Will Bunch, Common Dreams

There's a chilling explanation for why the House went AWOL

A lot of language that never used to be part of America’s political discourse has come into vogue since Jan. 20. Like “Rubicon,” that ancient Roman river that’s come to symbolize a divide between democracy and dictatorship, and has been crossed more times lately than the Hudson on a busy Monday-morning rush hour.

Or this one: “Reichstag Fire.”

On Feb. 27, 1933, less than a month after Adolf Hitler was named Germany’s chancellor, an alleged arson fire destroyed much of the nation’s legislative building in Berlin, the Reichstag. A Dutch Communist was blamed for the blaze, which sparked the ruling Nazis to implement the Reichstag Fire Decree — expelling leftist lawmakers and sending political foes to newly created concentration camps. The now-Nazi-dominated Reichstag soon passed the Enabling Act giving dictatorial powers to Hitler, and so “Reichstag Fire” has come to symbolize a crisis — real or manufactured — used to justify tyrannical rule.

What’s interesting is that the Nazi regime never abolished the Reichstag. It continued to meet — rarely, and as a ceremonial rubber stamp — until Hitler died inside his bunker in 1945. That’s typical under strongman rule to this day. For example, Russia’s Duma continues to meet and pass laws — but only the ones that Vladimir Putin tells them to enact.

Is any of this starting to sound familiar?

In Washington, the House of Representatives has met for only 12 days over the last three months, even as the nation confronts a wave of crises either linked to, or overlapping with, the shutdown of the federal government that began when Congress couldn’t approve a budget bill by the Oct. 1 deadline. After passing its own dead-on-arrival spending plan on Sept. 19, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) — in a measured tone meant to mask the increasing insanity of what he’s saying — keeps find one excuse after another to shut down the branch once dubbed, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, as “the People’s House.”

The Louisiana Republican has insisted — without any historical precedent — that there’s no point in the House conducting business as long as the gridlocked Senate refuses to pass the lower chamber’s bill to keep the government open. Many cynics have honed in on an alternate explanation — that Johnson is using the shutdown as an excuse not to swear in Democratic Arizona Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva. She would be the 218th vote to force likely passage of a measure to open up the government’s files on the late millionaire sex-fiend Jeffrey Epstein, including its likely references to President Donald Trump.

The cynics are right. The resistance among Trump and his allies to any reopening of the Epstein case is surely a motivation for Johnson’s obstruction — but I also can’t help but wonder whether the flap over the Grijalva swearing in is also a cover for something that is much more deeply disturbing.

The virtual disappearance of the House for most of three months, and the nagging fears that the body isn’t returning anytime soon (or ... ever?) is looking more and more essential to the authoritarian project of a movement that pleaded for a “Red Caesar“ to crush ”woke“ liberalism with unchecked executive power.

For the Founders who mapped out the American Experiment here in Philadelphia in 1787, the House was central to their vision of what democracy looks like. The idea was based on smaller districts and every-two-years elections that would closely bond its members to the people. It was, in other words, supposed to be the antidote to Western civilization’s monarchy problem.

For Trump, the absence of a functional Congress — despite the need to keep the world’s largest military, essential services like air traffic control, and definitely not-essential services like a masked secret police force running through the shutdown — makes it easier for him to run the country by fiat.

This is not a completely new problem. Over the course of my lifetime, I’ve watched Congress grow from a body fiercely committed to its own power and independence — especially in the early 1970s when the House and Senate went after Richard Nixon’s crimes and passed a War Powers Act aimed at restraining future Vietnams — to only caring about the fate of their party, and its president.

These “lawmakers” aren’t troubled when Trump no longer rules by law but by executive order. I’m pretty sure there’s a word for a would-be strongman who rules by dictate.

“I’m the speaker and I’m the president,” Trump has reportedly said in private conversations, according to inside sources blabbing to the New York Times. And in the supposed speaker of the House, Trump has found the perfect vessel for his ambitions. Johnson — a soft-spoken true believer who acts like he just emerged from a Manchurian cave whenever he’s asked a question he doesn’t want to answer, which is pretty much all of them — seems to love the trappings and the attention of the job, even as he cedes all of the job’s actual power to the president.

