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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsI am not and never have been a fan of Facebook
but there is a person there named Tonnocus McClain who posted a multi-page argument that Mike Johnson has no intention of reconvening the House of Representatives. I've read his argument via a cobbled together cut and pasted then printed document. I understand Facebook has taken the post down more than once. It is pretty convincing. If someone here has a working link to the document, please post it. Here is a brief quote from it:
By weaponizing time, Johnson found that the soft underbelly of the republic isn't ideology or partisanship-it's process. Through the manipulation of something as ordinary as the congressional calendar, the United States has stumbled into the unacknowledged suspension of its own legislative branch.
Scary stuff.
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ON EDIT. SEE POST 5 BELOW FOR THE FULL TEXT. POST 11 BELOW IS NEARER TO THE TOP OF THE THREAD AND HAS THE FULL TEXT.
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Nittersing
(8,041 posts)rzemanfl
(31,063 posts)Is the post there or just the comments? I got like a two-second glimpse.
Gore1FL
(22,802 posts)rzemanfl
(31,063 posts)I have always agreed with your username.
Celerity
(53,414 posts)Facebook keeps taking down this post. Meanwhile, people in other platforms are sharing it with me. What a surreal experience. I'm going to keep posting it, no matter how the algorithm tries to stifle me:
This is the post that you don’t want to read. And you don’t have to. But in a very short period of time, these things will find you anyway.
First, I’ve pointed out three areas of the most current American cognitive dissonance. I guarantee you are struggling to navigate AT LEAST one of them.
Second, I’ve listed nine reasons why the House of Representatives specifically is no more. I saved the most devastating reasons for the final few. Read them, if you dare.
And it all has to do with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson…
But first…the cognitive dissonance of the Right:
Observing Trump bend, circumvent, or break the law to benefit his friends yet pervert the law to terrorize his enemies is somehow ‘good for America’ and will only help Republicans while only targeting Democrats.
Bolton and Comey are both Republicans. No one is safe from the whims of the Great Leader.
And…the cognitive dissonance of the Left:
You can’t believe the 2024 Presidential election was manipulated and not ring every alarm to ensure it can’t happen again.
If everything is left exactly the way things were left in November, the Democrats will mysteriously never win a majority again.
Finally…the cognitive dissonance of America:
No Speaker of the House who seriously wants to end this government shutdown would disband Congress with no firm date to return. Period.
It is simply impossible to navigate negotiations of any kind and also not be at work. In fact, not only do the actions of the Speaker more closely align with those of a person not planning to reopen the federal government anytime soon, his actions suggest he isn’t planning to reopen it at all.
1. Never before has a Speaker kept the House out of session for this long during an active shutdown. The House has been in continuous recess for weeks, not holding even pro-forma sessions.
2. Never before has a Speaker used congressional recesses as leverage to halt all legislative business during a national funding crisis. Johnson’s open-ended congressional recess is being used as a shield from responsibility rather than as negotiation pressure. That’s entirely new.
3. No Speaker in American history (Democrat or Republican) has refused to seat a duly elected and certified member because of a shutdown, recess, or fill-in-the-blank.
Even during the Civil War, both World Wars, and the COVID-19 pandemic, members were sworn in and seated promptly. Johnson’s delay in swearing in Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva until “the government reopens” is therefore without modern or historical precedent.
4. No Speaker has ever blocked continuing resolutions (CRs) altogether. CRs are standard tools to reopen government temporarily while negotiations continue.
Johnson refusing to bring any CRs/short-term funding bills forward at all unless Democrats accept his policy terms effectively freezes the process and weaponizes the shutdown itself.
5. This is a biggie: In 114 years of congressional history, no Speaker has neutralized the power of the discharge petition through calendar manipulation.
By extending recess sessions in order to prevent members from gathering signatures or filing new discharge petitions, Johnson is effectively freezing an essential minority power.
It was invented specifically to prevent a Speaker from doing what Johnson is now doing–controlling the floor so tightly that a bipartisan majority can’t act.
