I was talking with a TPM Reader and friend yesterday and we’ve been having an on-going exchange about the simple question: why is Mike Johnson doing this? Like YOLO Johnson, sure. But why? He’s been kind of dragging along like this for six months and yeah, it’s kind of embarrassing but it’s always been embarrassing. Why the ‘Let’s Be Legends’ vibe now?
My friend asked if I thought it might be some sudden shift in the intelligence about the situation in Ukraine. Maybe, I said. But that didn’t seem right to me. Far more likely it was that the parliamentary dynamics simply hit a breaking point, perhaps spurred on by the sudden pressure to move Israel aid. If you’ve got one foot on the dock and another on the ship and the ship starts to pull off you have to make a choice. Stay or go. Equivocate and you fall in the water.
But this article from Politico suggests that new intelligence actually played a key role.