The House GOP is a circus. The chaos has one source.
Long.
Adapted from “Fools on the Hill: The Hooligans, Saboteurs, Conspiracy Theorists and Dunces who Burned Down the House,” by Dana Milbank.
The Lord works in mysterious ways. Six weeks after his improbable rise from obscurity to speaker of the House in late 2023, Louisiana’s Mike Johnson decided to break bread with a group of Christian nationalists. He gave the keynote address (at the Museum of the Bible) to the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, a group whose founder, “proud” Christian nationalist Jason Rapert, has said: “I reject that being a Christian Nationalist is somehow unseemly or wrong.”
Rapert’s organization promoted the pine-tree “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which was among the banners flown at the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021 — and which, by total and remarkable coincidence, was proudly displayed outside Johnson’s congressional office.
Confirmed speakers and award recipients for the gathering Johnson addressed included: a man who proposed that gay people should be forced to wear “a label across their forehead reading, ‘This can be hazardous to your health’ ”; a woman who blamed gay people for Noah’s flood and more recent natural disasters; and various adherents of “dominionist” theology, which holds that the United States should be governed under biblical law by Christians.
“I’ll tell you a secret, since media is not here,” Johnson teased the group, unaware that his hosts were streaming video of the event. Johnson informed his audience that God “had been speaking to me” about becoming speaker, communicating “very specifically,” in fact, waking him at night and giving him “plans and procedures.”
God, said Johnson, told him that “we’re coming to a Red Sea moment” and that Johnson needed to be prepared — to be Moses! Throughout the speakership battle, “the Lord kept telling me to wait,” Johnson recounted. “And it came to the end, and the Lord said, ‘Now, step forward.’” Johnson told them that “only God saw the path through the roiling sea.”
Those seas have not calmed much since. In 11 months as speaker, Johnson has led the House Republicans not to the promised land but into deeper water, where they have been thrashing, splashing and dog paddling without end. Johnson inherited a dysfunctional House GOP majority from Speaker Kevin McCarthy — the first in history to be ousted midterm — and managed to make it even worse by catering to the whims of former president Donald Trump even more than his predecessor had.
At the moment, Johnson and his caucus are in a typical crisis of their own making. The government runs out of money in less than two weeks, and Trump has ordered Johnson to shut it down if Democrats won’t swallow a poison pill that makes it harder to register to vote. But after a seven-week summer recess, Johnson tried to put the plan on the House floor last week — only to pull it because he didn’t have enough Republican votes. He’s trying again this week, against long odds. With days to go before a shutdown, House Republicans don’t even have a concept of a plan.
Today, Johnson’s run looks anything but heaven-sent. In the first 18 months of this Congress, only 70 laws were enacted. Calculations by political scientist Tobin Grant, who tracks congressional output over time, put this Congress on course to be the do-nothingest since 1859-1861 — when the Union was dissolving. But Johnson’s House isn’t merely unproductive; it is positively lunatic. Republicans have filled their committee hearings and their bills with white nationalist attacks on racial diversity and immigrants, attempts to ban abortion and to expand access to the sort of guns used in mass shootings, incessant harassment of LGBTQ Americans, and even routine potshots at the U.S. military. They insulted each other’s private parts, accused each other of sexual and financial crimes, and scuffled with each other in the Capitol basement. They screamed “Bullshit!” at President Joe Biden during the State of the Union address. They stood up for the Confederacy and used their official powers to spread conspiracy theories about the “Deep State.” Some even lent credence to the idea that there has been a century-old Deep State coverup of space aliens, with possible involvement by Mussolini and the Vatican.
And this is on top of the well-known pratfalls: The 15-ballot marathon to elect a speaker, the 22-day shutdown of the House to find another speaker, the routine threats of government shutdowns and a near-default on the federal debt that hurt the nation’s credit rating.
They devoted 18 months to a failed attempt to impeach Biden, which produced nothing but Marjorie Taylor Greene publicly displaying posters of Hunter Biden engaging in sex acts. One “whistleblower” defected to Russia, another worked with Russian intelligence and is under indictment for fabricating his claims, and still another is on the lam, evading charges of being a Chinese agent.