The petition process depends on the basics of a functioning House: It has to meet every few days. The Clerk has to be present with the Clerk’s desk open for signatures.
A House in recess has neither, functionally suspending majority rule. Now, even if a majority of the House wanted to act on government funding or transparency, it literally cannot because the Speaker’s recess schedule makes democracy procedurally impossible.
6. No Speaker has ever paused virtually all committee activity, including investigations unrelated to appropriations because that dismantles one of the foundational doctrines America was founded on: our system of checks and balances. Oversight is Congress’s core check on executive power.
Under Article I, Congress has both appropriations (the power of the purse) and oversight (the power of inquiry). When oversight is frozen, the executive branch effectively operates without scrutiny and without fear of subpoenas, negative testimony, or being compelled to produce any necessary documentation.
This reduces government accountability. Agencies (like ICE) can act without fear of being questioned by committees like Oversight, Judiciary, or Homeland Security. Inspectors general, whistleblowers, and watchdogs lose their main allies in Congress.
While the freeze continues, the Executive Branch (the President) becomes functionally unchecked, a condition the Founders explicitly tried to prevent.
7. No Speaker in American history has skipped pro-forma sessions... because doing so effectively causes the House of Representatives itself to stop existing as a functioning body for that period.
In modern history, the House and Senate always hold pro-forma sessions during recesses and shutdowns. They often appear silly, sometimes with just a single member of Congress present, but in doing so, they guarantee that Congress is never fully adjourned, even during a recess.
Speaker Johnson choosing to skip them:
- means that the House is not legally in session at all. That’s rare outside of wartime emergencies or pandemic lockdowns.
- raises serious constitutional questions. If the House is not meeting at least every three days, it arguably violates Article I, Section 5’s adjournment clause.
- disables mechanisms like the filing and signing of discharge petitions, the introduction or referral of bills, and prevents an immediate congressional response to national crises or budget deadlines.
- neutralizes formally convening oversight committees, giving the President free rein to do whatever he wants as long as the freeze continues.
- places the entire House in suspended animation: legally silent, procedurally frozen in amber, and unavailable to act…until the Speaker calls it back.
- concentrates total control of the chamber’s calendar–and its very existence–in the Speaker’s hands.
8. The Hidden Coup Within the Calendar
By failing to publish a calendar or set a date of return, the Speaker of the House caused the House of Representatives to cease to exist as an active governing body… and nobody noticed.
I know it sounds like I’m trying to make the most benign-sounding entry on this list into the worst of conspiracy theories, but as Samuel L. Jackson says in Jurassic Park, hold onto your butts.
It’s a huge and complicated ploy. (Spoiler alert: It’s devastating for America.)
I. The House of Representatives just … stopped.
The House isn’t a continuous institution, it only exists when it’s formally in session. Committees can’t meet or issue subpoenas if the chamber isn’t convened. The Clerk’s office can’t receive bill filings, amendments, or discharge-petition signatures unless the House is legally “gaveled in.”
Without a live session, even the most redundant action freezes: you can’t introduce bills, record testimony, or exercise authority. Every mechanism just … stops.
On paper, the House still exists, but in reality, it’s in suspended animation. And the Speaker’s 48-hour recall rule is actually a death note of paralysis dressed up as flexibility. Members are told to stay “on standby,” ready to return to Washington within two days of notice.
You see, it’s the calendar that makes the Participation, even possible. Members juggle hundreds of staff, district obligations, and fixed travel windows.
A published schedule lets them plan hearings, show up for votes, and coordinate oversight. Without that schedule, they’re forced into immobility, for fear of missing a vote entirely.
This tactic keeps Congress in permanent limbo. It’s neither adjourned nor active. It’s just … waiting.
II. Accountability and Oversight Evaporates
By withholding the public legislative calendar, the Speaker sealed the only real window the people have into how their government works.
Without a predictable schedule to anchor responsibility, nobody knows when the government is failing in its promises or whom to blame.
When the public can’t see Congress work, they lose their most basic tool of oversight: knowing when government business happens. The House calendar decides when members must be in Washington, when votes will be held, and when committees meet.
