[Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives] Mike Johnson made a scary graphic so let me translate it for you, because fear only works when you don’t know what you’re looking at.
❌ ABOLISH THE SENATE – What people are actually talking about is reforming a body where a senator from Wyoming represents about 295,000 people with the same vote as one from California representing 19.5 million. Equal state representation was a compromise between large and small states at the founding. It made sense when the biggest state was 12 times the smallest. Today California is 68 times the size of Wyoming and they still get the same number of senators.
❌ REPLACE THE PRESIDENCY AND SUPREME COURT – Johnson’s graphic says “replace” but most of the actual proposals on the table are term limits and court expansion. Germany’s constitutional court judges serve 12-year terms. France’s serve 9. In the U.S. a president who wins by slim margins appoints judges who shape law for 40+ years with zero accountability. Clarence Thomas has been on the bench since 1991. The country has changed entirely. His seat hasn’t. Most functioning democracies put limits on this kind of power. The U.S. doesn’t.
❌ DEFUND THE POLICE – One of the most deliberately misrepresented phrases in modern politics. For most people using it, it means redirect some funding to mental health response and crisis intervention. Some activists did push for more sweeping cuts – but the mainstream policy conversation is about why armed police respond to mental health crises, homeless calls, and noise complaints. Finland requires police to train for three years and pairs them with social workers. Norway does the same. The U.S. had over 1,200 fatal police shootings in 2023. There’s room to ask whether the current model is the only option.
❌ OPEN BORDERS – There is no bill proposing this. There is no candidate running on this. The E.U. has open internal borders between 27 countries – a French citizen can drive to Germany without a passport and civilization holds. What people are actually proposing is a functional immigration system instead of one that costs billions, separates families, and still doesn’t work.
❌ AMNESTY FOR ILLEGAL ALIENS – Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986. Gave legal status to roughly three million undocumented immigrants. Republican president. Republican policy. The word “amnesty” only became a political weapon when it stopped being useful to the party that created it.
❌ DEFUND THE PENTAGON – The U.S. military budget for 2024 was $886 billion. More than China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, the U.K., Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, and Australia combined. The Pentagon has failed to pass a full audit every single year since audits became mandatory in 2018. That doesn’t mean the money disappeared – it means the largest military in the world cannot fully account for how it spends almost a trillion dollars a year. Asking questions about that isn’t anti-military. It’s basic oversight.
❌ ABOLISH ICE – ICE was created in 2003 under the Homeland Security Act after 9/11. Before that, immigration enforcement existed under the INS since 1933. America handled immigration for 227 years without ICE. Since its creation the agency has been at the center of family separations, child detention controversies, and documented abuses in detention facilities – sometimes in coordination with other agencies. Questioning a 23-year-old agency is not the same as wanting to eliminate borders.
❌ MEDICARE FOR ALL – Canada has universal healthcare. So do the U.K., Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Taiwan. The U.S. spends roughly $12,500 per person per year on healthcare – the highest in the world – and consistently ranks behind peer nations on outcomes like life expectancy and infant mortality. Americans die rationing insulin. They set up GoFundMes for chemo. They avoid ambulances because a ride costs over a thousand dollars. Every other developed nation figured this out.
❌ GREEN NEW DEAL – Climate infrastructure and jobs. The E.U. launched its Green Deal in 2019 targeting climate neutrality by 2050 with hundreds of billions in investment. China produces more solar panels than the rest of the world combined and leads in EV manufacturing. Germany gets roughly half its electricity from renewables. The U.S. is still debating whether climate change is real while its own cities flood, burn, and run out of water.
❌ GOVERNMENT OWNERSHIP OF CORPORATIONS – We bailed out the banks in 2008 with $700 billion in taxpayer money. Bailed out GM and Chrysler. Bailed out the airlines during COVID. Government picks up the tab every time a corporation fails but when anyone suggests the public should see a return on that investment, suddenly it’s communism. Meanwhile countries like Norway built a $1.7 trillion sovereign wealth fund from their natural resources and their citizens get world-class public services. Different model, same question: who benefits when public money is on the table?
Mike Johnson is counting on you not knowing any of this. Now you do.
Related Off-site Link:
Yes, We Really Should Abolish the Senate – Ben Burgis (Jacobin, July 24, 2026)>
See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• “Our Country Right Now Is At a Crossroads”
• Mark Greene on How ICE Is a Weapon of the Epstein Class
• Matthew Cooke on the Fallacy That Socialism “Doesn’t Work”
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