As soon as Biden withdrew his candidacy, they promptly forgot their probe of Biden’s “corruption” and rushed to launch a new series of investigations into Kamala Harris (over her record on border security) and Tim Walz (over his military service and “cozy relationship” with China).
After a number of failed attempts, they did impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas (the first such action against a Cabinet officer since 1876) without identifying any high crimes or misdemeanors he had committed; the Senate dismissed the articles without a trial. House Republicans created a “weaponization committee” under the excitable Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), but it was panned even by right-wing commentators when it produced little more than a list of conspiracy theories from the likes of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard.
They lapsed repeatedly into fits of censure resolutions, contempt citations and other pointless acts of vengeance. In all of its history, the House had voted to censure one of its own members only seven times; in the two weeks after Johnson became speaker, members of the House tried to censure each other eight times.
Give them credit for this: a bipartisan debt deal to avoid a default crisis that they themselves created. A pair of temporary spending bills (both passed with mostly Democratic votes) to avert a government shutdown crisis that they themselves created. They made hardly a dent in federal spending. Their attempts to stoke culture wars with poison-pill legislation went nowhere. Their months-long failure to approve arms for Ukraine enabled Vladimir Putin to inflict punishing losses on Ukrainian forces.
In lieu of consequential legislating, they passed bills such as the Refrigerator Freedom Act, the Gas Stove Protection and Freedom Act and the Stop Unaffordable Dishwasher Standards (SUDS) Act. On the House floor, the Republican majority suffered one failure after another, even on routine procedural votes. Seven times (and counting), House Republicans voted down their own leaders’ routine attempts to begin floor debates — something that hadn’t happened once in the previous 20 years.
Republicans themselves know they’ve been a disaster. “Our Republican House majority has failed completely,” Greene has said.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.), stood on the House floor and demanded: “One thing. I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing — one — that I can go campaign on and say we did.”
The chaos has one source. While Johnson and his House GOP colleagues may think they’ve been hearing the voice of God, they’ve actually been heeding the voice of the “Orange Jesus,” as Tennessee Republican Rep. Mark Green called Trump (in Liz Cheney’s telling).
Johnson owes his job entirely to Trump, who backed Johnson’s speakership bid last year and shot down Greene’s effort to oust him in May. Johnson has reciprocated by relinquishing control of the House agenda to Trump, most prominently when the speaker, responding to Trump’s orders, killed a bipartisan border-security bill — the toughest in decades — of the sort Johnson himself had been demanding for months.
With each election since Trump became a political force a decade ago, the House GOP caucus has swelled with ever-more-exotic hooligans, saboteurs and conspiracy theorists in the MAGA mold.
In the House GOP class of 2022 alone:
Andy Ogles of Tennessee, under FBI investigation related to allegations of campaign finance irregularities, falsely identified himself as an “economist” and a business-school graduate and falsely claimed to have been a police officer and to have served in various business positions.
Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, propelled to stardom by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and MyPillow’s Mike Lindell, was found to have embellished many aspects of her life story, including a “home invasion” she suffered and her upbringing as a “Messianic Jew.” In Congress, she has been known primarily for introducing bills to expel, fine or censure Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) because he led the first impeachment of Trump, and for legislation calling on the House “Sergeant-at-Arms to take into custody the body of Attorney General [Merrick] Garland wherever found.”
Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin, who was at the Capitol on the day of the insurrection, made a name for himself in Congress by yelling and cursing at high school students serving as Senate pages because they were taking photos from the floor of the Rotunda (it was their last week on the job). The representative called them “lazy sh---” and told them to “get the f--- up,” reported Punchbowl News.
Ohio’s Max Miller, who had been a mid-level aide in Trump’s White House, was accused by his girlfriend from the time, White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, of physical abuse and violence. Miller’s defamation lawsuit against Grisham was dismissed.
