Burning down the House
By 
Mike Johnson’s decision to prorogue himself in part to protect King Donald from damaging revelations by refusing to seat a duly elected representative should be getting more attention:
On Feb. 27, 1933, less than a month after Adolf Hitler was named Germany’s chancellor, an alleged arson fire destroyed much of the nation’s legislative building in Berlin, the Reichstag. A Dutch Communist was blamed for the blaze, which sparked the ruling Nazis to implement the Reichstag Fire Decree — expelling leftist lawmakers and sending political foes to newly created concentration camps. The now-Nazi-dominated Reichstag soon passed the Enabling Act giving dictatorial powers to Hitler, and so “Reichstag Fire” has come to symbolize a crisis — real or manufactured — used to justify tyrannical rule.
What’s interesting is that the Nazi regime never abolished the Reichstag. It continued to meet — rarely, and as a ceremonial rubber stamp — until Hitler died inside his bunker in 1945. That’s typical under strongman rule to this day. For example, Russia’s Duma continues to meet and pass laws — but only the ones that Vladimir Putin tells them to enact.
Is any of this starting to sound familiar?
In Washington, the House of Representatives has met for only 12 days over the last three months, even as the nation confronts a wave of crises either linked to, or overlapping with, the shutdown of the federal government that began when Congress couldn’t approve a budget bill by the Oct. 1 deadline. After passing its own dead-on-arrival spending plan on Sept. 19, House Speaker Mike Johnson — in a measured tone meant to mask the increasing insanity of what he’s saying — keeps find one excuse after another to shut down the branch once dubbed, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, as “the People’s House.”
The Louisiana Republican has insisted — without any historical precedent — that there’s no point in the House conducting business as long as the gridlocked Senate refuses to pass the lower chamber’s bill to keep the government open. Many cynics have honed in on an alternate explanation — that Johnson is using the shutdown as an excuse not to swear in Democratic Arizona Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva. She would be the 218th vote to force likely passage of a measure to open up the government’s files on the late millionaire sex-fiend Jeffrey Epstein, including its likely references to President Donald Trump.
The cynics are right. The resistance among Trump and his allies to any reopening of the Epstein case is surely a motivation for Johnson’s obstruction — but I also can’t help but wonder whether the flap over the Grijalva swearing-in is also a cover for something that is much more deeply disturbing.
The virtual disappearance of the House for most of three months, and the nagging fears that the body isn’t returning anytime soon (or…ever?) is looking more and more essential to the authoritarian project of a movement that pleaded for a “red Caesar” to crush “woke” liberalism with unchecked executive power.
For the Founders who mapped out the American Experiment here in Philadelphia in 1787, the House was central to their vision of what democracy looks like. The idea was based on smaller districts and every-two-years elections that would closely bond its members to the people. It was, in other words, supposed to be the antidote to Western civilization’s monarchy problem.
Juan Linz’s theory of democratic devolution in presidential systems posits that the key problem is that divided government leads to competing claims of legitimacy that are resolved by the executive filling the vacuum. I don’t know how much precedent there is for legislatures ceding their own power in times of unified government. And not even because of some kind of power play on the part of the executive, but of their own initiative. Trump is getting the message:
Delivering remarks in Japan, the incumbent president reflected on the GOP domestic policy megabill he signed into law in July. “It really covers everything, the Great Big Beautiful Bill,” Trump said, apparently forgetting the name he insisted on (it was the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” not the “Great Big Beautiful Bill”).
“We got everything done,” he added, “I said, ‘Put it all into one bill and if we get it done, we’re done for four years.’ We don’t need anything more from Congress.”
That will be Mike Johnson’s political epitaph.