Ed Morrissey passes on this incident from January 2024 when the then newly-elected Speaker of the House Mike Johnson first realized that Biden wasn’t in charge.
“Can I ask you a question? I cannot answer this from my constituents in Louisiana,” Johnson recalled telling Biden. “Sir, why did you pause LNG exports to Europe? Liquefied natural gas is in great demand by our allies. Why would you do that? Cause you understand we just talked about Ukraine, you understand you are fueling Vladimir Putin’s war machine, because they gotta get their gas from him.”
Biden, according to Johnson, was stunned. “I didn’t do that,” Biden said. Johnson responded, “Mr. President, yes you did. It was an executive order like three weeks ago.” Biden continued to deny that he paused the LNG exports. At that point, Johnson suggested that the president ask the president’s secretary to print out the executive order, so the two could read it together.
Biden then recalled that he had signed an executive order, but it only called for a study on the effects of LNG. Johnson was firm. “Sir, you paused it, I know. I have the export terminals in my state. I talked to those people in my state, I’ve talked to those people this morning, this is doing massive damage to our economy, national security.”
In this exchange, Johnson said he realized that Biden was not lying to him. “He genuinely did not know what he had signed,” Johnson said. “And I walked out of that meeting with fear and loathing because I thought, “We are in serious trouble—who is running the country?” Like, I don't know who put the paper in front of him, but he didn’t know.”
Morrissey then asks the important question: “why didn’t Johnson take action?” I’d answer that because everyone in the Washington political circus circle knew that Biden was non compos mentis even before he ran in 2020, no one felt an individual duty to expose him, and in fact, the Democrats’ plan all along was to prop him up as a figurehead while a select group of hidden “professionals” ran the country. “He’s senile? Well, d’uh; shut up.”
But here, to me, is the even more important question: Cui bono? The decision to cut off LNG shipments to Europe hurt domestic gas producers, and the global warmists certainly welcomed that damage, but it also drove the price of energy, including the electricity produced by that gas, sky-high in Europe. That weakened the continent’s economy and hammered Germany’s already-weak manufacturing sector. Russia benefited, as did the world-wide network of de-industrialists, but were their still more factions in the White House, representing still more interests? Who can tell? Who will tell?
Worse, this was clearly not an isolated incident: every government action and policy decision made over the past four years, foreign, domestic, and military was decided by some ghost cabinet, unelected and unaccountable to citizens. That’s historic, and scary. “Preserving democracy” indeed.
Whoever has been running this administration the past four years, it wasn’t the man elected to presidency, and Morrissey thinks someone should have stopped that:
Johnson … was and is Speaker of the House, and someone in position to take action if a president seems to be incapacitated or manipulated by others. … As Speaker, Johnson could have alerted the House to this potential incapacitation, formed a select committee to investigate it, and force White House aides and Cabinet officials to testify under oath to their interactions with Biden.
We have argued for most of Biden's term that the signs of senility/dementia were recognizable, if not painfully obvious. The April 2022 Easter Bunny incident alone should have prompted the mainstream media to demand these answers and for Democrats to come clean about what we now know they knew at that time. The timing and extent of Biden's infirmity needs a full investigation, as well as answers as to who issued directives under Biden's name by taking advantage of that situation.
But we didn't need to wait until Tuesday to start that process. Perhaps Johnson didn't want to create a constitutional crisis by forcing the issue, but defending the Constitution is Johnson's primary duty. If Johnson knew that Biden wasn't issuing the orders in the White House -- in a literal sense with this EO and others -- then Johnson had a duty to investigate that and force the question into the open.
And this is why we probably will never get a full accounting of the Biden fraud and cover-up. Too many people participated in it, explicitly or implicitly, to the extent that full exposure will burn everyone. It will be a replay of Murder On the Orient Express.
And while Joe Biden may very well be the worst president in history (save for James Buchanan, because come on), the current political class in Washington DC may be the worst in its history since the Civil War too. The 17th Amendment and the rise of the bureaucratic state have warped constitutional self-governance badly enough to turn Washington into nothing more than a swamp, where Congress abdicates its responsibilities and puppets dance stiffly in the Oval Office with no consequences for those holding the strings.