Ryan Zinke of Montana returned to Congress after serving as Trump’s interior secretary, during which time he rode a horse to work on his first day and ordered the department to fly a special “secretarial flag” from the building’s roof whenever he was in residence. He resigned under pressure in 2018 in the face of multiple probes into his real estate dealings, and the Interior Department’s inspector general found that Zinke repeatedly violated federal ethics rules while in office. After being sworn in as a new member of Congress, Zinke went to the House floor to say that “the Deep State runs secret messaging campaigns with one goal in mind: to increase its power to censor and persuade the American people.” Claiming that “shell organizations” funded by foreign investors “repeatedly attempt to destroy the American West,” the lawmaker said, “they want to wipe out the American cowboy completely.”
With such an extraordinary lineup of lunacy, it was going to be difficult for members of the freshman class to distinguish themselves as the nuttiest of the nutty. But there were many fine attempts.
Florida Republican Cory Mills celebrated his appointments to the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees by handing out inert grenades to members of Congress. Mike Collins of Georgia blamed a spate of train derailments on “diversity, equity and inclusion” policies. Trump-backed Harriet Hageman of Wyoming, who had ousted Cheney in a primary, engaged in conspiracy theorizing so bizarre that (Trump-appointed) FBI Director Christopher Wray called it “insane.” Eli Crane of Arizona referred to Black Americans as “colored people” on the floor of the House. Iowa’s Zach Nunn described the bloody Jan. 6 insurrection as “a bunch of middle-aged individuals … walking onto the floor.”
And from Long Island came a young gay Republican who was a “proud American Jew,” grandson of Holocaust survivors, son of a woman who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11, had been a star volleyball player at Baruch College, got a business degree from New York University and top jobs at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, saved thousands of dogs and cats with his charity and lost employees of one of his companies at the Orlando gay nightclub shooting. As the world now knows, all of it was a lie. In real life, George Santos had been a drag queen in Brazil. He pleaded guilty in August to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft and faces at least two years in prison and must repay those he defrauded.
This was, without a doubt, the zaniest bunch of lawmakers to enter the House of Representatives since … well, since the Republican Class of ’20.
That batch included Georgia’s Greene, who was famous for, among other things, promoting such beliefs as: Jewish space lasers start forest fires; Democratic officials ought to be executed; pandemic public health restrictions were akin to actions of Nazi Germany; joining the U.S. military is “like throwing your life away”; the 9/11 attacks were an inside job; various school shootings were faked; members of Congress are being spied on by “Nancy Pelosi’s Gazpacho Police”; Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are murderers; and “the Democrats are a party of pedophiles.”
Shortly after the 2022 election, she went to a gala held by the New York Young Republicans and shared with the crowd the latest outrage she had discovered. “You can pick up a butt plug or a dildo at Target and CVS nowadays,” she informed them. She also offered thoughts on how the Jan. 6 insurrection could have succeeded. “I want to tell you something,” Greene said. “If [former Trump strategist] Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, it would have been armed.”
Also arriving in the House after the 2020 election was Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who said she would carry her Glock in Washington, joked about a Muslim congressional colleague being a suicide bomber, blamed Anthony S. Fauci for causing puppies to be “eaten alive,” indignantly proclaimed that “we’re not a democracy,” and routinely accused trans people and those on the left of “grooming” children for pedophiles. Her Christmas card photo showed her children posing with AR-15-style weapons. At one hearing, Boebert repeatedly attacked District of Columbia officials for legalizing public urination. (They hadn’t.)
In a signature moment, Boebert and her boyfriend were escorted out of a Denver performance of the musical “Beetlejuice” in September 2023 after the venue accused her of vaping, singing, recording and “causing a disturbance.” During the show, a pregnant woman said Boebert refused her request to stop vaping. The congresswoman, in turn, blew smoke at the woman. Boebert denied the claims. Then the venue released video surveillance footage showing Boebert vaping — and also groping the crotch of her boyfriend, who groped her breasts. Boebert, then a 36-year-old grandmother, attributed her behavior to a “difficult divorce” she was going through.