It is the frame that keeps the window clear. When a Speaker hides or shifts that calendar unpredictably, transparency vanishes, and the public can’t tell when—or even if—their representatives are working.
Reporters can’t pinpoint when a missed vote, broken promise, or delayed bill should have been handled. Constituents can’t say, “You failed to vote on X last week,” because there was no published “last week.”
No votes can occur. There’s no mechanism to restart proceedings or challenge the Speaker’s schedule. The Speaker becomes the sole decider of when government acts, making criticism easy to deflect.
Skipping a voicemail is far easier than facing an enraged constituent outside the Capitol.
The public loses its ability to monitor its government, and the government loses the ability to monitor itself. Oversight, subpoenas, and investigations are all creatures of the calendar—every act of fact-finding, every witness summons, every document request, every hearing notice depends on a legislative day to give it legal force.
When the calendar stops, compliance deadlines freeze, giving targets an excuse to stall or destroy records. Agencies can ignore document requests without consequence because there’s no convened authority to back them.
Congressional subpoenas draw power from an active committee of an active chamber. When the House is not in session, the Clerk’s office and the Sergeant at Arms can’t process or enforce them.
If a committee’s authority expires or the session lapses, pending subpoenas can be challenged in court as unenforceable because Congress itself is technically adjourned. Recipients exploit that, arguing that “no active Congress” means “no active compulsory power.”
Without a session to hang them on, committees can’t schedule hearings, report findings, or issue subpoenas. Extended, unscheduled recesses break quorum cycles, which means committees can’t technically meet at all—let alone vote to compel testimony.
Whistleblowers have no entity for which to whistle. Staff authority to conduct depositions, interviews, or travel investigations exists only “under direction of a sitting committee.”
When the House isn’t formally convened, that direction disappears; staff are barred from continuing fieldwork, their authority dissolved. Investigations stall, evidence vanishes, witnesses step back, and oversight momentum dies.
The power to demand answers—a cornerstone of congressional authority—simply evaporates.
III. And then there’s the Constitution…
Under Article I, the House of Representatives exists not merely to legislate, but to serve as the people’s check on an unruly executive. It is the constitutional barrier through which every act of presidential power must pass for scrutiny.
When that barrier is suspended, even briefly, the balance between the branches tilts. The executive no longer faces a coequal body capable of restraint—only a silent one.
When one person controls the calendar absolutely, Congress stops being a collective body. The House’s institutional independence erodes; it ceases to function as a body and becomes an extension of the Speaker’s whims.
Over time, a presidency-heavy balance starts to feel normal, shrinking the legislative check. The legislative branch fades into irrelevance, granting the executive freer rein.
The Founders explicitly feared an unrestrained executive and deliberately empowered the House to prevent it. America was created by escaping a belligerent king.
So the Founders designed the House to be the most immediate representative of the people—directly elected and frequently renewed—so it could check executive excess in real time.
That is why the House’s ability to convene, investigate, and hold hearings is not procedural housekeeping. It is the mechanism of the republic’s self-defense: the process by which abuses are exposed, the President is called to account, and every branch is reminded that it serves the people, not itself.
Without that mechanism, the President faces no scrutiny, no subpoenas, no deadlines, no check on unilateral action. What the framers feared most—an executive governing without oversight—arrives not through war or revolution…but through the quiet absence of a calendar.
This is not the government they designed. It is the one they warned us about.
IV. The Quiet Erasure of a Branch
Congress’s most fundamental check on executive and corporate power—the foundation of its very existence—dies. The House has been silently defunded, not through legislation but through time itself.
When the Speaker erased that calendar, Congress’s authority to find facts, question power, and enforce accountability—the lifeblood of its legitimacy—was quietly gutted.
Johnson hollowed out its agency and relevance by the simple act of not calling the House back to work.
This is why the calendar is not a bureaucratic formality; it is the heartbeat of constitutional oversight. The genius and danger of this maneuver is that it leaves no clear act to challenge.
Johnson doesn’t have to suspend Congress formally (which would be unconstitutional); he only has to never reconvene it.
