Mike Johnson’s Game of Chicken
Mike Johnson is a lot of things—a right-wing zealot and a shameless enabler of Donald Trump among them. But it looks like he’s finally grown something of a backbone, teeing up foreign aid votes that may end in his own ouster, thanks to Marjorie Taylor Greene and the other hardliners in his conference. “We’re going to stand for freedom and make sure that Vladimir Putin doesn’t march through Europe,” Johnson told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Wednesday. “We’re the greatest nation on the planet, and we have to act like it. And we have to project to Putin and [Xi Jinping] and Iran and North Korea and anybody else that we will defend freedom.” “When you do the right thing,” Johnson added, “you let the chips fall where they may.” Johnson, who assumed the speakership in October after the demise of Kevin McCarthy, had managed for months to avoid the motion-to-vacate threats that ultimately did in his predecessor—in large part because his party was too worn out from its last fight over the gavel to get …