The GOP Class of ’20 also included a gun dealer, Andrew Clyde of Georgia. Clyde handed out AR-15 lapel pins to colleagues and opposed the awarding of the Congressional Gold Medal to police officers who had defended the Capitol on Jan. 6. Clyde had called the attack a “normal tourist visit.” Clyde, whose gun stores had been monitored by the federal government because many guns sold there had been used in crimes, has attempted to block the federal government from supporting gun-violence prevention research.
Nancy Mace of South Carolina, also duly elected in 2020, was known for her erratic voting, her chaotic office management (her chief of staff left amid a mass staff exodus and then ran in a primary campaign against her), and her bizarre public pronouncements. Speaking at an annual prayer breakfast, she informed the crowd that her fiancé “tried to pull me by my waist over this morning in bed,” but she turned him down. Mace told the worshipers that she offered him a rain check “later tonight.”
Classmate Victoria Spartz of Indiana, an immigrant from Ukraine who voted against aid to Ukraine, routinely mystifies colleagues with her rambling speeches and her constant reversals (she announced her retirement from Congress and then ran for reelection anyway). This summer she was caught at Dulles International Airport with an unloaded .380-caliber handgun in her carry-on bag.
And rounding out the roster for the Class of ’20 was Ronny Jackson of Texas, who as White House physician under Donald Trump was known as the “Candyman” for liberally dispensing pills without paperwork. His subsequent nomination by Trump to be secretary of veterans affairs fell through over allegations that he had been drunk on the job, had an explosive temper and fostered a toxic work environment.
The toxicity continued after his election. At a rodeo outside Amarillo in the summer of 2023, Jackson got into an altercation with a state trooper — disobeying the officer, lunging and jabbing at him, and calling him “a f---ing full-on dick” who had “better recalculate, motherf-----.”
These rookie rowdies joined well-established oddballs such as Florida’s Matt Gaetz (the subject of an ethics probe into sexual misconduct), Louisiana’s Clay Higgins (who sends coded messages to militias and claims the FBI instigated the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol using “ghost buses”), white-nationalist Paul Gosar of Arizona and Pennsylvania’s Scott Perry, whose conspiracy ideas about the “stolen” 2020 election were so bizarre that even Trump’s Justice Department called them “pure insanity.”
On one level, these guys have at least had the minor virtue of entertainment value: Santos’s campaign expenditures for OnlyFans and Botox; Santos going to a karaoke bar full of journalists, and, another time, being chased down a Capitol hallway carrying an unidentified baby; the House passing an unemployment fraud bill the same day Santos was being indicted on a charge of unemployment fraud; Greene telling Boebert she was a “little bitch” on the House floor and inviting former British prime minister David Cameron to “kiss my ass”; Greene leading the Mayorkas impeachment for what she pronounced as “indicktable crimes,” calling for a “very tedious impeachment inquiry” of Biden and drawing guffaws when, presiding over the House, she insisted on “decorum.”
McCarthy, in his short run as speaker, produced endless amusement: Having a bidet installed in the speaker’s office; delivering a “kidney punch” to Tennessee Republican Tim Burchett; threatening Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) that “I’ll kick your ass” on the House floor after Swalwell called him weak; and promoting the allegation that Gaetz, the man responsible for his ouster, “slept with a 17-year-old.” Gaetz, for his part, left a draft of his “motion to vacate the chair” — the ouster of McCarthy — in a Capitol men’s room. On two occasions, Republican colleagues came close to assaulting Gaetz, and one of them had to be restrained on the House floor.
And yet the crazy kept coming. A House committee adopted a new rule allowing members to carry loaded guns to hearings. Thomas Massie, a senior House Republican, argued on the floor that guns should be allowed in bars. James Comer, chairman of the Oversight Committee, called a Democrat on the panel a “smurf.” Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.) attacked Attorney General Garland at a hearing over the “World Naked Bike Ride.” Republicans took up a resolution to condemn the Russian Revolution of 1917, Joseph Stalin’s Ukraine famine, Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward and Pol Pot’s killing fields — but they had to shelve and rewrite a simple resolution praising law enforcement out of concern that it might appear to praise the FBI. They took up legislation to defund the IRS, then later complained about poor service at the underfunded IRS.
