House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) bucked his Senate GOP colleagues last week after openly rejecting a proposal to fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and in doing so, may have handed Democrats what they need to secure a decisive victory in the upcoming midterm elections, an analysis from The Washington Post found Monday.
Last week, the Senate unanimously approved a bill to fund all agencies under DHS other than Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), handing House lawmakers an opportunity to give the bill final passage and end the ongoing partial government shutdown that has sparked chaos and long lines at airports nationwide.
However, Johnson rejected that deal out of hand, and instead, put forward an alternative bill to fund DHS, and without cutting ICE and CBP out of the picture.
“That is why this moment is so important: Republicans in the House are now actively bucking every member of their party in the Senate who agreed to go along with the Senate bill, which passed unanimously, giving Democrats a significantly larger cudgel to use in blaming them for the shutdown,” the Post’s analysis reads.
The “pretzel” Johnson found himself “twisted into,” the Post found, was acknowledged by some Republican commentators, including Ari Fleischer, a GOP operative and former White House press secretary.
“They are trying to get everything they want,” Fleischer said on Fox News recently, the Post reported. “If they block this, Republicans in the House now are going to be the ones who own the blame for [Transportation Security Administration] workers and the delays at the airports.”
As to why Johnson would put himself in such a precarious position, the Post suggested that the “clearest answer was to save his own job.”
“The House Freedom Caucus, the most far-right wing of Republicans in the chamber, was in outright revolt and would never have gone along with it in the first place,” the Post’s analysis reads.
“To pass the Senate deal, Johnson would likely have had to ask Democrats for help — something the party’s leaders indicated they would have given if asked. But asking Democrats for help to pass a stopgap funding bill is what cost former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy his job. And it is crystal clear that Johnson doesn’t want to add former to his title.”