Mike Johnson Is Screwed Now That The Government Is Open

Credit: Gage Skidmore | gageskidmore.com | via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The government shutdown has been hilarious in an absurd way. Republicans worked tirelessly in the 2024 election to win an incredibly rare governmental trifecta with majority control of BOTH chambers of Congress for a brief two-year window before Democrats probably take back the House… and Republicans are just chilling passing virtually no legislation and sitting on their hands doing nothing for months.
Does Mike Johnson have any self-respect at all? Is he not concerned about his existential legacy at all? He has been elevated improbably — miraculously even — to the third most powerful position in the most powerful nation in the history of the Earth, and he’s doing so little with that power to shape and mold the country and world in the direction he wants. He is utterly a Trump stooge.
And the reason for his end of the shutdown stalemate has been to avoid seating a lawfully elected colleague member of the House long enough in order for either Trump to threaten one of the GOP signers of the Epstein Files discharge petition to back out, or to wait long enough for the upcoming December special election in Tennessee to give the GOP one extra vote to change the math and block the discharge petition so Congress can continue obstructing justice protecting an infamous ring of pedophile rapists from legal liability!
Johnson is right now drafting a Wikipedia page for himself that everyone for the rest of eternity will be able to look him up and see that he was a submissive, doormat beta cuck who wasted the opportunity of a lifetime and a political coalition years in the making quivering in fear of a low energy, unpopular, 79-year-old pedophile rapist president who looks more every day like he’s gonna stroke out within the next six months.
I understand upon Johnson’s ascension to the Speakership he agreed to a ridiculous hostage-esque set of rules where he can easily be voted out as Speaker like Kevin McCarthy if Trump posts one “Truth” demanding Republicans turn on him, but, personally, I wouldn’t find it worth it staying in the job just to be the guy who goes down in history inextricably linked to Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking. And I’m not even a guy who’s terrified of being judged by God and spending eternity in hell like Johnson is!
Hillary Clinton’s gaffe about a large portion of Trump voters being irredeemably deplorable was unfair (and of course a giant, unforced electoral error), but I’ll go on record agreeing that a vast majority of House Republicans are irredeemably deplorable. The only four Republicans who have voted to hold Epstein’s co-conspirators accountable are **chokes on my vomit** Lauren Boebert, Nancy Mace, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Thomas Massie. On this one issue, they are truly heroes of civic virtue.**projectile vomits all over my laptop**
I mean — don’t get me wrong — I’m ecstatic that Republicans are doing nothing of substance to further fuck our country, but wow is Mike Johnson conducting a masterclass in pathetic political insignificance and cowardice. If I was a Republican voter, I’d be LIVID that Republicans are wasting so much time not using the fleeting bit of power I helped them obtain. As such, a silver lining in the GOP’s Project 2025 agenda is that most of it is being conducted via executive orders because they have such a Do Nothing Congressional majority, which means Project 2025 can largely be reversed with a Democratic president’s signature just as easily as Trump signed it.
I’m sick of conservatives bitching every time they see or hear about someone on food stamps buying a soda, or a bag of chips, or a steak. Especially because so much of this commentary comes from people who call themselves Christian. Why are poor people’s grocery store purchases so micromanaged when we have countless corporations that make record profits but manipulate their accounting books to show they lost money, and the CEOs do their taxes to pay a lower marginal rate than their secretaries?
How about instead of auditing some poor person’s $2 Mountain Dew, we audit Donald Trump, who in 2016 when he first won the presidency claiming to be a billionaire, paid literally only $750 in federal income taxes after years of paying none at all. How about we reconsider the tax subsidies that oil companies making record-breaking profits soiling our planet continue to get as if it’s 1915 and they’re a brand new baby industry that needs some help getting off the ground? How about we figure out why all the military contractors’ spending is so opaque the military literally can’t audit itself? …But, yeah, a poor person buying a steak to celebrate his birthday, or a holiday family gathering, or mind-your-own-business is why this country is fiscally unsound.
Speaking of government handouts, federal welfare disproportionately goes to Republican dominated states and districts because blue states do much, much more at the state level to raise their residents’ standards of living. Red states are disproportionately the taker/handout states, but Republicans constantly bitch about their own constituents getting fed.
The Founding Fathers would absolutely detest Trump’s occupation of American cities with National Guard troops intimidating citizens under the made up rationale of stopping crime. I don’t agree with the purely Originalist interpretation of the Constitution that Congressional and Supreme Court Republicans never shut up about, but for quite some time early in our history many in Congress thought it was unConstitutional to have any standing army at all in times of peace because they believed it would lead to *ahem* executive branch tyranny. Which is why the Founders were so amped about the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms: they wanted well-regulated state militias full of prepared citizens to be able to organize into a national army in the event of an external threat or war. Not stand around picking up trash — or doing nothing — in the safe, touristy parts of Chicago, Portland, and LA to fuck with mayors and governors the president doesn’t like and make himself look tough. But, because we now have a full-time, professional military, the Second Amendment’s originalist intent is kind of moot.
I think it’s funny that Trump keeps a printed out list of the wars he has allegedly ended in his suit jacket during interviews and press events because even though his negotiations were so historic and such extraordinary examples of his peerless genius and tireless work ethic, he can’t remember them all and gets them laughably mixed up geographically.
Conservative Evangelicals in America have just fundamentally lost the thread of the entire point of their religion. The bastardized version of personalized Sola Fide that Republican-leaning Christians largely promote today in which, because the Earth is fallen and full of sin, the only thing that truly matters is your PERSONAL relationship with God and Jesus, and whether you PERSONALLY are going to Heaven independent of everyone else. In recent decades this has morphed into a weird, extremely capitalistic excuse for many Republican Christians to not concern themselves too much about the truly radical, communist-esque welfare that Jesus and the Disciples stressed in which you were literally not supposed to have ANY wealth surplus at all that you weren’t ACTIVELY sharing via salvation-through-works with those around you because the literal, material kingdom of Heaven would be imminently arriving any day now, ON EARTH, in which, in this material plane of existence, all the bodies of the dead would be literally reanimated and rise from the ground to join the still-living. Paul mostly by himself invented the ideas that would inspire justification-through-faith-alone, and frankly I don’t care much about Paul. Biblical scholars are pretty convinced many of Paul’s letters in the New Testament were not actually written by him.
I have to imagine that if the Roman emperor had asked Jesus if he thought the Roman government should institute a welfare program to give out food stamps to the poor, Jesus wouldn’t tell Caesar that the poor are lazy and should get jobs or go fuck themselves, and that the Roman government’s money would be better spent giving rich Romans tax breaks and exemptions on their private chariots. 🥃

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