As long as the Speaker’s chair remains vacant, so does the House itself.
In effect, Johnson has done through omission what extremists and hostile powers could never achieve through force: he has hollowed out the investigative heart of Congress while leaving its shell intact.
The chamber can no longer investigate anything—including the Speaker himself. This maneuver accomplishes what no coup, insurrection, or hostile power has ever managed—the quiet nullification of the legislative branch through mundane procedure.
By weaponizing time, Johnson found that the soft underbelly of the republic isn’t ideology or partisanship—it’s process.
Through the manipulation of something as ordinary as the congressional calendar, the United States has stumbled into the unacknowledged suspension of its own legislative branch.
The result is a Congress that looks alive from the outside—members still going on CNN and FOX News, staff still answering phones and dodging constituent questions.
But that normal-seeming routine is a façade, concealing Congress’s current reality: the slow, bureaucratic death of representative democracy.
And the longer this continues, the harder it becomes to turn things around. Every day that passes without a published calendar, without pro forma sessions, without committees in motion, is another day the legislative branch erodes.
The return of what we once took for granted grows less likely, and the idea of a permanently diminished Congress begins to feel normal.
The longer this goes on, the longer the President acts without fear of constitutional consequence.
That is why this point matters more than all the others combined: through silence and scheduling, the Speaker has rendered Congress unable to do the one thing that defines it—to seek truth, demand accountability, and defend the republic it was created to protect.
9. This is what first made me question what’s happening with the House. I had heard the outrageous news that the Speaker of the House was delaying swearing in a duly elected member of Congress and making it contingent on the reopening of the government.
And I also know that Speaker Mike Johnson does everything Donald Trump wants him to do. That’s how he got his job and that’s what he’s all about. Full stop.
So when I hear this man declare that the 218th vote needed to release the Epstein files will be sworn in when the government reopens, that broadcasts to me that the government will never reopen.
By making her oath dependent on an event he alone controls, Johnson ensures that both the swearing-in and the reopening remain perpetually out of reach.
Once Grijalva takes her seat, the House regains the 218 votes needed to compel action on multiple fronts, like removing the Speaker’s power to single-handedly dissolve the House of Representatives for one thing and another would be the long-delayed release of the Epstein files.
That single vote would unlock subpoena power, trigger committee filings, and make it procedurally impossible to continue hiding what powerful people most fear seeing made public.
Trump’s motivation couldn’t be clearer: keeping those files buried is existential. Johnson’s job is to make sure the vote that could unearth them never happens — and the easiest way to do that is to keep the House itself dormant.
And if you think it’s speculation, you haven’t paid attention to all the other points on this list. All of his actions are pointing in one direction: The federal government is done. And certainly the House of Representatives.
The Speaker’s “wait until the government reopens” line isn’t a promise. It’s a firewall. It transforms the shutdown from a crisis to a containment strategy — a way to freeze the legislative branch precisely where it is safest for those who have the most to lose.
So let’s call it what it is: the government isn’t “waiting to reopen.” It’s been locked shut, deliberately and indefinitely. The only question I have is how long is it going to take for the rest of the world to realize it?
rzemanfl
(31,063 posts)
pnwmom
(110,171 posts)She says, for one thing, that the House MUST convene on Jan. 3. So we'll see. I hope she's right.
elleng
(141,926 posts)and I am sick.
Silent Type
(12,305 posts)
dweller
(27,691 posts)Facebook keeps taking down this post. Meanwhile, people in other platforms are sharing it with me. What a surreal experience. I'm going to keep posting it, no matter how the algorithm tries to stifle me:
This is the post that you don’t want to read. And you don’t have to. But in a very short period of time, these things will find you anyway.
First, I’ve pointed out three areas of the most current American cognitive dissonance. I guarantee you are struggling to navigate AT LEAST one of them.
Second, I’ve listed nine reasons why the House of Representatives specifically is no more. I saved the most devastating reasons for the final few. Read them, if you dare.
