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Yesterday, Congressman Thomas Massie, perhaps the last Republican in the entire party with any guts, did something that should be routine in a functioning democracy. He introduced a discharge petition to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
I don’t particularly care for Thomas Massie’s politics. But credit where it’s due, because what happened next tells you everything you need to know about the state of our government.
Massie didn’t give Republican leadership a heads-up. They panicked. Donald Trump ordered Speaker Mike Johnson to shut it down, and Johnson did exactly what he was told. He put the House in recess rather than let his own members debate and vote on removing Hegseth from office.
Think about what that means. Hegseth is so unpopular in Congress that the votes are likely there to remove him. And a month and a half before the election, Republican leadership would rather shut down an entire branch of government than force their members to go on record about one of the least-liked cabinet secretaries in American history.
Hegseth has been an absolute disaster. He is hilariously unqualified for the job. He has clearly broken the law several times. He’s quietly plotting a presidential campaign while waging an illegal, catastrophic war in Iran that has gotten an incredible number of people killed and decimated the global economy.
I could write this entire piece about Pete Hegseth’s incompetence. I thought about it. But I want to point the spotlight somewhere else for a minute. I want to talk about Mike Johnson.
Because right now, we don’t have a Congress.
Mike Johnson has abdicated his responsibility to lead a coequal branch of our government. The House of Representatives works exclusively for Donald Trump. Trump installed Johnson as Speaker, and House Republicans are too afraid of the president to stand up to him. So nothing happens in Congress unless Donald Trump signs off on it. No bill gets debated. No bill moves forward. No action gets taken. Not without the president’s permission.
That is not how this is supposed to work.
Our founders got a lot right and a lot wrong, but they understood one thing clearly: power has to be checked. They envisioned a government where Congress holds its own powers and exercises oversight over the executive branch, where the judiciary holds its own powers and responsibilities, and where no single person gets to run the whole show.
Donald Trump has spent the last ten years tearing that apart. He’s dramatically expanded executive power with help from the Supreme Court justices he put on the bench. The Senate barely moves without his approval. The House barely moves without his approval. And now we’ve reached the point where a likely majority of the House wants to impeach a lawbreaking, incompetent defense secretary, and they can’t even hold a vote, because the Speaker shut the whole thing down on Trump’s orders.
This government doesn’t function at any level.
This is why Endless Urgency exists: to keep watching the people in power, keep connecting the dots, and keep putting this information in front of as many people as possible. If you value having an independent voice doing that work every day, like this post, share it with someone you know, and help us reach more people.
It’s one thing for a president to install incompetent boobs like Hegseth throughout the government. And believe me, there isn’t one Pete Hegseth. There are a million Pete Hegseths working in this government right now. God knows how many of them are at the FDA right now, supposedly inspecting our food, after this administration gutted the place. It’s part of the reason you can’t find some of your favorite items on the shelf right now. The recalls just keep coming.
The check on all of that is supposed to be Congress. The check is supposed to be the courts.
Now the only check left is YOU. The American people. This election.
And Donald Trump is coming after that too.
He’s attacking mail-in voting. He’s purging people from the voter rolls in Texas. He and his allies are running plot after nefarious plot to make it harder for you to cast a ballot. And he’s formed an unholy alliance with tech billionaires like Elon Musk, who are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to lie to you about Democratic candidates like James Talarico, because they’re terrified he’s about to win the Texas Senate race and turn Texas blue for the first time in a very long time.
That’s why winning these midterms, and winning them big, has to be our highest priority.
A big win doesn’t just send a message about the abject failure of Trump’s second term. It sends a message to the Republican Party that we will no longer tolerate them turning our entire government into a single unified machine for Donald Trump, his radical far-right agenda, and his corruption.
Democrats winning the House and Senate means real, meaningful accountability and oversight of the executive branch. It won’t fix everything overnight. The economy isn’t going to magically recover in the next couple of years. I don’t know that we can end this war in Iran. But I do know we can build a real check on this administration.
We can investigate Hegseth. We can investigate what’s going on with Kash Patel and FBI recruits allowed to engage in bestiality. We can dig into the crypto schemes, the Tate brothers, and so many of the other things that have vexed us for so long while nobody in Washington takes them seriously.
Handing the gavels back to the Democratic Party, as imperfect as it is, is how we start. Then we build a better party. We bring real accountability back to Washington. And when we win in 2028, we elect a Democratic president who gets to work quickly to make a dramatic, meaningful difference in people’s lives.
Because at the end of the day, all the drama in Washington, whether it’s Mike Johnson, Pete Hegseth, Barron Trump, or whatever comes next, only matters because of what it does to you. An incompetent, broken Washington that has become an all-boys club where everyone protects each other and nobody is held accountable for anything, right up to the Epstein files, is never going to work to make your life better.
That’s what we have to fix. It starts in the next month and a half. And there’s no clearer example of why than Donald Trump ordering his Speaker to shut down the entire House to protect Pete Hegseth.
I’m going to keep covering all of it, every day, right up to Election Day and beyond. If this work matters to you, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Independent voices are how we fight back when the people in charge have stopped doing their jobs. We can’t do it without you.
With urgency,
—Mike
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Trump’s administration is more like the land of misfit idiots. He’s the chief of them. They need to go. I can’t wait until they get voted out.
Mike Johnson is the worse
Excellent post, Mike. It’s a shame that more people with an audience do not speak out loudly about the pathetic Speaker Johnson. The angst that I have is that he probably gets voted back in because his constituents do not vote to have effective representation. Stay on the case!