This supposed budget impasse isn’t only preventing the House from opening up the Epstein can of worms, but from doing any real oversight of a president who seems to have two or three Nixonian Watergates every week, including his family’s shady crypto deals and even drone consulting work. And that 1973 Wars Powers Act? Trump and his “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth are blowing up boats and murdering persons unknown off the coasts of Latin America, and the castrati up on Capitol Hill are not going to do a gosh-darned thing about it.

With Congress sidelined, Trump — in an extreme flouting of the Constitution — is issuing dictates (that word again) on who’s not getting our tax dollars, including 40 million Americans who depend on food aid to feed their families, and who is. The latter category seems to include the over-the-top drive to recruit 10,000 new masked goons for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and — quite tellingly — supporting the troops.

Earlier this month, Trump announced that, unlike other federal employees, active-duty soldiers would get paid, at least for now, with $8 billion that the regime “found” by killing off research and development projects that had been authorized by Congress. Adding some icing on that cake, the president then claimed that an “anonymous” donor — quickly outed as right-wing billionaire Timothy Mellon — had donated another $130 million toward a few more hours of military paychecks.

It’s probably worth noting that both of these moves are almost certainly illegal — in blatant violation of the “antideficiency” laws that Congress has been passing since 1870 to prevent an administration from spending money without authorization. Trump is clearly banking on popular political support for the troops, but also the neutering of Congress, a Justice Department that works for him and not the citizenry, and a corrupt and compliant Supreme Court will all lead to nobody stopping him.

But what’s even scarier is that Trump surely hopes that by paying the troops, he is also buying their loyalty, which he will surely need as his abuses of power continue to mount. If you study tyrants beginning with Benito Mussolini and Hitler all the way through Putin, you know that strongman rule depends on many things, but especially a rubber-stamp legislature-in-name-only and a faithful military.

So, yes, the House’s endless summer is about Epstein, but it’s about more than Epstein. With Speaker Johnson in Trump’s back pocket, the touring ex-Talking Head David Byrne isn’t the only performer “Burning Down the House” this autumn.

This shock move has shown how regular folks can cripple Trump

It’s a well-worn cliche in the legal world that prosecutors have so much clout in the grand jury room that they could indict a ham sandwich. The currency of this quote only soared in value when the man who first uttered it, a New York State top judge named Sol Wachtler, was subsequently indicted himself.

And maybe the US Justice Department still could indict a ham sandwich. But a salami hoagie from Subway is apparently a bridge too far.

I am talking, of course, about the now notorious Washington, DC case against the man commonly known as “Sandwich Guy”—a now-former Justice Department paralegal (yes, the irony) named Sean Dunn whose anger at the federal surge of law-enforcement officers backed by National Guard troops in the nation’s capital boiled over last month. Dunn verbally quarreled with agents and called them “fascists” before hurling that infamous hoagie at a Customs and Border Protection officer and then getting chased down, with all of it captured on video.

To many in DC and around the country who think the Trump regime’s ostensibly crime-fighting military operation in Washington is a dictatorial overreach, “Sandwich Guy” quickly became a resistance icon, his action celebrated in pop-up posters plastered around Washington.

To Trump’s Justice Department, Dunn’s sub attack and its disrespect for the authority of an authoritarian regime demanded the full hammer of the law. Federal prosecutors went before the DC grand jury seeking a felony indictment against their ex-coworker—a stiff penalty for an attack with a soft roll.

But then something remarkable—or it least it used to be remarkable before January or so—took place. The DC grand jury returned “no bill,” meaning that a majority of the panel (typically between 16 and 23 people) who listened to the Justice Department’s case against Dunn voted against indicting him. Prosecutors later conceded the defeat and said they are instead charging Dunn with a misdemeanor.

We don’t know why the grand jurors rejected a felony charge against Dunn, but we do know that this kind of stand by a grand jury wasn’t an isolated incident. Days earlier, the Justice Department had sought felony charges against a DC woman named Sidney Lori Reid, accused with interfering with federal agents’ arrest of two alleged gang members. Prosecutors claimed Reid, while filming the bust, got in the way of agents and then fought back aggressively when an immigration agent pushed her against a wall, and that a/; Federal Bureau of Investigation agent suffered a hand bruise in the ensuing scuffle.