And it all has to do with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson…
But first…the cognitive dissonance of the Right:
Observing Trump bend, circumvent, or break the law to benefit his friends yet pervert the law to terrorize his enemies is somehow ‘good for America’ and will only help Republicans while only targeting Democrats.
Bolton and Comey are both Republicans. No one is safe from the whims of the Great Leader.
And…the cognitive dissonance of the Left:
You can’t believe the 2024 Presidential election was manipulated and not ring every alarm to ensure it can’t happen again.
If everything is left exactly the way things were left in November, the Democrats will mysteriously never win a majority again.
Finally…the cognitive dissonance of America:
No Speaker of the House who seriously wants to end this government shutdown would disband Congress with no firm date to return. Period.
It is simply impossible to navigate negotiations of any kind and also not be at work. In fact, not only do the actions of the Speaker more closely align with those of a person not planning to reopen the federal government anytime soon, his actions suggest he isn’t planning to reopen it at all.
1. Never before has a Speaker kept the House out of session for this long during an active shutdown. The House has been in continuous recess for weeks, not holding even pro-forma sessions.
2. Never before has a Speaker used congressional recesses as leverage to halt all legislative business during a national funding crisis. Johnson’s open-ended congressional recess is being used as a shield from responsibility rather than as negotiation pressure. That’s entirely new.
3. No Speaker in American history (Democrat or Republican) has refused to seat a duly elected and certified member because of a shutdown, recess, or fill-in-the-blank. Even during the Civil War, both World Wars, and the COVID-19 pandemic, members were sworn in and seated promptly. Johnson’s delay in swearing in Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva until “the government reopens” is therefore without modern or historical precedent.
4. No Speaker has ever blocked continuing resolutions (CRs) altogether. CRs are standard tools to reopen government temporarily while negotiations continue. Johnson refusing to bring any CRs/short-term funding bills forward at all unless Democrats accept his policy terms effectively freezes the process and weaponizes the shutdown itself.
5. This is a biggie: In 114 years of congressional history, no Speaker has neutralized the power of the discharge petition through calendar manipulation. By extending recess sessions in order to prevent members from gathering signatures or filing new discharge petitions, Johnson is effectively freezing an essential minority power. It was invented specifically to prevent a Speaker from doing what Johnson is now doing–controlling the floor so tightly that a bipartisan majority can’t act.
The petition process depends on the basics of a functioning House: It has to meet every few days. The Clerk has to be present with the Clerk’s desk open for signatures. A House in recess has neither, functionally suspending majority rule. Now, even if a majority of the House wanted to act on government funding or transparency, it literally cannot because the Speaker’s recess schedule makes democracy procedurally impossible.
6. No Speaker has ever paused virtually all committee activity, including investigations unrelated to appropriations because that dismantles one of the foundational doctrines America was founded on: our system of checks and balances. Oversight is Congress’s core check on executive power. Under Article I, Congress has both appropriations (the power of the purse) and oversight (the power of inquiry). When oversight is frozen, the executive branch effectively operates without scrutiny and without fear of subpoenas, negative testimony, or being compelled to produce any necessary documentation. This reduces government accountability. Agencies (like ICE) can act without fear of being questioned by committees like Oversight, Judiciary, or Homeland Security. Inspectors general, whistleblowers, and watchdogs lose their main allies in Congress. While the freeze continues, the Executive Branch (the President) becomes functionally unchecked, a condition the Founders explicitly tried to prevent.
7. No Speaker in American history has skipped pro-forma sessions... because doing so effectively causes the House of Representatives itself to stop existing as a functioning body for that period.
In modern history, the House and Senate always hold pro-forma sessions during recesses and shutdowns. They often appear silly, sometimes with just a single member of Congress present, but in doing so, they guarantee that Congress is never fully adjourned, even during a recess.
Speaker Johnson choosing to skip them:
- means that the House is not legally in session at all. That’s rare outside of wartime emergencies or pandemic lockdowns.
- raises serious constitutional questions. If the House is not meeting at least every three days, it arguably violates Article I, Section 5’s adjournment clause.
