Mike Johnson’s Speaker of the House Struggle: What’s Really Holding Him Back from the Top Spot?
So here we are—yet another twist in the political sitcom that’s got Speaker Moses stumbling like he’s trying to nail jelly to a wall. Imagine gearing up for an 18-month extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, only to get blindsided by 20 of your own clan jumping ship and teaming up with the opposition. Ouch, that stings worse than a bad workout aftermath. This fiasco isn’t just a hiccup; it’s a sprawling mess tangled in GOP infighting, White House delays, and a cast of characters that reads like a thriller—minus the thrill. As we unpack this chaos, you gotta wonder—how does a giant, high-stakes surveillance program become the stage for so much behind-the-scenes drama? Buckle up, because the saga’s only just begun. LEARN MORE
4 min readI hate to go this far out on a shaky limb, but I’ve come to believe that Speaker Moses is not very good at this whole Speaker of the House thing. In the early hours of Friday, he got kicked in the teeth when 20 members of his caucus went over the hill and voted with the Democrats against a clean 18-month extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. He and his obstreperous master in the White House were thereby handed a nice handful of dead fish. And now, let the recriminations begin.
In interviews with more than two dozen Republican lawmakers and aides on Capitol Hill involved in the talks, many of whom were granted anonymity to speak freely about the contentious policy debate, the consensus is that the White House is largely responsible for the current breakdown as GOP factions snipe and assign blame. “This is why we shouldn’t wait until the last minute on these things,” one House Republican fumed Thursday. A congressional GOP aide added, “The White House was too late to come to a decision. That was the original sin.”
A senior White House official disputed the characterization from some Hill Republicans that the administration had taken too long to plead their case. They pointed to a briefing in the Situation Room months ago with Republican lawmakers, during which “the president heard arguments on both sides of the issue.” The official added, “We’ve had multiple briefings from senior officials, both on the House and Senate side, about the desirability of this program. Again, going back months ago.”
Gradually, this whole thing grew into such a big, chewy cluster of fck that it touched every aspect of the GOP’s control over the country’s public institutions. The White House discovered that it couldn’t negotiate any of the Republican hard-liners any more than it could negotiate with Iran. Speaker Moses was next to useless, as he is in any photograph at the president’s side. And then there was the Crackpot Who Wasn’t There.
Noticeably absent from this outreach is Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Her office plays a statutory role in overseeing Section 702 and has historically been a key proponent of the powerful spy powers. Gabbard in early February expressed concerns to Trump about reauthorizing the statute without additional privacy guardrails, as Politico reported earlier Thursday, though her appeal appears to have been unsuccessful.
And while the administration’s position on Section 702 came into focus in February, there were signs earlier in the month that its position had not fully crystallized. Officials meeting with the Senate Intelligence Committee at that time refused to divulge the White House’s stance on extending the surveillance power and adding reforms, according to five people with knowledge of the meeting. The exchange frustrated Republicans and Democrats on the panel, who are generally supportive of the surveillance program.
Finally, the House managed to pass a ten-day extension of the program. So Speaker Moses has until April 30 to stay off the president’s naughty list, and the president is now typically bizarre in his support for the provisions. Pausing, as ever, to drive a few more nails into his own palms:
When the Dirty Cop, James Comey, the failed Head of the FBI went after me, he was using FISA Title I, the Domestic Collection, not FISA 702, the Foreign Collection, which needs to be extended today. While parts of FISA were illegally and unfortunately used against me in the Democrats’ disgraceful Witch Hunt and Attack in the RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA Hoax, and perhaps would be used against me in the future, I am willing to risk the giving up of my Rights and Privileges as a Citizen for our Great Military and Country!
Section 702 is problematic enough—as is FISA, now that I think about it—without these clowns screwing with it. From The New York Times:
Section 702 allows the government to collect—on domestic soil and without a warrant—the communications of foreigners abroad, including when those people are interacting with Americans. Under the law, the National Security Agency can order email services like Google and network operators like AT&T to turn over copies of messages of targeted foreigners.
The provision legalized a form of the Stellarwind program, the once-secret warrantless wiretapping program that the Bush administration launched after the September 11, 2001, attacks. When Congress enacted Section 702 in 2008, it added a “sunset” deadline to ensure that lawmakers would periodically review—and potentially modify—the program. Privacy-minded lawmakers want to require a court order to access information about and the private messages of Americans swept up in the program. They have also proposed using the bill to bar the government from purchasing data about Americans from data brokers if it would need a warrant to collect the information directly.
Any search program that is defined as “warrantless” deserves to be examined with an electron microscope. So the concerns of these Republican apostates are not necessarily wing-nut paranoia. And even though the president is willing to “give up his rights and privileges”—what a guy!—the rest of us may not feel the same way.
Mr. Trump’s full-throated endorsement of the surveillance tool marked a sharp pivot. For years, he has railed against the FBI’s use of different part of FISA during the investigation into Russia and his 2016 campaign, and only grudgingly acceded to Section 702 extensions.
I don’t think he even remembers that part of his history, and, hell, coherence is very overrated.
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