House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is under pressure from Trump allies to clamp down on special counsel Jack Smith's criminal prosecutions of former President Donald Trump, and The New Republic's Greg Sargent argues that his latest reported moves reek of "deep MAGA desperation."
In particular, Sargent reports that Johnson soon may announce proposals that "would restrict federal funding from going to any special counsel to 'bring a criminal prosecution of a former or current president," while "two others would restrict federal funding to other federal and state law enforcement officials pursuing such a prosecution."
"To put this delicately, these ideas are bonkers," Sargent comments.
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Legal scholar Matthew Seligman, meanwhile, tells Sargent that the proposals being floated by House Republicans are "fundamentally antithetical to the rule of law" given that they would "immunize current or former presidents from criminal prosecution, no matter what law they broke and no matter how grave their crimes."
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Making the matter even graver, Democrats tell Sargent that they think the GOP will attach these measures to crucial government funding bills and could effectively force a shutdown of the government unless Democrats agree to defund Jack Smith's prosecutions of Trump.
“House Republicans are proposing extreme poison pill riders that will never get the support of Democrats and will never become law,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), told Sargent. “These tactics only create more chaos and drive us closer to the brink of a shutdown.”
Johnson has long been reluctant to shut down the government during an election year and it's not clear that shutting down the government to protect an already-convicted felon would play to the GOP's benefit.
While Sargent doesn't believe Johnson will actually go through with such a plan, he does think that it could finally cost the Louisiana Republican his speakership.
"This time, though, the price extracted from Johnson for failure could be worse, because MAGA rage over the Trump conviction has gone positively nuclear," he writes. "MAGA personalities are slamming it as everything from a harbinger of the death of America to a modern day version of the Salem Witch Trials."
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