- disables mechanisms like the filing and signing of discharge petitions, the introduction or referral of bills, and prevents an immediate congressional response to national crises or budget deadlines.
- neutralizes formally convening oversight
committees, giving the President free rein to do whatever he wants as long as the freeze continues.
- places the entire House in suspended animation: legally silent, procedurally frozen in amber, and unavailable to act…until the Speaker calls it back.
- concentrates total control of the chamber’s calendar–and its very existence–in the Speaker’s hands.
8. The Hidden Coup Within the Calendar
By failing to publish a calendar or set a date of return, the Speaker of the House caused the House of Representatives to cease to exist as an active governing body… and nobody noticed.
I know it sounds like I’m trying to make the most benign-sounding entry on this list into the worst of conspiracy theories, but as Samuel L. Jackson says in Jurassic Park, hold onto your butts.
It’s a huge and complicated ploy. (Spoiler alert: It’s devastating for America.)
I. The House of Representatives just … stopped.
The House isn’t a continuous institution, it only exists when it’s formally in session. Committees can’t meet or issue subpoenas if the chamber isn’t convened. The Clerk’s office can’t receive bill filings, amendments, or discharge-petition signatures unless the House is legally “gaveled in.”
Without a live session, even the most redundant action freezes: you can’t introduce bills, record testimony, or exercise authority. Every mechanism just … stops. On paper, the House still exists, but in reality, it’s in suspended animation. And the Speaker’s 48-hour recall rule is actually a death note of paralysis dressed up as flexibility. Members are told to stay “on standby,” ready to return to Washington within two days of notice.
You see, it’s the calendar that makes the Participation, even possible. Members juggle hundreds of staff, district obligations, and fixed travel windows. A published schedule lets them plan hearings, show up for votes, and coordinate oversight. Without that schedule, they’re forced into immobility, for fear of missing a vote entirely.
This tactic keeps Congress in permanent limbo. It’s neither adjourned nor active. It’s just … waiting.
II. Accountability and Oversight Evaporates
By withholding the public legislative calendar, the Speaker sealed the only real window the people have into how their government works. Without a predictable schedule to anchor responsibility, nobody knows when the government is failing in its promises or whom to blame.
When the public can’t see Congress work, they lose their most basic tool of oversight: knowing when government business happens. The House calendar decides when members must be in Washington, when votes will be held, and when committees meet. It is the frame that keeps the window clear. When a Speaker hides or shifts that calendar unpredictably, transparency vanishes, and the public can’t tell when—or even if—their representatives are working. Reporters can’t pinpoint when a missed vote, broken promise, or delayed bill should have been handled. Constituents can’t say, “You failed to vote on X last week,” because there was no published “last week.”
No votes can occur. There’s no mechanism to restart proceedings or challenge the Speaker’s schedule. The Speaker becomes the sole decider of when government acts, making criticism easy to deflect. Skipping a voicemail is far easier than facing an enraged constituent outside the Capitol.
The public loses its ability to monitor its government, and the government loses the ability to monitor itself. Oversight, subpoenas, and investigations are all creatures of the calendar—every act of fact-finding, every witness summons, every document request, every hearing notice depends on a legislative day to give it legal force. When the calendar stops, compliance deadlines freeze, giving targets an excuse to stall or destroy records. Agencies can ignore document requests without consequence because there’s no convened authority to back them.
Congressional subpoenas draw power from an active committee of an active chamber. When the House is not in session, the Clerk’s office and the Sergeant at Arms can’t process or enforce them. If a committee’s authority expires or the session lapses, pending subpoenas can be challenged in court as unenforceable because Congress itself is technically adjourned. Recipients exploit that, arguing that “no active Congress” means “no active compulsory power.”
Without a session to hang them on, committees can’t schedule hearings, report findings, or issue subpoenas. Extended, unscheduled recesses break quorum cycles, which means committees can’t technically meet at all—let alone vote to compel testimony.
