On Thursday morning, Melissa Mackenzie called me and suggested that we talk about Mike Johnson in one of the segments of next week’s Spectacle Podcast.

My reaction was that I didn’t want to.

Of course, I’m doing it anyway, here in this column and next week when we pop out The Spectacle. But I go reluctantly.

Why? Well, as regular readers of this column know, Mike is a personal friend of mine. He has been for a long time. I know him to be a very good conservative, one of the best in Congress. He’s a man of principle and, if he had the means to truly make policy, he would be very much be the revivalist figure America needs in leadership.

And I can say this out of far more than mere personal feeling. Because, as regular readers of this column know, Mike Johnson wrote the foreword to my book The Revivalist Manifesto: How Patriots Can Win The Next American Era. That was well before he became House speaker. And, after he won the speakership, CNN used my book to trash Mike Johnson as a friend of racists, homophobes, and conspiracy theorists (like me, apparently).

Which ended up selling a lot of copies of The Revivalist Manifesto.

The point being that Johnson believes not just in trying to preserve our corrupt status quo but in bringing back an America that was prosperous, successful, sustainable, and dominant on the global stage. I believe this, and I believe it’s borne out in his words and, when he’s able, his deeds.

But the “when he’s able” part of this is the rub. And it’s why I know I’ll be accused of shilling for Mike when I write or talk about him in a supportive way, and that’s why I’m reluctant to address this subject.

It’s impossible to be an effective speaker of the House when you have a majority as small as Mike Johnson’s majority is. Utterly impossible.

I noted this at The Hayride on Thursday after a bill to renew the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act failed due to conservative opposition, which was seen as a blow to Johnson:

A Speaker’s job is to make a majority, particularly on “must-pass” bills like the federal appropriations instruments. Arguably, the FISA renewal is such a bill.

Johnson has members of his caucus who are either RINOs or who represent swing districts. It’s hard to get them to come aboard for strong conservative reforms, for a couple of reasions: first, any such reforms are dead on arrival in the Democrat-dominated Senate, not to mention they’d be vetoed by Joe Biden if they made it that far. For those congressmen, there’s nothing but downside to voting for those reforms: they aren’t going to be making policy, so they’re not actually changing anything, plus they’re now going to get attacked by Democrat special interest groups for having backed those reforms.

In a House majority with 240 members, let’s say, Johnson could simply excuse a few of those members to vote with the Democrats because he could bleed some votes and still pass the bill. He doesn’t have that freedom now.

This means that Mike Johnson isn’t in the business of passing conservative legislation. He’s reduced to trying to pass moderate legislation because it’s a better alternative than passing leftist legislation – or passing nothing and getting trashed for grinding the House of Representatives down into dysfunction.

Most conservatives would be perfectly happy to see the latter – including the grand spectacle of a government shutdown. The problem is, we’re not in the majority with such an opinion. Generally, voters think government shutdowns are a sign of incompetent governance and they generate negative political results.

Which Johnson can’t afford, because virtually any sort of Democrat success in November will make Hakeem Jeffries the House Speaker. And as it stands, Marjorie Taylor Greene has a motion to vacate the chair hanging over Johnson’s head on the right, so he could lose his speakership in one of two ways.

This is the reality staring Johnson in the face.

I think Johnson was wrong to bring a FISA renewal bill that didn’t have a requirement of a warrant for surveillance of Americans. My hope is that when he brings that bill back up next week, such a requirement will be present, and at that time hopefully it will pass.

Not because I believe FISA renewal is vital to our national security. I think the FBI and CIA ought to be broken up and made much smaller, and powers granted to them under laws like FISA should be greatly curtailed until such time as the law enforcement and intelligence agencies that might replace the FBI and CIA can be shown to be worthy of such powers.

But there is no congressional majority for that kind of reform. And that’s Johnson’s problem. He has no ability to make that kind of policy. All he can do is to try to make good — or, at least, not awful — policy along the margins. Because that’s what he can sometimes make a majority for. And apparently there are some reforms in the FISA renewal bill. Adding a requirement for warrants would mean at least incremental positive change.

It’s an impossible job. Johnson can’t really be judged until he has a working majority. He needs 20 more votes. And while this should be an election cycle in which those might be had in November, the larger question is whether Johnson can even hold on until then. This arising, of course, from the motion that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene filed against Johnson some weeks ago.

But now it looks like Johnson is getting some wind added to his sails thanks to another personal friend of his, Donald Trump: