Speaker Johnson Buttresses the Welfare-Warfare State

July 9, 2025
Glory Column
3 min read
By Hunter DeRensis

According to Gallup, the U.S. Congress sits on an abysmal approval rating of just 23%. Actually, this is a comparative high for the past five years.
The American people recognize the legislative branch for its utter fecklessness; simultaneously paralyzed by partisanship, but somehow still united in support for the welfare-warfare state. The primary example of congressional weakness is the unconditional surrender of its war powers.

Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution requires a vote by Congress before the United States can go to war—one of the few things universally agreed upon by the Founding Fathers at the 1787 convention. But that obligation did not prevent President Donald Trump from unilaterally deciding to bomb Iran, or Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) from defending that executive overreach during a recent press conference:

“[E]exercising the authority to declare war isn’t something we’ve done since World War II. And everybody in this room knows, since then we’ve had more than 125 military operations from Korea and Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan. They have occurred without a declaration of war by Congress. Presidents of both parties have exercised that authority frequently.”
The outrageousness of that statement comes not only from Johnson’s position as the co-leader of the legislative branch (and technically second-in-line of presidential succession), but also his status in Republican leadership.
The late Senator Bob Dole was a disabled World War II veteran who spent almost a half century in electoral politics, including both the top and bottom of a Republican presidential ticket. And in that time the only interesting thing he ever said was during the 1976 vice presidential debate, when he referred to World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam by name as “Democrat wars”:
“I figured up the other day, if we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century it’d be about 1.6 million Americans, enough to fill up the city of Detroit.”

Four G Media Contributor Hunter DeRensis

If the most milquetoast of establishment Republicans can use language like that, there’s no excuse for an allegedly “conservative” House Speaker to wilt away from condemning wars like Korea—waged when the United Nations superseded American law—or even more egregious crimes like Iraq.
Despite his claim to be a “jealous guardian of Congress’ Article I authority,” Mike Johnson has proved time and again to be a whipping boy for every major lobby in Washington, most of all the military-industrial complex. But worst of all, he is an accurate representation of the thinking among House Republicans and their continued support for perpetual war, bottomless debt, open borders, and liberal globalism.
It must be recognized that for all of its mixed messaging and unforced policy errors, the Trump White House remains the only branch of the government not wholly hostile to realism and restraint. That is a consequence of President Trump’s explicit rejection of Bush era neoconservatism, a slow-going transformation within the GOP that a decade later has still not flipped the party’s congressional backbenches.

It’s not uncommon for presidents to be ahead of their congressional base when it comes to new political paradigms, absent rare turnover elections like 2010 and 1994. And that can require executive leadership to “ put a bit of stick about ” to overcome incumbency bias and get the troops in line.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt expended immense political capital to purge his party of dissenters during the 1938 midterms (to mixed results). During and after the Reagan Revolution, conservatives mobilized to remove any remaining influence of “Rockefeller Republicans,” exiling liberals like Jacob Javits and Lowell Weicker.

Unfortunately, Trump has selected as his highest priority, intraparty target the House’s most principled non-interventionist and darling of the grassroots, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY). Meanwhile, Bushite Republicans like Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and open fifth columnists like Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) received glittering endorsements. This undermines Trump’s electoral mandate for “no more endless wars” and the active redirection of the Republican Party.

In my personal collection, I own a pin produced for the 1940 election; it’s an acrostic that insists the GOP stands for “Guard Our Peace.” If that’s going to become a reality in 2028, it must begin in 2026 and the midterms, primarying any incumbent that doesn’t live up to the America First mantle.

Bringing glory to Capitol Hill requires indulging in a pastime as American as baseball: throwing the bums out!

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