It was his first day back in Washington after a long winter break, and Speaker Mike Johnson was under pressure to pass a short-term funding bill to avoid a government shutdown within days.
While far-right Republicans were in turmoil against the plan, everyone in the Capitol was anxious to see what the inexperienced leader would do next and whether it could lead to his downfall.
After spending less than six minutes answering questions at a news conference, Mr. Johnson interrupted the questions shouted by reporters with a silent signal, like turning off a taxi’s lights, signaling that he was no longer available: He held his smartphone to his ear and accelerated – out of sight.
It’s a trick Mr. Johnson has used frequently since the fall when he won the speakership to avoid questions and with it the difficult task of governing with a deeply divided and shrinking Republican majority in the House.
Before he was elected in October, Mr. Johnson, a Louisiana Republican in his fourth term, regularly stopped by the hallways for job interviews. They are a regular part of a lawmaker’s life on Capitol Hill, where authorized reporters move freely except for a few secure rooms and harass members of Congress wherever they can find them. Mr. Johnson often paused and chatted in the marble corridors surrounding the House floor, engaging in impromptu and sometimes lengthy question-and-answer sessions with reporters before and after the vote.
But since winning the gavel, Mr. Johnson has avoided that ritual in favor of one of the most common tactics in a congressman’s playbook: talking on the phone or pretending to talk. These days, as he strides through the Capitol from his office to the House floor and back, Mr. Johnson’s preferred stance is inaccessible. And mostly it involves using your iPhone as a buffer.
The “on the phone” gesture serves as a shield against unwanted hallway interrogation, a universal nonverbal rejection that conveys busyness without blocking and that brings with it the possibility of extreme awkwardness if ignored. (Is it a spoofed call, a sick child, or the President of the United States? It’s hard for journalists to tell who, if anyone, is on the other end of the line — and that’s the point.)
When Mr. Johnson isn’t holding his cell phone to his ear while walking, he sometimes takes notes or reviews documents. Photographers have complained that it was difficult to capture an image of Mr Johnson looking up.
And when he’s not busy with another task, Mr. Johnson still rarely engages with questions about work before the House of Representatives or other issues. What he did to celebrate his birthday, a reporter asked him as he walked through the Capitol on Tuesday morning, his 52nd birthday.
“Working,” Mr. Johnson replied harshly. He did not answer any further questions.
His hands-off approach is a notable shift from the way Mr. Johnson’s two immediate predecessors handled the public portion of the most powerful post in Congress. Kevin McCarthy, a talkative extrovert, couldn’t resist speaking to reporters several times a day as he strolled through the Capitol, participating in walk-and-talks and holding impromptu news conferences in Statuary Hall.
As he became more harassed, Mr. McCarthy appeared to engage more and more with the press, sometimes holding several impromptu skirmishes a day and appearing unexpectedly in live television reporters’ footage where he was willing to talk more. Even on his worst days, Mr. McCarthy always seemed to make time for the media, even if his sometimes garbled statements had to be cleaned up with further back-and-forth with the press.
Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi also frequently answered questions as reporters gave her a tour of the building. She also held a weekly press conference, usually answering questions for about 30 minutes.
Sen. Mitch McConnell, the longtime Republican leader from Kentucky, also holds weekly question-and-answer sessions with reporters outside the Senate chamber. But outside of his formal news conference, the taciturn Mr. McConnell has a more direct and cool way of fending off hallway questions he wants to avoid: He simply stares straight ahead and moves on as if the questioner didn’t exist.
Some observers suspect that Mr. Johnson’s comparatively shy demeanor is due to his inexperience in his new position. His staff insists it is strategic; He doesn’t want to distort the message of the day. Aware that all of his comments will now be scrutinized, Mr. Johnson’s approach is that less is more.
That means attending a weekly news conference with other House Republican leaders, a group affair in which he is one voice among several and little else. His aides note that he is augmenting his small media presence under the Capitol dome with a larger presence in television interviews.
Commuting through the Capitol can be a conversation minefield for lawmakers. Journalists and photographers lurking in every hallway and stairwell are an accepted part of the Capitol Hill ecosystem, and answering their questions about the day’s news is an expected part of the job of elected officials.
For those who love attention, media monitoring is an advantage.
“My motto is, ‘Almost all press is good press,'” said Rep. Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, who is known for being often unavoidable when it comes to commentary. Mr Khanna said it never occurred to him to use his phone to avoid questions. He said he would be more likely to hang up if a reporter approached him to chat.
But for lawmakers less comfortable answering questions, the “on the phone” strategy is a handy way to signal that journalists looking for commentary and jokes should look elsewhere.
“I would actually do it as a joke,” said Al Franken, the former Minnesota senator and comedian. “I would just do it with my hand and my thumb in my ear, like, ‘I’m on the phone.’ Sometimes I would say I’m on the phone with the president.”
Mr. Franken said it could be an effective way to evade reporters, but acknowledged that it had not been a fully credible strategy for navigating the Capitol since the Blackberry fell out of fashion. “He doesn’t want to be approachable,” he said of Mr. Johnson. “It’s kind of up to him. Then he just has to live with the consequences, and that means writing an article about it.”
For some, the consequence is that they are caught in a lie. Sen. Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, pretended to be on a phone call as he left the Capitol in June 2022 as reporters pressed him to explain his role in an attempt to provide a list of fake voters to an aide to former Vice President Mike Pence hand over.
“I’m on the phone,” Mr. Johnson said. But he wasn’t.
“No, you’re not – I can see your phone; I can see your screen,” responded Frank Thorp V, a reporter for NBC News.
Mr. Johnson eventually gave up the ruse, put his cell phone back in his pocket and responded to the reporters who followed him. (“That’s a complete nonsense,” he finally said, adding, “I don’t know what you’re even worried about here.”)
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, who has threatened to oust Mr. Johnson from office if he advances a bill that would provide more money for Ukraine, said the phone ploy was simply not her style.
“I don’t think you’ll see me walking around on the phone,” said Ms. Greene, who in recent years has adopted a friendlier approach to the mainstream media she once used as a foil. “But I’ll see if Mike Johnson tries to avoid me that way.”
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2024-02-03 02:01:07
www.nytimes.com
