Who’s really running the Republican House now? It’s not who you think.
Now that Mike Johnson has become Speaker of the House through one of the most comically inept processes in the history of politics, the mainstream media and pundit class is already trotting out the usual narratives about how this was the Republicans’ strategy all along, and they got exactly what they wanted, and now they’re in a position of real power. This kind of thing is almost never true, but it scares audiences enough to keep them tuned in.
Back in the real world, it’s plainly obvious that no one got what they wanted out of this. 93% of House Republicans voted against ousting Kevin McCarthy to begin with, because they thought he was their best shot at carrying out their party’s agenda. So they certainly didn’t get what they wanted. Donald Trump and Matt Gaetz wanted Jim Jordan to be Speaker, because Jordan is influential and is willing to do brazenly extremist things. But they didn’t get him either.
Instead House Republicans ended up settling for Mike Johnson, a powerless nobody, specifically because he’s a powerless nobody. Of course now we’re already heading media narratives about how Johnson is dangerously powerful, because the media knows that if it portrays Johnson as dangerously powerful, people will be scared enough to stay glued to their screens. But in reality the various House Republican factions each know that Johnson won’t have any ability to stand up to any of them, and so they’re each hoping to grind him down in the hope of getting their own way.
So who’s really in charge of the Republican House now? It’s certainly not Mike Johnson, who has very little influence over his colleagues. He’ll be on the defensive the entire time, as his fellow Republicans each try to push him in a different direction. And that’s before the media starts eating him alive over all the extremist positions he’s staked himself to over the years.
And since Mike Johnson has no power, it’s fair to say that the likes of Trump and Gaetz will have no power either. Again, they firmly wanted Jim Jordan, not Johnson. They settled for Johnson, after their plan to install Jordan failed. Johnson will be way too powerless to be of much use to them, even though he does share their extremist leanings.
Instead, in reality the Republican House will be run by the committee chairs. Each House committee is its own little fiefdom, and each committee chair is essentially a prince. In this analogy the Speaker of the House is the king. But with a powerless weakling now on the proverbial throne, there’s no one and nothing to stop the committee chairs from each doing whatever they feel like doing, within the purview of their own committee.
Mike Johnson says he doesn’t want to expel George Santos, but New York area House Republicans are pushing ahead with expulsion proceedings anyway. So the House Ethics Committee, which can choose to release a well timed report about Santos’ conduct (or choose not to), has the real influence there. Mike Johnson says he’s in favor of sham Biden impeachment hearings, but House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer now says that he wants to move on from impeachment hype.
In other words we’re already seeing that Mike Johnson can take whatever position he wants on any given issue, but the committee chairs are just going to bowl him over and do whatever they want instead. That’s because the committee chairs are people who have been at this for a long time and have real influence and have a sense of how things work, and well, Mike Johnson is Mike Johnson.
So the committee chairs are collectively running the Republican House. Not Johnson. Not Trump. Not Gaetz. Not any of the names that’ll get tossed around by the media. It’s the committee chairs who are calling the shots now. And that won’t go particularly well for them, because it means they’ll each be constantly fighting each other for more power. But that’s what happens when you oust your own experienced leader, who could barely control the fiefdoms to begin with, and replace him with someone who got the job specifically because he doesn’t have the skills to do the job.
