‘I run the protection program’: Johnson vows to shield Trump and his allies from scrutiny

In the final two years of Joe Biden’s presidency, there was a Republican Congress and a Democratic president, and the two institutions didn’t exactly see eye to eye on the nation’s policy priorities. As a result, lawmakers put aside any legislative ambitions and spent 2023 and 2024 focused almost entirely on oversight, investigating all sorts of perceived controversies related to the Democratic administration.

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After Donald Trump returned to the White House, the GOP-led Congress continued to show very little interest in legislating, but this time, lawmakers also abandoned their oversight responsibilities to an almost cartoonish degree, pretending not to notice any of the incumbent president’s many abuses and scandals.

Congressional Republicans have done so little oversight, The Washington Post reported last month, that the White House Counsel’s Office, expecting Democrats to reclaim a majority in at least one chamber, recently began “giving private briefings to the administration’s political appointees on how to best prepare for congressional oversight.”

The same article added that the roughly 30-minute briefings “have included a PowerPoint presentation about how congressional oversight works and best practices for handling it.”

From House Speaker Mike Johnson’s perspective, the priority is to prevent this from becoming a problem for the White House in the first place.

“If we lose the midterms, heaven forbid, these Democrats — y’all, impeachment isn’t even the real concern,” the Louisiana Republican told a conservative audience on Friday. “They will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body, and they’ll go after the president’s family, the Cabinet, his donors, friends, half of you in this room will be targeted.”

The House speaker added, “I run the protection program. We’ll take care of you, OK?”