Whistleblowers have no entity for which to whistle. Staff authority to conduct depositions, interviews, or travel investigations exists only “under direction of a sitting committee.” When the House isn’t formally convened, that direction disappears; staff are barred from continuing fieldwork, their authority dissolved. Investigations stall, evidence vanishes, witnesses step back, and oversight momentum dies. The power to demand answers—a cornerstone of congressional authority—simply evaporates.
III. And then there’s the Constitution…
Under Article I, the House of Representatives exists not merely to legislate, but to serve as the people’s check on an unruly executive. It is the constitutional barrier through which every act of presidential power must pass for scrutiny. When that barrier is suspended, even briefly, the balance between the branches tilts. The executive no longer faces a coequal body capable of restraint—only a silent one.
When one person controls the calendar absolutely, Congress stops being a collective body. The House’s institutional independence erodes; it ceases to function as a body and becomes an extension of the Speaker’s whims.
Over time, a presidency-heavy balance starts to feel normal, shrinking the legislative check. The legislative branch fades into irrelevance, granting the executive freer rein.
The Founders explicitly feared an unrestrained executive and deliberately empowered the House to prevent it. America was created by escaping a belligerent king. So the Founders designed the House to be the most immediate representative of the people—directly elected and frequently renewed—so it could check executive excess in real time. That is why the House’s ability to convene, investigate, and hold hearings is not procedural housekeeping. It is the mechanism of the republic’s self-defense: the process by which abuses are exposed, the President is called to account, and every branch is reminded that it serves the people, not itself.
Without that mechanism, the President faces no scrutiny, no subpoenas, no deadlines, no check on unilateral action. What the framers feared most—an executive governing without oversight—arrives not through war or revolution…but through the quiet absence of a calendar.
This is not the government they designed. It is the one they warned us about.
IV. The Quiet Erasure of a Branch
Congress’s most fundamental check on executive and corporate power—the foundation of its very existence—dies. The House has been silently defunded, not through legislation but through time itself. When the Speaker erased that calendar, Congress’s authority to find facts, question power, and enforce accountability—the lifeblood of its legitimacy—was quietly gutted. Johnson hollowed out its agency and relevance by the simple act of not calling the House back to work.
This is why the calendar is not a bureaucratic formality; it is the heartbeat of constitutional oversight. The genius and danger of this maneuver is that it leaves no clear act to challenge. Johnson doesn’t have to suspend Congress formally (which would be unconstitutional); he only has to never reconvene it. As long as the Speaker’s chair remains vacant, so does the House itself.
In effect, Johnson has done through omission what extremists and hostile powers could never achieve through force: he has hollowed out the investigative heart of Congress while leaving its shell intact. The chamber can no longer investigate anything—including the Speaker himself. This maneuver accomplishes what no coup, insurrection, or hostile power has ever managed—the quiet nullification of the legislative branch through mundane procedure.
By weaponizing time, Johnson found that the soft underbelly of the republic isn’t ideology or partisanship—it’s process. Through the manipulation of something as ordinary as the congressional calendar, the United States has stumbled into the unacknowledged suspension of its own legislative branch.
The result is a Congress that looks alive from the outside—members still going on CNN and FOX News, staff still answering phones and dodging constituent questions. But that normal-seeming routine is a façade, concealing Congress’s current reality: the slow, bureaucratic death of representative democracy.
And the longer this continues, the harder it becomes to turn things around. Every day that passes without a published calendar, without pro forma sessions, without committees in motion, is another day the legislative branch erodes. The return of what we once took for granted grows less likely, and the idea of a permanently diminished Congress begins to feel normal.
The longer this goes on, the longer the President acts without fear of constitutional consequence.
That is why this point matters more than all the others combined: through silence and scheduling, the Speaker has rendered Congress unable to do the one thing that defines it—to seek truth, demand accountability, and defend the republic it was created to protect.
9. This is what first made me question what’s happening with the House. I had heard the outrageous news that the Speaker of the House was delaying swearing in a duly elected member of Congress and making it contingent on the reopening of the government. And I also know that Speaker Mike Johnson does everything Donald Trump wants him to do. That’s how he got his job and that’s what he’s all about. Full stop.
