A conservative writer at The Bulwark unloaded on House Speaker Mike Johnson on Thursday, casting his entire tenure as a study in surrender and branding it with one cutting word: “impotence.”
In a piece titled “Mike Johnson, Lollygagger of the House,” reporter Joe Perticone argued that the Louisiana Republican stands apart from his recent predecessors because he has made handing power to the White House his defining act.
“Each House speakership ends up having its own unique character—forged through a combination of successes and failures,” Perticone wrote, before walking through the legacies of Nancy Pelosi, Paul Ryan, John Boehner, and Kevin McCarthy.
Pelosi, he noted, ruled her caucus with an iron fist and muscled through landmark bills like the Affordable Care Act. Ryan and Boehner moved substantial legislation and landed lucrative post-Congress gigs. McCarthy was tarred and feathered on the House floor, figuratively speaking, and has yet to find a soft landing.
Then Perticone torched Johnson.
“Mike Johnson’s speakership is somewhat different from all these,” he wrote. “His overriding project has been to cede whatever power and decision-making he can to the White House, and this has, in turn, given shape to an unusual legacy, one defined by impotence.”
The takedown lands as Johnson’s own members increasingly route around him. According to a recent analysis from Georgetown’s Government Affairs Institute, House Republicans under Johnson have set the modern record for successful discharge petitions, the procedural workaround that lets a majority of members force a floor vote without the Speaker’s blessing.
Perticone pointed to the same dynamic, writing that “In recent months there has been a strange spirit of bipartisanship among frustrated House members, who have relied on the previously rare tactic of discharge petitions to circumvent Johnson” — a streak that has left the Speaker visibly outmaneuvered and reduced to insisting he “has not lost control” of the chamber.
The Bulwark was founded in 2018 by Sarah Longwell, Bill Kristol, and Charlie Sykes as a Never Trump home for center-right writers cast out as the Republican Party reorganized around President Donald Trump.
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