Given their intentions, it’s a blessing that the House Republicans have been so ineffective.
Fully 161 House Republicans, or nearly three-quarters of the caucus, voted to eliminate the Education Department. When that failed, they attempted a 28 percent cut to the department’s budget, including a $15 billion cut in aid to low-income Title I schools.
Most House Republicans (112 to 101) voted to cut off funds to Ukraine as it defends itself from Vladimir Putin’s invasion. They also took up on the floor a Greene amendment to pull the United States out of NATO.
An overwhelming majority of 177 House Republicans voted to keep the names of military bases that honor Confederate officers.
More than half of the House GOP caucus — 125 Republicans — signed on as co-sponsors of the Life at Conception Act, which would ban all abortion nationwide, block the abortion pill mifepristone and even shut down in vitro fertilization. The House Republican Study Committee, which counts 80 percent of House Republicans as members, embraced a nationwide ban on abortion from the moment of conception and the rescinding of approval of mifepristone.
House Republicans promised to balance the budget in 10 years without touching Social Security and Medicare, or cutting defense spending or veterans’ pensions, or allowing the Trump tax cuts to lapse. To accomplish all this, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, Republicans would literally have to eliminate everything — everything — else the government does: No more Homeland Security, no more Border Patrol or FBI; no more Coast Guard, air traffic control, or federal funds for education or highways; no agricultural programs; no housing, food, or disaster assistance; no cancer research or veterans’ health care; no diplomacy or space exploration; no courts — and no Congress. House Republicans passed legislation that would have slashed most domestic spending by 30 percent and eliminated all green-energy tax credits. (It went nowhere in the Senate.)
House Republicans embraced Second Amendment extremism, voting to protect the legality of a powerful and deadly type of handgun — those with “stabilizing braces” — that had been used in several recent massacres, including in Nashville, Boulder, Colorado Springs and Dayton. They attempted huge cuts to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and they sought to cut the FBI’s salaries and expenses by about 5 percent and federal prosecutors’ by 12 percent. They also tried to block the government from regulating DIY “ghost guns,” from getting reports when an individual buys multiple rifles or shotguns at once, from implementing “red flag” laws to keep guns away from those prone to violence, and from implementing several other initiatives to reduce gun violence.
The Republicans added provisions to various appropriations bills blocking funds from going to anything that might qualify as promoting “racial equity,” critical race theory, DEI or affirmative action. They added a provision excluding undocumented immigrants from census counts. Another blocked funds for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Latino. They voted to block research on climate change. They attempted various provisions blocking abortions, even in cases of rape and incest, prohibiting Medicaid from covering abortions, stripping funds for family planning, eliminating fetal tissue research and forbidding the military from covering travel expenses for female service members who need abortions. They sought to outlaw programs that promoted racial cohesion in the military and to ban books that mentioned LGBTQ issues. They tried to block transgender kids from competing in sports, to prevent Pride flags from flying at federal facilities, to protect those who discriminate against same-sex couples and to prohibit funds for gender-affirming care. Other pieces of legislation sought to end all income taxes, abolish the IRS, withdraw from the World Health Organization and repeal Obamacare.
Johnson and other senior Republicans have invoked the racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Tex.) alleged that colleague Judy Chu (D-Calif.) should not have a security clearance because of her Chinese ancestry. Tony Gonzales (R-Tex.) called his colleagues “scumbags,” telling CNN’s Dana Bash that “these people used to walk around with white hoods at night. Now they’re walking around with white hoods in the daytime.”
