Is Mike Johnson rendering the House ‘irrelevant’?

The government is shut down and so, apparently, is the House of Representatives. Speaker Mike Johnson has kept the House on an indefinite hiatus over the last month. That decision has halted the work of passing bills and doing oversight, while also blocking the swearing-in of a new Democratic representative.

Johnson’s decision has “diminished the role of Congress and shrunken the speakership” at a moment when President Donald Trump is claiming more power for himself, said Annie Karni at The New York Times. Johnson has “chosen to make himself subservient to Mr. Trump” instead of a “governing partner” as speakers before him have been. The president is taking notice. “I’m the speaker and the president,” Trump reportedly said to associates. That has created a “strange dynamic” in which Johnson seems to have used his “considerable power” to “render the House irrelevant.”

Shifting the balance of power

Johnson is “ostensibly” making the point that the House has “done its job and voted to fund the government,” said Leigh Ann Caldwell at Puck. It is Senate Democrats who are blocking the passage of a continuing resolution to end the government shutdown, after all. But his decision is also “inadvertently reducing the legislature’s own authority,” while Trump “seizes de facto spending and taxation powers” that constitutionally belong to Congress. Johnson’s deference to the president is accordingly “shifting the balance of power in a way that has not been seen since the Nixon administration.”

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The House was “central” to the Founders’ vision of “what democracy looks like,” Will Bunch said at The Philadelphia Inquirer. Small districts and biennial elections were intended to “closely bond its members to the people” and be an “antidote to Western civilization’s monarchy problem.” Now the “absence of a functional Congress” is allowing Trump to “run the country by fiat.” Johnson may lead the House, but he is ceding “all of the job’s actual power to the president.”

House Republicans largely agree with Johnson’s tactics, said NOTUS. “What would we be doing?” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.). The battle over the shutdown is being waged in the Senate. Most House members would say they should come back when “we’ve got something to vote on,” Cole said. At the moment “we really don’t.” But “cracks are growing” in the GOP caucus, said Axios. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Dan Crenshaw of Texas, among others, have “raised concerns about being on recess during the shutdown.”

Deepening suspicions

It is difficult for Johnson to argue that he is “serious about swiftly reopening the government” when he will not call the House into session, James Downie said at MSNBC. Another side effect: Johnson has used the House hiatus to delay the swearing-in of Democratic Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva of Arizona. Grijalva has said she would be the 218th signature on a House discharge petition to force the release of the government’s files on Jeffrey Epstein. The delay in swearing in Grijalva “only deepens suspicions that the White House is hiding something” in the Epstein case.