Donald Trump has Mike Johnson in another no-win situation

Congress finally returns from summer break next week — for a little while at least. Lawmakers will only be in Washington for about three weeks before they leave again for the campaign trail. The first, and arguably only, task on their to-do list before the end of the month is to keep the federal government open.

But that might be easier said than done for Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La. For the entirety of his time leading the House, carrying out Congress’ most routine function has given him the most grief. Johnson now finds himself under pressure from his right flank and former President Donald Trump to go on yet another quixotic snipe hunt and risk a government shutdown weeks before a presidential election.

This time around, Johnson’s task from the MAGA wing of his party is to get the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act signed into law. If enacted, it would mandate that people registering to vote would have to present documentary proof of U.S. citizenship when filling out their paperwork. As I noted when the House passed the SAVE Act as a stand-alone bill in July, that requirement would only add a hurdle that millions of people would not easily be able to clear while doing nothing to prevent the supposed problem.

Because, while Republicans have tried to frame the bill as a necessary safeguard to prevent noncitizens from voting in federal elections, that’s absolutely not the case. Despite what Johnson has claimed, Democrats are not opposing the SAVE Act because “they want [undocumented immigrants] to vote in our elections.” Nor is there a mass voter fraud network, as Trump and his allies have insinuated. It is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. It is, likewise, illegal to lie on the forms that states such as New York use requiring people registering to vote to affirm their U.S. citizenship.

We’re talking about this now because Congress has only funded the federal government’s operations for the current fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30. Without a new set of appropriations, all nonessential services shutter on Oct. 1. Since it seems somehow physically impossible for Congress to get this process done before that annual deadline, what we normally see is a stopgap measure known as a continuing resolution, which temporarily resets the clock until full spending bills are approved or the deadline in the CR has passed.

Meanwhile, archconservatives have spent their time during this congress running into the same brick wall. Whenever a deadline approaches for funding the government, the “chaos caucus” tries to force Democrats to accept draconic spending cuts, far-right policies, or both. It’s worked precisely zero times; the closest they’ve come to a win was removing Johnson’s predecessor from the speakership. But in an extreme case of gambler’s fallacy, they are certain that things will work out differently this time.

As the highest-ranking elected Republican, and someone who won’t be speaker next year if Republicans don’t hold onto the House, Johnson should know how much of an utter disaster it would be to have the GOP be blamed for a government shutdown as the November election looms. But Trump says that’s what Republicans should do if they don’t get their way. “I would shut down the government in a heartbeat if they don’t get it,” he said on the “Monica Crowley Show” last week. “It should be in the bill. And if it’s not in the bill, you want to close it up.”

That brings us to our current looming disaster. Johnson told his caucus on Wednesday that he’ll bring a spending bill to the floor that would punt the current fiscal deadline back to March and attach the SAVE Act. In doing so, he’s committed himself to a no-win scenario that could hurt the party’s chances of retaining its extremely slender majority.

The best case for Johnson is that his united caucus votes for the combined package and passes it over Democratic objection. But Democrats are more inclined to only push the deadline back to (in what has become something of an odd Washington tradition) December, instead of March. It would be likely then that the Senate, controlled by Democrats, would simply pass a clean CR with that date altered and send it to the House, putting the onus on Johnson to get the votes to see that it is approved. That would likely involve leaning on House Democrats for their support (again) and showing how hard it is to get Republicans to do the work of governing.

At worst, Johnson refuses to bring a Senate bill to the floor without the SAVE Act attached as Trump would prefer, bringing the gears of government grinding to a halt while his members are out trying to convince voters to send them back to Washington. The imagery of national parks shuttered and long lines at airports as Transportation Security Agency workers go unpaid while members of Congress campaign is not exactly an electoral winner.

As things stand, though, it’s not even clear Johnson has the GOP votes for this current framework. Should he try to bring up the bill only for it to fail because not even his caucus stands behind it? What better evidence would there be that Republicans are unable to do even the most basic work of governance? And yet, this apparently is the only way forward for Johnson, hemmed in as he is by the delusions of Trump and his acolytes. The question is whether in doing so the fallout is confined to the halls of the Capitol or makes the Republicans’ failures impossible to ignore as people around the country suffer.