Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, genius, will never make anyone's "big brains of the Senate" list. That doesn't keep him from being asked on to the Sunday shows, however, where he regularly exposes the shallows of his understanding of how the world works. Case in point: this Sunday on Chuck Todd's Meet the Press, on which Johnson claimed Republicans did not control both chambers of Congress for the past two years.
Johnson was attempting to lay the blame for the government shutdown and Trump's national emergency declaration at the feet of the Democrats and, to his credit, Todd wasn't going to let that go unquestioned. "Republicans controlled the House and the Senate for the first two years of this presidency," he pointed out. "Is this not on, is this not on congressional Republicans and the president that we're in this situation in the first place?" Johnson had the bit between his teeth, though, and wasn't going to take it out.
"You said we controlled both chambers. We didn't," he answered. Yes, he said that for real. "We had a majority in the Senate. So you don't control it. We need Democrats to support us." At least he acknowledged that Republicans had a majority, thank goodness. Because if he didn't recognize that as reality, we've got much bigger problems than his general idiocy. Never mind that, with majority power, Mitch McConnell figured out how to get two Supreme Court justices ramrodded onto the bench.
To his discredit, Todd just let that ridiculousness sit there without further question, a testament to how unwilling the political punditry is to address how profoundly stupid and dishonest Republicans are in 2019.