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.

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?”

In context, the GOP leader did not appear to be referring to a prepared text. In other words, Johnson was just candidly speaking his mind.

And what was on his mind was a near future in which a possible House Republican majority spends 2027 and 2028 shielding the president, his team and their allies from the kind of scrutiny that Congress has a responsibility to do as a matter of course.

This isn’t altogether surprising, given everything we’ve seen from Capitol Hill over the past year and a half, but it was nevertheless remarkable to hear a sitting House speaker declare, out loud and in public, that he wants and expects to run a “protection program” — a phrase more commonly associated with organized crime — on behalf of the White House.

Usually, GOP leaders are a bit more subtle about their anti-oversight posturing.

As for the prospect of Democrats turning “every committee of Congress into an investigative body” starting next year, Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee promoted Johnson’s comments via social media alongside a message that read, “We are the Homeland Security Committee Democrats and we approve this message.”

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