President Donald Trump joked about his many responsibilities in recent White House closed-door meetings.
The president has reportedly teased House Speaker Mike Johnson over who really runs the House, as Johnson often comes to him to help unify the party for votes.
“I have two jobs: being president and being speaker,” Trump laughed at one gathering with Johnson and other party leaders, according to NOTUS. But under the joke is a more serious issue, the House Speaker is having to turn to the president time and again to get Republicans on the same page about the party’s agenda.
“Johnson can lose only two Republican votes on any partisan legislation, and the disparate factions of his caucus are often diametrically opposed to each other. That’s usually when Johnson gets Trump to make phone calls to holdouts and the president berates them until they do what he wants,” the outlet explained.
“He’s the one getting everyone in line,” one Republican representative said of the president.
This power dynamic became most evident during last year’s reconciliation bill negotiations, when the president was personally calling GOP holdouts.
From NOTUS:
Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Indiana) was handed a phone with Trump on the other end of the line in the cloakroom off the House floor. Two sources described Spartz as trying to talk while noticeably crying during the call. After they were done and she left the cloakroom, Trump, who was on speakerphone, said: “I have no fucking idea what she just said.” (A spokesperson for Spartz disputed the account as “incorrect” but said she does not share her private conversations.)
When Johnson was trying to hold onto the gavel in January last year, Trump actively called the members who had voted against the speaker and convinced them to flip their votes.
The outlet further claims that, aside from getting help holding the party together, Johnson has also “handed over other powers that usually rest with the speaker.” Quoting two sources willing to speak with NOTUS, “Johnson has in several instances directed members seeking to bring legislation to the floor to obtain the administration’s approval first.”
“It is a total shirking of responsibilities to the White House. Everything has to be preordained and pre-blessed, and there’s very little that we’re able to have our own will on. We should be empowered to pass our own priorities, not just follow what the mandate of the day is,” a second GOP representative said.
But one senior aide thinks that this is likely a positive thing, rather than a negative one.
“Given that the President has to sign the bills that Congress passes for them to become law, it stands to reason that the White House would have input into and help pass the legislative agenda that Republican House Members and the President ran on and that 77.3 million Americans voted for,” they reasoned.
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Sierra Marlee is a millennial whose hunger for the truth in a world of fake news has led her to write. Marlee also contributes to BizPac Review.
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