Speaker Johnson’s Gambit – Governing by Crisis

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a man blessed with the extraordinary gift of managing expectations by lowering them, has just pulled a six-month stopgap spending bill from the floor. The bill was laden with a provision requiring voter ID for federal elections, something that Republicans believe will excite their base and, as usual, further alienate everyone else.

Let us be clear: the stopgap measure, aside from the voter ID provision, never had a prayer of becoming law. Opposition from Democrats was a given. The tepid response from many Republican senators was predictable. And, of course, the Biden administration lobbed the obligatory veto threat. Yet, the real mystery isn’t why this proposal collapsed but rather why it was even put forward in such a chaotic and unserious manner.

Johnson, ever the pragmatist cloaked in ideological righteousness, frames this debacle as a pause for “thoughtful conversations” and “family discussions.” The reality, however, is that his GOP family is as dysfunctional as a holiday dinner with all the political grievances on full display. This legislation, despite its ambitions, was less a serious attempt at governance and more a desperate attempt to flex conservative muscle during an election season where immigration and identity politics are once again front and center.

The Speaker insists that Congress faces “two primary obligations”: funding the government and ensuring that only U.S. citizens vote in U.S. elections. While this rhetoric is bound to garner applause from certain quarters of the GOP, it is hard to ignore the obvious: requiring voter ID is already illegal in many states, and the notion that non-citizens are swarming polling stations is a paranoid delusion untethered from reality. Johnson’s sudden embrace of this issue, rather than focusing solely on the more pressing matter of avoiding a government shutdown, is an exercise in distraction.

One might ask: What, exactly, is the rationale behind attaching voter ID legislation to a government funding bill? Johnson claims it’s about “ensuring the integrity” of elections, though he offers no evidence of widespread fraud. Perhaps he is taking a page from Donald Trump’s playbook – a man who once declared, with Orwellian flair, that any election in which he does not prevail must have been rigged. And, lo and behold, Trump himself chimed in on this debate from his social media pulpit, urging Republicans to reject any stopgap measure that doesn’t include the voter ID provision. The party, yet again, is caught in Trump’s gravitational pull, a vortex of performative governance.

Of course, this is about more than just voter ID laws. It is about setting the stage for a government shutdown – a spectacle that Washington has tragically perfected over the last few decades. The modern Republican Party, obsessed with small government in theory but inept at managing it in practice, has become expert at manufacturing crises to serve political ends. The looming shutdown is not just a matter of fiscal irresponsibility; it is a tool used to ratchet up tensions, rally the base, and vilify Democrats who, according to the GOP script, oppose even the most “common-sense” measures like voter ID requirements.

Yet, this entire strategy reveals something far more troubling about the state of American politics. When governing becomes synonymous with crisis management, when leaders prioritize political theater over legislative responsibility, and when voters are conditioned to see gridlock as the norm, democracy itself begins to erode. The danger is not just a lack of competence; it is the normalization of dysfunction.

Consider Johnson’s plaintive cry: “I want any member of Congress, in either party, to explain to the American people why we should not ensure that only U.S. citizens are voting in U.S. elections.” It is a compelling soundbite, but it evades the larger truth: there is no credible evidence that non-citizens are voting in significant numbers. Instead, Johnson is creating a solution in search of a problem, one designed to pander to the grievances of his party’s base while distracting from the more urgent task of governing.

And what of the Democrats? They, too, are not without blame. Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro’s call for bipartisan negotiation is commendable in principle but hopelessly idealistic in practice. The current Congress is not a venue for good-faith negotiation but rather a battleground for political posturing. Any hope of compromise on a stopgap spending measure is unlikely when one side is more interested in sowing chaos than in finding common ground.

So, here we stand, with a government on the brink of shutdown, a spending bill discarded, and a Speaker who promises more “family conversations” as though his caucus were one heartfelt discussion away from unity. The Republican Party, in its zeal to appease a certain former president and his most ardent supporters, has chosen to elevate voter ID laws to the status of existential crisis. Meanwhile, the real crisis – a government teetering on the edge of insolvency – looms ever closer.

If Mike Johnson’s brief tenure as Speaker is any indication of his leadership style, we should brace ourselves for more of the same: governance by crisis, legislation by spectacle, and politics by distraction. And as the government lurches toward yet another shutdown, one cannot help but wonder: Is this really the best we can do?