination is well noted, but Benen said “usually, GOP leaders are a bit more subtle about their anti-oversight posturing.”

Johnson’s protective oath sounds odd considering how hard Trump appears to be working to get the Republican majority removed from Congress, however. Trump’s polling is at historic lows, and his recent effort to blowup a hugely popular housing bill in the Senate is souring voters to both the administration and his party.

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