Mike Johnson found a new use for the Speaker’s gavel today: dismissing class before the substitute could get the room out of hand. Thomas Massie has been pushing for a floor vote on impeaching Pete Hegseth, whose Pentagon a Times piece this week described as a running battle of turmoil and mistrust among the people supposedly running it. Rather than let that vote happen, get debated, or get voted down on the record, Johnson just recessed the House early, skipping the whole exercise instead of losing it.

The same day, the House found time to pass a Russia sanctions bill nicknamed “Sanctions From Hell,” bipartisan enough to sail through without incident and land on Trump’s desk. So the capacity is there, and so is the floor time. What’s missing is only ever the willingness to hold a vote that costs someone something at home. Sanctioning a foreign adversary is free. A recorded vote on whether your own defense secretary keeps his job is not, and everyone in that chamber seems to have done the math the same way.

There’s a heavier item buried in today’s stack, too easy to scroll past next to a procedural dodge. A federal judge, on the record after finishing his term as chief judge, called Trump’s deployment surge in Minnesota “a grave threat to the rule of law.” No hedge, no “critics say.” That’s a sentence from someone who spent a career choosing words that have to hold up later, and it deserves more than a passing mention before the next headline arrives.

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