Mike Johnson may be the most even-keeled, unflappable leader I’ve ever known in my years of observing Congress. His razor-thin Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives—at least until November 5th, when 435 members of the House will be up for reelection—virtually assures power plays and legislative gamesmanship by some members of Congress who are not as clued into the big picture as Speaker Johnson is.
However, on the Salem Media Group news program, THIS WEEK ON THE HILL with Tony Perkins, the frustrations of this past week’s battles over keeping the federal government fully funded after September 30th were evident.
First, the House defeated a Continuing Resolution containing the SAVE Act, an astonishing move that torpedoed the much-needed safeguard against illegals voting in the 2024 presidential election. As outlined in my earlier columns, SAVE (the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act) would codify the need for anyone registering to vote to provide incontrovertible proof of American citizenship. This would close the loopholes many Democrat-controlled cities and states have concocted, which allow “undocumented” individuals (CODE: illegals) to vote in local elections.
Of course, it doesn’t take a brainiac cosmologist like Stephen Hawking to figure out that there’s only one ballot available when “visitors” from Venezuela, Mexico, or Yemen walk into a voting booth…thus there’s no way to prevent them from browsing above the contests for city council or county treasurer and casting a ballot also for—wild guess—Kamala Harris.
Always the diplomat, Mike Johnson didn’t call out any specific congressmen by name when recapping this week’s defeat of the SAVE Act. Instead, he calmly noted in a sports analogy, “We ran the first play—because of how important election security is—and we attached the SAVE ACT to a resolution this week to keep the government funded. We tried to get it over the line and fell slightly short. It is very disappointing to fail to get across the goal line, but we’ll now go back to the playbook; we’ll work through this weekend, and we’ll have something new on the House floor next week to be sure we get the job done.”
Personally, I have zero respect for members of Congress—Democrats or Republicans—who, for personal reasons or political posturing or just plain myopia, chose to defeat the SAVE Act so close to the most important election in American history. Especially at a time when our nation—thanks to Kamala Harris and Joe Biden—is literally overrun by migrants who thought nothing of breaking the law to sneak into the United States and now, barring a Hail Mary by the Speaker, will also be allowed to vote for our next President.
Beyond securing our federal elections from being impacted by illegals, this week’s House vote was also aimed at stopping Leftist legislators from once again “playing chicken” with House leadership and slapping together another horrible year-end omnibus bill packed with all sorts of pet projects and goodies to expand liberals’ grip on America, all at the expense of taxpayers.
“This is no way to run a railroad,” observed Speaker Johnson. “That’s the way federal funding has been done around here for a couple of decades now,” he notes, adding that since he became Speaker last year, he’s been trying to break what he calls the Christmas omnibus fever. “That’s where the Senate jams the House right before Christmas Eve when everybody is anxious to get home so they cram in a couple trillion dollars of spending in a 3,000 or 4,000 page piece of legislation that no one’s read.”
Mike Johnson is correct that this is not how government should operate. But until legislators on both sides of the aisle stop caring more about potentially grabbing a committee chairmanship or furthering the ham-handed goals of their political parties at the expense of We The People…the charade of “representative” government goes on.
Maybe Donald Trump has only revealed half of the equation. Instead of just moving to “
Drain the Swamp”…perhaps it is time to check out who voted against the SAVE Act this week and, on November 5th, move to also selectively Drain The Congress.
Tom Tradup is V.P./News & Talk Programming for Dallas-based Salem Radio Network and serves as Executive Producer of THIS WEEK ON THE HILL with Tony Perkins, heard on leading radio stations nationwide and seen Saturdays at 10am Eastern time on the Salem News Channel.
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