In this case, prosecutors tried not once but three separate times to secure a felony indictment of Reid—each time rebuffed by the grand jury—before finally settling on a misdemeanor charge instead. “The US attorney can try to concoct crimes to quiet the people, but in our criminal justice system, the citizens have the last word,” Reid’s two lawyers said in a statement.

We should be inspired by these grand jurors in DC and Los Angeles to get more creative in our own daily lives in resisting American autocracy.

OK, you can blame the “woke,” left-leaning citizens of DC—US President Donald Trump got just 6.5% of the vote there in 2024—except that something similar reportedly happened some 3,000 miles away in Los Angeles earlier this year. There, the US Attorney’s office initially sought felony charges against 38 people related to unrest over stepped-up federal immigration raids, but the Los Angeles Times reported that only seven of the criminal complaints resulted in indictments, with the rest ending in dismissals or misdemeanors. The paper said the US attorney, Bill Essayli, was caught screaming at his subordinates after one felony case collapsed.

To borrow what Stephen Stills wrote after youth riots on LA’s Sunset Strip in 1966, there’s something happening here...

But what it is, ain’t exactly clear. Grand jury proceedings are secret—so much so that even Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein at the height of their Watergate glory days struggled to lift that veil. In some of these cases, it’s possible—perhaps likely, given the inflated nature of some of the government’s allegations—that the jurors simply felt that the feds lacked evidence to make their case.

Or, it’s also possible that these everyday citizens engaged in a highly unique form of protest that a law professor might call “jury nullification.” This is essentially when a jury elects to clear a defendant not because of a lack of evidence that they did what the government accused them of doing, but because they believed the underlying law is unjust, or that the entire system is thoroughly corrupted.

As Paul Butler, Georgetown University law professor and now frequent MSNBC commentator, argued in a 2016 Washington Post op-ed, the notion of a jury nullification in America carries a rich history that includes the American Revolution, the Fugitive Slave Act, and the movement for LGBTQ rights. Citing aggressive prosecutions of Black Americans for minor offenses, Butler wrote then: “I encourage any juror who thinks the police or prosecutors have crossed the line in a particular case to refuse to convict.”

Nine years later, in jurisdictions that voted heavily against Trump in 2024—and which face armed troops and masked, unbadged federal agents in 2025—jurors seems to be engaged in a quiet, behind-closed-doors revolution against the regime.

Think about this. The right to justice by a jury of your peers—everyday citizens from your own community—is in essence the foundational building block of what over centuries would slowly become democracy. Britain’s Magna Carta—written in 1215 (!)—codified this notion as a defense against its overbearing lords more than 800 years ago, and the idea proved so powerful it has managed to survive the creation of our large institutions that provide Big Government but too often seem removed from the people.

The Trump regime’s push for an authoritarian United States might be the biggest story right now, but rivaling that is the growing gap between our cowardly and failing big institutions—Congress, the Supreme Court, Big Media, university administrations, etc., etc.—and the wisdom of regular folks.

For sure, there’s an unshakable cult of Trump supporters, but one of the many underreported stories of 2025 is the lingering faith in democratic ideals, fairness, equity, and diversity that still holds with the majority of the American people—despite everything that’s happened. We’ve seen it in Trump’s sky-high disapproval rating, and the public rejection of individual policies, and in protests like June’s “No Kings” event that brought a record-setting 5 million folks into the streets.

Yet feckless opposition from Beltway Democrats and an increasingly compromised news media also has the masses realizing they are on their own, still in search of workable outlets to challenge an increasingly repressive regime. Protests can be ignored or put down, while economic boycotts are promising but hard to organize. It’s the jury system, with eight centuries of tradition behind it, that has given the American people a last-chance outlet to say “no” to fascism.

We should be inspired by these grand jurors in DC and Los Angeles to get more creative in our own daily lives in resisting American autocracy. That would be a modern-day miracle, turning a loaf and some salami slices into a feast of democratic resistance.