House Speaker Mike Johnson Existing Outside Of Irony
On Sunday we were thanking Mike Johnson for doing the right thing for Ukraine. We were glad he’d been convinced by facts. On Wednesday, we’re watching the same Speaker with a tenuous hold on the gavel, whose own caucus is threatening to unseat him, calling for the ouster of the president of Columbia University.
Mr. Johnson seems to have missed the irony of his position.
I’d like to reiterate the hippy adage. What goes around comes around.
Mr. Johnson seems to miss the facts abundantly clear to students at Columbia, NYU, Yale, MIT, Harvard, Brown University, University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers, American University, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, University of North Carolina, Emerson College, UC Berkeley, Cal State Humboldt, USC, Stanford, UT Austin, and probably some campuses I have failed to name.
The facts are that the United States government is fostering the Israeli government’s genocide of Palestinian civilians, and like students before them, the students are exercising their duty to protest.
Campus protests began after Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, when militants killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took roughly 250 hostages. Since then, Israel has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, according to the local health ministry, which says at least two-thirds of the dead are children and women.
Protesting against the Netanyahu slaughter of innocents is not anti-Semitism. It’s also the case that anti-Semitic events are happening now and have happened, and those events do in fact stink of immoral, unethical, unacceptable violence, and historic ignorance.
Student demands vary. Student governments at Columbia, Harvard Law, Rutgers and American University have passed resolutions calling for an end to investments and academic partnerships with Israel. Other demands include universities’ divestment from companies such as military weapons manufacturers that are supplying arms to Israel, cessation of accepting research money from Israel for projects that aid the country’s military efforts, and/or halting investments in endowments with money managers who profit from Israeli companies or contractors.
These are fact-based analyses by students, who have learned well.
Speaker Johnson may be able to learn as well. One thing in particular should come across his event horizon: it is not the business of the Speaker of the House to tell a university President to resign, nor to tell the world that the President of the United States should tell a university President to resign. It is the business of the Speaker of the House to advance legislation that benefits the People of the United States of America. There is a great pile of legislation that has not been getting anywhere since the Republican Party took the majority in the House. Republicans in the House and Senate killed a major bipartisan border policy bill. Reforms to bedrock programs like Medicare and Social Security are desperately needed but no closer to getting passed. In 2023, the House passed 27 bills. No more. Compare this to the 713 bills passed by Congress during one year of the Reagan administration, 1987-1988.
Mr. Johnson is working for us, on our dimes. It would be good to get our money’s worth.