So when I hear this man declare that the 218th vote needed to release the Epstein files will be sworn in when the government reopens, that broadcasts to me that the government will never reopen. By making her oath dependent on an event he alone controls, Johnson ensures that both the swearing-in and the reopening remain perpetually out of reach.
Once Grijalva takes her seat, the House regains the 218 votes needed to compel action on multiple fronts, like removing the Speaker’s power to single-handedly dissolve the House of Representatives for one thing and another would be the long-delayed release of the Epstein files. That single vote would unlock subpoena power, trigger committee filings, and make it procedurally impossible to continue hiding what powerful people most fear seeing made public.
Trump’s motivation couldn’t be clearer: keeping those files buried is existential. Johnson’s job is to make sure the vote that could unearth them never happens — and the easiest way to do that is to keep the House itself dormant.
And if you think it’s speculation, you haven’t paid attention to all the other points on this list. All of his actions are pointing in one direction: The federal government is done. And certainly the House of Representatives.
The Speaker’s “wait until the government reopens” line isn’t a promise. It’s a firewall. It transforms the shutdown from a crisis to a containment strategy — a way to freeze the legislative branch precisely where it is safest for those who have the most to lose.
So let’s call it what it is: the government isn’t “waiting to reopen.” It’s been locked shut, deliberately and indefinitely. The only question I have is how long is it going to take for the rest of the world to realize it?
#like #like #like
rzemanfl
(31,063 posts)
misanthrope
(9,337 posts)One of them being just yesterday, Oct. 21. I think there is also another planned for Friday, Oct. 24.
usonian
(23,034 posts)That is all.
He hopes to gain absolute power before it happens.
more here
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220735608
Baitball Blogger
(51,596 posts)Otherwise, it would be far too easy to dismantle this government.
rzemanfl
(31,063 posts)Not a good time for litigation. Besides the administration says "fuck the courts."
rurallib
(64,490 posts)
PCIntern
(27,926 posts)I must needs make phone calls. FB is part and parcel of the infrastructure of our lives, like it or not. When I was growing up, we all knew one family who refused to purchase a tv. Even progressive intellectuals would eyeroll at this particular declaration.
rzemanfl
(31,063 posts)I can remember party lines. Too old for this stuff.
pnwmom
(110,171 posts)rzemanfl
(31,063 posts)I know it wasn’t that way in the past.
kimbutgar
(26,634 posts)Johnson and the repute party and the corporatists who support him wants to end our democracy and made the orange turd a dictator.
And unfortunately all 3 branches are on the same page. The Supreme Court made themselves moot by giving the tuckfrump unlimited executive power. We’ve taken to the streets this past weekend and it was ho hum for them. They’re sending military in the streets to attack American citizen( which is against out constitution] but we need to do an economic boycott and not buy items not spending money. We should all start STOCKpiling the essentials for when that day or even week is declared. We need a national economic blackout day. Don’t leave your house or spend any money. And unfortunately our media is in cohoots with the orange a hole and his thugs. We need to fight back and punch hard where it hurts them in their wallets.
relayerbob
(7,337 posts)The group that created Project 2025 did, and have been working that angle for years. How do you think we have such a fucked up SCOTUS. They had to have all the pieces in place to fully implement the permanent destruction of the US, which they now do. Johnson is just another pawn, albeit a fully willing participant.
But don't give him that much credit.
rzemanfl
(31,063 posts)McClain pretty much says it is about keeping the lid on the Epstein files.
relayerbob
(7,337 posts)and the comment was made as a response to the article itself. And while keeping a lid on the files is certainly part of it (and IMO, they are likely MUCH worse than anyone is talking about at present), the longer term goal is to end democracy, and using the system against itself has been the focus of the far right for a very long time.
mitch96
(15,579 posts)Who is pulling the strings behind the curtain.. These "project 2025" guys are a piece of work....
m
Javaman
(64,999 posts)rzemanfl
(31,063 posts)the new representative from Arizona shows the Epstein files are not going to get out until TSF is ready for them, or never.