The Dangling Man

Mike Johnson faces the GOP's future: It is ugly. But the present is no better

Mar 30, 2026

Speaker Mike Johnson looks…tired. Photo credit: Joshua Sukoff/Shutterstock

United States senators in both parties were already on their way home for the two-week April break when Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R. LA-04) announced that his majority would not pass the upper chamber’s bill to fund the Transportation Security Agency.

Why? Because, in a deal with the Democratic minority, Majority Leader John Thune deferred action on funding ICE and the Border Patrol. Refusing this compromise is, of course, symbolic politics on Johnson’s part. Even absent budget authorization, ICE and BPS officers are already being paid from a separate budget established in the 2025 legislation also known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The only Homeland Security employees going unpaid in this partial government shutdown are TSA employees, whose only job is to keep everyone safe and ensure that, every day, air travel for millions of Americans goes without a hitch.

Polls show that Americans are equally angry at both parties, but when that happens, they tend to make a change. By rejecting the Senate bill, Johnson scuttled Thune’s strategy for saving his own majority: pushing Homeland Security funding through later in the year on a party-line majority vote as part of a reconciliation package and showing some mercy to TSA employees whose lives have been turned upside down with this political game of chicken.

As the party in power, no matter how much they blame Democrats, Republicans will take the hit for this, and party strategists know it. Nevertheless, Johnson’s majority substituted its own bill to temporarily extend all DHS funding until May 22, something to which no one in the Senate has agreed, which means that when the Senate returns in two weeks the process of finding a compromise will have to start all over again.

After this bill, the House majority also left town, and like their Senate colleagues, were escorted past long security lines at airports to make their flights, a longstanding Congressional perk (in a brilliant PR move, Minneapolis-based Delta has now suspended that privilege.)

Yet, even as Republicans were packing their suitcases, President Donald Trump (who has the political instincts of a lizard, and I mean that as a peculiar compliment) had the wit signed a memorandum directing the Office of Management and Budget to find money to pay TSA employees, and pay it back later when Speaker Monkey gets his $h!t together. These hard-working and generally good-natured people could receive two weeks of back pay as soon as Monday.

Trump’s move suggests that House Republicans have misplayed their hand badly, even within their own party. Why? Because they have shifted attention away from the narrative this whole performance was intended to establish: that Democrats, who were seeking changes that would rein in ICE lawlessness, care about immigrants than they care about border security and hard-working ordinary Americans.

Now, the story is that Trump, Thune, and Johnson are, to put it mildly, not on the same page, that they don’t care about anyone, and that this might be the most meaningless government shutdown, partial or otherwise, ever.

Republicans have also underlined with a virtual Sharpie that the schisms and dysfunction in the GOP have made it impossible to get work done for their constituents. As a not irrelevant aside, this reality has caused an unusually large number of Republican members to not run for re-election. That number was 39, and became 40 this morning. I would say the exodus is unprecedented, except that in 2018, when Trump was also President, 44 Republicans fled political life. Some will probably take up lucrative lobbying posts, others are running for other offices, and a few—like Marjorie Taylor Greene—are simply quitting.

But it is the clearest sign we have that all of the internal numbers say that Republicans will lose the House in November (one anonymous member confided that the projected losses are as high as 60 or 70 seats), and maybe the Senate.

This looming disaster is what has turned Johnson into a dangling man, although given the circumstances of how he became Speaker in the first place—a narrow majority, and Kevin McCarthy’s destruction at the hands of the party fringe—perhaps he always has been. Like Joseph in Saul Bellow’s 1944 debut novel, Dangling Man, about an Army draftee waiting to be inducted, Speaker Monkey’s genial grin masks a man perpetually unable, or unwilling, to act because he doesn’t command the influence to discipline and direct his troops. As MAGA melts down around him, Johnson, in Bellow’s words, has “nothing to do but wait, and dangle, and grow more and more dispirited.”

So, to be fair, this most recent display of Johnson’s insufficiency as a political strategist should be seen in the context of what is a generally bad situation that would render even the most skilled leader rudderless. He leads a political party that runs campaigns based on fear and ignorance, not policies that matter to people, a party that has put its fortunes into the hands of fringe extremists empowered by an eccentric, untutored, venal President who seems to be suffering from early-stage dementia.

In other words, Johnson’s only real job at this point is not passing legislation, but delaying the moment when Republicans pass into the minority, in one or both chambers.

This is something could happen even before the midterms. Polymarket gives this a 16% chance: it’s small, but real, because the numbers are fragile. The 2013-203 vote on the DHS bill that Republicans returned to the Senate on Friday included votes from three centrist Democrats: Don Davis (NC-01 and Raleigh-Durham airport), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (WA-03 and Sea-Tac airport) and Henry Cuellar (TX-28 and San Antonio airport). Had these three Democrats not voted with Johnson, the count would have been 210-206.