House Republican leaders used “emergency” legislative procedures to remove Rep. Ilhan Omar, (D-Minn.) a Muslim American, from the Foreign Affairs Committee. Meanwhile, they restored the committee memberships of Greene and Gosar, both with white-nationalist ties and both of whom fantasized publicly about violence against Democrats. Nor are Democrats the only targets of violent threats: Republicans who opposed Jordan’s bid for the speakership reported receiving death threats against themselves and their families.
Johnson is well suited to be ringmaster of this circus. His own eccentricities include calling homosexuality “inherently unnatural,” saying states would be justified in banning “same-sex deviate sexual intercourse,” and his use of an “accountability software” program in which his son receives an alert if the elder Johnson accesses pornography.
Originally, Johnson had been no fan of Trump, saying he “lacks the character and the moral center” needed in a president.
But once in Congress, he positioned himself among the fiercest of Trump’s defenders, and he rose to prominence leading the effort among Republicans to overturn Trump’s 2020 election defeat. When McCarthy was toppled — Trump wouldn’t lift a finger to help him because he believed him insufficiently sycophantic — Johnson, enjoying Trump’s backing, outlasted more accomplished Republican lawmakers in the succession battle.
As soon as Johnson won the speaker’s gavel, he raced to endorse Trump’s return to power — even though the speaker presides over the Republicans’ nominating convention and therefore has historically remained neutral. “I’m all in for President Trump,” he said on CNBC on Nov. 14.
He made pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago. He appointed two MAGA lawmakers, both avid conspiracy theorists, to sensitive positions on the House Intelligence Committee. He pushed for colleagues to support legislation curtailing the authority of Trump prosecutors Fani T. Willis and of Alvin Bragg, who Johnson has said is “bought and paid for by George Soros.”
Worse, he used his office to attack the justice system, proclaiming the prosecutions of Trump to be a “borderline criminal conspiracy.” Just six days after Trump saved Johnson from Greene’s motion to vacate, Johnson traveled to New York to accompany Trump to his hush-money trial, then stood in front of the cameras outside the courthouse to denounce the trial and the criminal justice system generally.
“This is a sham trial!” said Trump, inside the courthouse.
“Sham of a trial,” parroted Johnson, outside the courthouse.
“There’s no crime!” said Trump, inside the courthouse.
“There’s no crime here,” repeated Johnson, outside the courthouse.
“It’s election interference!” proclaimed Trump.
“It is election interference,” said Johnson.
Biden is “weaponizing the Department of Justice,” announced Trump.
“Weaponized against President Trump,” Johnson echoed.
Even by the standards of the Trump era, it was appalling behavior by the highest-ranking officer of the legislative branch. Without a shred of evidence, he alleged that “the judge’s own daughter is making millions of dollars” off the trial. He claimed a prosecutor in the case had “recently received over $10,000 in payments from the Democratic National Committee.” He alleged that, in Trump’s classified documents case, prosecutors “manipulated documents” and “might have tampered with the evidence” — conduct “so egregious” that it caused that trial to be “indefinitely postponed.” Each of these was false or, at best, deeply distorted. For good measure, Johnson even offered an inflated count of the crowd size at a recent Trump rally — just to please the boss.
“The people are losing faith right now in this country, in our institutions,” Johnson said. “They’re losing faith in our system of justice. And the reason for that is because they see it being abused as it is being done here in New York.”
In reality, people are losing faith in our institutions because Johnson and others sworn to uphold those institutions are instead attacking them to appease their patron.
As the election approaches, control of the House could go either way. But the stakes are enormous. When Trump was last in the White House, Congress reined in some of his excesses; even when the House was under Republican rule, the comparatively steady hand of Speaker Paul Ryan checked some of the far right’s impulses. But MAGA Republicans now dominate the House GOP conference and are heading that way in the Senate.
Voters’ attention is justifiably focused on the top of the ticket, but if Trump prevails, it’s likely that a MAGA-tilted House and Senate will follow on his coattails. The zany things House Republicans tried but failed to do in 2023 and 2024 could actually happen in 2025. A second Trump presidency would be ruinous — but a second Trump presidency abetted by Mike Johnson would be even worse.
