In positioning himself as a junior partner to the president and doing his bidding on matters large and small, the Louisiana Republican is diminishing a job that involves leading a coequal branch of government.
The speaker of the House has for centuries played a singular role among political leaders in the United States, as the only partisan figure in Congress who is also explicitly empowered by the Constitution to lead the legislative branch.
One wouldn’t necessarily know that from watching the recent behavior of Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, who is conducting himself less like the autonomous head of a coequal branch of government and more like a junior partner to President Trump.
In the past couple of weeks, Mr. Johnson removed the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Michael R. Turner of Ohio, acting upon a request from Mar-a-Lago. He trailed behind Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance at the White House, breathlessly chronicling Mr. Vance’s first moment setting foot in the Oval Office as if he were a White House staff member.
“I told him and President Trump that I HAD to capture the moment on video,” Mr. Johnson wrote online in a giddy caption to his viral video last week.
On Monday, when Mr. Johnson and House Republicans held their annual retreat at the Trump National Doral in Miami, the speaker complimented Mr. Trump on his “beautiful club” and defended several norm-shattering and legally questionable moves the president has made that circumvented Congress.
“We support the president’s initiative, obviously, 100 percent,” he said of Mr. Trump’s decision to overhaul the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He stood by the president’s decision to fire more than a dozen inspectors general overseeing government agencies without giving Congress the required 30-day notice about such removals.