In other words, on any party line vote Johnson has a four-vote margin, one that will shrink to two after special elections in CA-01 and New Jersey 11 later this spring. No one can not show up for a vote. No one can vote no. No one can be booted or forced to resign, although five House Republicans are currently under investigation for ethics violations, some of which are actual crimes (see: Corey Mills.) No one can die (four Republican House members are over 80, which is absolutely the death zone.)

A second number demonstrates a greater, and more realistic, threat to Johnson continuing to function even if he retains that two-vote majority: 34, or the number of Republicans organized as the House Freedom Caucus. This is a group of hard-liners led by Chip Roy (TX-21), the man with the pussy beard who can’t pass legislation but can take a breathtakingly ugly chunk of votes away from the Speaker. (Go here to see why someone told Roy that facial hair of any kind might be a good idea.)

United States Congressman Chip Roy at the 2024 Young Americans for Liberty, Kissimmee, Florida. Photo credit: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons

The last three elections have demonstrated that independent voters hold the keys to the kingdom in national elections. Yet, Republicans continue to exacerbate their internal struggles by supporting extremists who push those independents away by ignoring the problem they promised to solve in 2024: voters’ economic realities.

Couple this with the theater of the absurd that many GOP primaries have become. Currently, the House GOP leadership is backing Brandon Herrera in TX-23, a man who is the proud owner of a copy of Mein Kampf and denies that Abraham Lincoln emancipated enslaved people. Herrera replaced incumbent Tony Gonzales, who first lied about, then admitted, an affair with a staffer who had subsequently ended her life. In addition, “Several of Herrera’s videos show him reenacting historical assassinations,” Kadia Goba and Teo Armus report at The Washington Post, “including testing the type of guns that killed John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln or were used in various historical wars.” Herrera has also re-enacted the assassination of civil rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr.

There are two possible outcomes here, both of which must be the stuff of Johnson’s nightmares. That Herrera, an undisciplined nut job, racist and antisemite, joins the House and becomes another problem for leadership to solve; or that Democratic challenger Katy Padilla flips a district that Gonzales won by almost 25 points in 2024. Neither one of them is an outcome a functioning political party, or a functioning leader, would allow to happen.

That is Speaker Monkey’s problem in a nutshell: at this point, when he wins, he loses. So, he has decided, it seems, to do nothing.

Nothing, that is, but dangle.

Rose Byrne as Amanda Ogle. Image credit: Votiv Films

Last night I went to a movie in an actual theater to see Tow (Stephanie Laing: 2026), a true story about Amanda Ogle, who was living in her car in Seattle when it was towed. Played by Rose Byrne, Ogle embarks on a struggle to get her 1991 Toyota Camry back, a beater that is worthless to the people who have taken it and means everything to her. In the process, Amanda has to learn to face realities about how her life came to this point, and learn how to get to of her own way. There are terrific supporting roles by Octavia Spencer, Ariana DeBose, and Demi Lovato. You can also see Tow on Apple TV.

Can you convert to paid? $5!

Short takes:

What is at stake in the birthright citizenship case? Everything, and not just the 14th amendment, but the concept of a national citizenship defined by birth in this country, Jamelle Bouie writes at The New York Times. The 13th amendment, which outlawed subordination based on race or ethnicity, “was meant to outlaw hereditary caste as much as it was meant to end chattel slavery,” Bouie writes, and Trump aide Stephen Miller is working to do just that by exploring the right of states to exclude undocumented children from public school. “The effect of this change, if it were to become law, would be to mark about a million children as members of a subordinate class — a lower caste excluded from mainstream society.” (March 28, 2026)
Mukta Joshi of Mississippi Today took a deep dive into the ICE detention facilities owned and maintained by CoreCivic, Inc.: they are the biggest employer and largest taxpayer in Adams County. CoreCivic “owns or controls about 57% of all privately owned prison beds in the U.S.,” Joshi writes, and in 2024, its “revenue increased by nearly $200 million thanks largely to an increase in ICE detentions, according to the company’s latest annual report.” A men’s facility, “currently houses a small number of transgender women. Following President Trump’s 2025 executive order, transgender people are required to be incarcerated in facilities that align with their gender assigned at birth, regardless of their legal status.” Private facilities are not subject to public disclosure laws; using them not only puts money in the pockets of Trump allies, it also helps to obfuscate what goes on there. (March 27, 2026)
Less than a day before the event, University of Southern California president Beong-Soo Kim, concerned that controversy would overwhelm the event itself, canceled a gubernatorial debate because the local ABC affiliate refused to expand those on the stage to include candidates of color. “A chorus of California Democrats had called for a candidate boycott and urged voters not to tune in,” Tomo Chien whites at L.A. Material. “The exhortation from Democratic legislative leaders to invite the excluded candidates came as the state party grappled with a worrying possibility: that such a fractured Democratic field could lead to a historic upset. In that scenario, two Republicans could advance to the November general election, despite Democrats having a steep voter registration advantage in the state.” California has a so-called “jungle primary,” in which voters can vote for a candidate in either party, and the top two vote getters go to the general election. (March 24, 2026)

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