Keeping the House Absent, Johnson Marginalizes Congress and Himself

It has been over a month since there has been a policy debate or vote on the House floor. Spending legislation is not being considered. Oversight hearings are on hold until further notice.

Speaker Mike Johnson’s decision to put the House on an indefinite hiatus that is now stretching into its second month while the government is shut down is the latest in a series of moves he has made that have diminished the role of Congress and shrunken the speakership at a critical moment.

It’s an approach born of political expedience that could have far-reaching consequences for an institution that has already ceded much of its power to President Trump. And Mr. Johnson, who without the president’s backing wields little influence over his own members, has chosen to make himself subservient to Mr. Trump, a break with many speakers of the past who sought in their own ways to act more as a governing partner with the president than as his underling.

“I’m the speaker and the president,” Mr. Trump has joked, according to two people who heard the remark and relayed it on the condition of anonymity because of concern about sharing private conversations with him.

Mr. Johnson has done little in recent weeks to contest the point.

He has argued that the House, which under the Constitution has the sole power to initiate spending legislation, has no reason to meet as long as Senate Democrats are blocking a bill to reopen the government. He has refused to swear in Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat who won election a month ago and has sued in federal court to be allowed to take her seat, claiming he lacks the power to do so.

His strategy of indefinite hiatus means that Mr. Johnson has not engaged in the typical political theater that speakers often employ during shutdown fights to jam the party out of power: scheduling tricky votes on bills to reopen parks or pay certain categories of federal workers, like agents for Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Customs and Border Protection.

Democrats had been bracing for him to do so. But instead, he has spent much of the shutdown appearing daily at news conferences at the Capitol, hammering them for refusing to fund the government and making the case that Republicans need not negotiate. He is insistent that the House has nothing to do but wait for the stalemate to end. And he defends a growing list of extreme moves by Mr. Trump.

The absenteeism, people around Mr. Johnson said, is a strategic calculation that the best way to keep his unruly rank and file in line is to place them on an extended leave.

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich, who often serves as a sounding board for Mr. Johnson, said in an interview that if the House were in session, “other issues will begin to clutter this up, and there is some small danger that some Republicans might begin to have a mixed message on the shutdown.”

In fact, such dissonance has already begun bubbling up even with everyone working remotely. The divide among Republicans over whether to extend expiring health insurance subsidies — Democrats’ central demand in the shutdown fight — has highlighted a political vulnerability for the party.

It has all created a strange dynamic on Capitol Hill: Mr. Johnson appears to be using the considerable power of the speakership to render the House irrelevant.

Representative Beth Van Duyne, a hard-right Republican from Texas, spoke up on a private party conference call this week to say it was time for everyone to return to Washington. Representative Elise Stefanik, the New York Republican and Trump acolyte now eyeing a run for governor, has called for the House to return to take a floor vote on paying the troops during the shutdown.

And Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House adviser and “War Room” host who is close to many right-wing lawmakers in Congress, said he was growing more appalled by the day by Mr. Johnson’s decision to waste precious weeks doing absolutely nothing.

“The Trump revolution must be codified,” Mr. Bannon said in an interview. “Executive orders and presidential actions are great, but at some point you must make these things federal law or this can all be undone, all be reversed with a stroke of a pen. We need the E.O.’s turned into laws — and Johnson refuses to do this.”

A spokesman for Mr. Johnson asserted that House Republicans had passed bills codifying 59 of Mr. Trump’s executive orders, including as part of the sweeping tax cut and domestic policy law enacted over the summer. He also said that Mr. Johnson was the only congressional leader who had passed a bill to fund the government.

On other matters, Mr. Johnson appears to be bowing to purported restrictions on his authority where there are none. In justifying his stalling on seating Ms. Grijalva, he has argued that he cannot swear her in because she was elected while the House was out of session, a detail that has no bearing on his power to administer the oath to a duly elected member of Congress.

Democrats have accused him of protecting pedophiles, because Ms. Grijalva has vowed to provide the 218th and final signature needed on a petition that would force a floor vote on a measure calling on the Justice Department to release its files on the deceased convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Mr. Trump, a former friend of Mr. Epstein’s, opposes the release of the files.

More broadly, Democrats attribute Mr. Johnson’s moves to his unquestioning deference to Mr. Trump, who has an iron grip on congressional Republicans and this week told G.O.P. senators that after they pushed through his marquee tax cut law, “We don’t need to pass any more bills.”

“It is clear that Donald Trump has effectively abolished the House of Representatives,” former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, said in a statement for this story.

Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, recently pleaded with Mr. Trump to come back and negotiate with Democrats because “we know that House and Senate Republicans don’t do anything without permission from their boss, Donald J. Trump.”

When pressed on why he had not met with Mr. Johnson and Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, he stated straightforwardly: “Because Donald Trump has not given them permission to meet.”

Mr. Bannon has taken to calling Congress under its current leadership “the state Duma,” a reference to the legislative body in Russia that has limited power and can be dissolved by the president.

Some students of the institution argue that Mr. Johnson’s moves to marginalize himself and the chamber’s role risk doing permanent harm to the House.

“There are a lot of members on both sides of the aisle who haven’t been in Congress for long,” said Molly Reynolds, a senior fellow in governance studies at the left-leaning Brookings Institution. “If you’re new to the House since the last long shutdown, you’re learning from this experience that what the Republican speaker does is not do anything. That starts to shape your understanding of how the institution should be behaving.”

At the same time that he has effectively taken the House out of the equation for resolving the shutdown impasse, Mr. Johnson has continued to act as the president’s defender.

After Mr. Trump circulated an A.I.-generated video of him dumping feces from a bomber jet over peaceful protesters, Mr. Johnson sang his praises.

“The president uses social media to make the point,” he told reporters who asked him about the image on Monday. “You can argue he’s probably the most effective person who’s ever used social media for that.”

Mr. Johnson’s enthusiastic defense of the crude post underscored how much he has changed over the past 10 years. Back in 2015, he wrote on Facebook of Mr. Trump: “I just don’t think he has the demeanor to be President.”

In recent days, Mr. Johnson has also defended the president’s decision to commute the sentence of former Representative George Santos of New York, the serial con man. “We believe in redemption,” he said.

He said he saw nothing wrong with the president demanding that the Justice Department pay him $230 million for federal investigations into him, saying, “I know that he believes he’s owed that reimbursement.”

And the speaker was satisfied with Mr. Trump’s decision to demolish the East Wing of the White House, without consulting Congress, to make way for a new ballroom.

“The ballroom,” Mr. Johnson said, “is going to be glorious.”