This week’s chaos in the House shows us what a second Trump term would look like
The 118th Congress will end not with a bang but a continuing resolution, just like it always has. Tonight, the House of Representatives will vote on a clean stopgap spending bill to keep the government open until after the election.
That will allow the House to, once again, avoid a government shutdown. And just like in every other time this past Congress, Democrats will bail out House Speaker Mike Johnson because extremists in his conference will say “Hell no.”
Just like other times, they will suspend the rules to pass the legislation, meaning it will not have to go through the Rules Committee because Johnson acknowledges that the far-right members of his conference would block it. That means the bill will go directly to the floor and only be able to pass with two-thirds of the vote.
Then, the Senate will vote on it and that will be that. And the House will be at the same place it was last year, when Republicans were on the brink of shutting down the government because then-House speaker Kevin McCarthy faced a mutiny from the far-right of his conference.
Lest we forget how it all played out back then: Matt Gaetz filed a motion to vacate McCarthy from the chair, which sent the House into chaos for three weeks. That chaos included Jim Jordan losing three votes on the House floor, George Santos pilfering someone’s baby, and Johnson ending up as the unexpected yet unanimous GOP choice.
But aside from all the humor and absurdity that has come with the Mojo Dojo Casa House of Representatives, this also offers a preview of what Washington under a second Trump presidency would look like. When a handful of extremists can completely reorient the government to its will and take government to the brink, here’s what you get.
Johnson has proven to be a somewhat more deft speaker than Washington might have expected and, in fact, much more adept at handling the far right than McCarthy was. While earlier this year I called him a coward for not supporting Ukraine for fear of losing his job, he ultimately did put a bill to support Ukraine to the floor and, to boot, he relegated Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene to irrelevance, at least for this conference, after her motion to vacate failed.
Tonight’s vote on a continuing resolution will not include provisions to ban undocumented immigrants from voting — which is already illegal — despite the fact Trump had called for a shutdown if these provisions did not pass. But make no mistake, Johnson’s a Trump guy through and through. He even showed up to Trump’s trial in New York City just a few months ago. He’s not passing this resolution out of any sense of duty to the country — he just recognizes that causing a shutdown 41 days out from an election is the worst thing he could do for his most endangered members.
Nobody should forget that Johnson led the legal efforts to overturn the election results in 2020. And on Tuesday, when he was asked whether he would observe regular order if Kamala Harris wins in November, he said, “If we have a free, fair, and safe election, we're gonna follow the Constitution, absolutely.”
Of course, Johnson himself would be the one to determine if the election was free, fair and safe as speaker at the beginning of the next Congress if Republicans keep the House, and would call Congress into session at the beginning of the next Congress if Democrats win the majority to begin the handoff process.
While Republicans can somewhat brush off Trump when he’s the nominee, he could easily veto continuing resolutions or spending bills if he is president and chooses to force the topic. That’s something that Republicans are already thinking about.
“I think, with the dysfunction in the house, that anybody's agenda is going to have a tough time getting through,” Representative Garret Graves of Louisiana, who is retiring, told The Independent. “This place has become more reality TV than actually serving the public in [terms of] functionalities.”
Graves helped negotiate the bipartisan debt limit negotiations bill with the White House, which should have been a high point. But conservatives like Chip Roy of Texas rejected the bill and Republican leadership had to rely on Democrats to pass it.
Now, Roy says he isn’t as concerned.
“We learned a lot this Congress about things we could do,” he told The Independent. “We've learned some things that don't always work. So we're gonna figure out how to get ourselves unified.”
Roy spent much of the beginning of this Congress blocking McCarthy from becoming speaker and then blocked Steve Scalise from becoming the same. His words are akin to an arsonist burning a building and then asking the tenants to bring buckets of water.
Tim Burchett of Tennessee, who initially went from being an ally of McCarthy to voting to torpedo him in an intensely personal feud, said he was not worried.
“I think we’ll be in better shape, I think we'll have a larger majority, and the speaker will be able to work with that a lot easier,” he told The Independent. Despite his strident conservatism, Burchett remains close friends with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who said Republicans will acquiesce to Trump.
“I mean, they bend the knee to Trump now,” she told The Independent.
The 118th Congress was incredibly silly, often exasperating and always a spectacle. It’s easy to laugh at some of the sideshow that was the chaos. But it’s also incredibly instructive. If Republicans win a trifecta this November, it will give Trump incredible amounts of leverage. And right-wingers who are otherwise a nuisance will have an ally in the White House who could always go running home to daddy when the teacher Mike Johnson does something they don’t like.
The House GOP indeed currently may be farce. But it could come back as a tragedy.