Trump, true to nature, has been obsessed in recent weeks with harnessing the powers of Congress to fight on his own behalf and go to war against the Democrats he accuses of “weaponizing” the justice system against him.
It’s a campaign he orchestrated in the days after his May 31 conviction on 34 felony counts in New York, starting with a phone call to the man he wanted to lead it: Speaker MIKE JOHNSON.
Trump was still angry when he made the call, according to those who have heard accounts of it from Johnson, dropping frequent F-bombs as he spoke with the soft-spoken and pious GOP leader.
“We have to overturn this,” Trump insisted.
[...]
The speaker didn’t really need to be convinced, one person familiar with the conversation said: Johnson, a former attorney himself, already believed the House had a role to play in addressing Trump’s predicament.
Politico
That's not what the House is for, asshats.
Johnson is already finding it difficult to deliver for Trump.
[...]
House GOP leaders, for instance, spent yesterday afternoon whipping a bill written by Rep. RUSSELL FRY (R-S.C.) that would allow presidents charged at the state level to move those cases to federal court — effectively nullifying the power of officials like Bragg and Fulton County DA FANI WILLIS. The bill was filed in April 2023 and reported by the Judiciary Committee in last September; only now is it being readied for possible floor action.
And that would go to the Supreme Court, where Trump can expect all the help in the world.
Johnson has also been in talks with Judiciary chair and Trump ally JIM JORDAN (R-Ohio) about using the appropriations process to target special counsel JACK SMITH’s probe. It’s an apparent softening of his position: The speaker told us in an interview last month that he found a similar idea by Rep. MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE (R-Ga.) unworkable; now, he’s actually looking into it.
[...]
The problem, of course, is that these proposals don’t yet have the votes to pass.
Yet.
One senior appropriator, Rep. MIKE SIMPSON (R-Idaho), told Playbook the idea of defunding Smith was “stupid.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea unless you can show that [the prosecutors] acted in bad faith or fraud or something like that,” he said. “They’re just doing their job — even though I disagree with what they did.”
Be prepared to be voted out of the party, Mike.
“We accuse Democrats of weaponizing the Justice system,” said another skeptical senior Republican who was granted anonymity to speak with fear of MAGA blowback. “That’s exactly what we’d be doing.”
Reasonably afraid of their own monsters.
Off the House floor yesterday, Fry — who said he’s not spoken to Trump about his proposal — said there’s an education effort underway inside the House GOP.
His argument: Federal lawmakers, executive officials and judges currently have the ability to try to move their local cases to federal court. Why shouldn’t the leader of the free world? (One difference, of course, is that unlike those federal officials, Trump isn’t currently in office.) What’s more, he argued, federal jury selection is “more robust” and includes “more disclosure.”
...hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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