Yes, Chuck Schumer.
All you hear is that Mike Johnson is the one with egg all over his face after House Republicans, bolstered by online advocacy from Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and others, scuttled the continuing resolution that would have kept the government funded into mid-March.
That’s what the Propaganda Press is pushing, and too many Americans are still letting those liars set the narrative.
Because the 1500-page disgrace that the House Republicans killed on Wednesday was not Johnson’s idea. It was Schumer’s.
I’ll explain.
- Johnson Might Not Be The Good Guy Here, But He’s Not The Bad Guy
Johnson’s job as speaker is to pass the must-pass things and keep the House — and the federal government — running. That’s actually a dirty job, and there’s a reason so relatively few of your favorite members of Congress have any interest in it. The speakership is a position serving the entire House, not just the majority party. So there are things a speaker has to do that he’d probably rather not do.
Ideally, Johnson would conjure the votes to keep things moving through the party from which he comes, meaning that this week he’d put a clean CR through that would be backed by a majority made up of Republicans.
But he has two problems there.
First, Johnson can’t get to 218 votes with just Republicans, because Republicans can’t agree on a CR for a host of reasons. One is, and this is where I would be if I were a member of Congress, that some of them don’t want to vote for any spending bills at all without a full-on scrubbing of the budget.
This isn’t going to happen while Joe Biden is still president and Schumer still runs the Senate. There isn’t enough stroke — at least not until January — to force the Democrats to knuckle under on any budget the hard-core conservatives like me would support.
So if you’re Johnson you bleed votes from a tiny majority because there’s a small group of people like me who want to take the absolutist (and correct) position and won’t vote for much...
No hoodwinking or hornswoggling here.
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