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Mike Johnson Is the Most Dangerous House Speaker in American History

His decision to shut the House down at a moment of crisis around AI is the act of a reckless charlatan.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson at the Capitol on September 16, 2026.

The need for congressional oversight and regulation of AI is only growing clearer. Just this month, top AI researchers said that the irresponsible development of new technologies posed an existential threat not just to jobs and privacy but to humanity itself. Nobel Prize winners such as Geoffrey Hinton, widely recognized as the “Godfather of AI,” confirmed the assessment. Executives of the AI behemoths that have already consolidated so much of the nation’s wealth acknowledged that they could no longer control their own creations.

Everyone who’d been paying honest attention to the development of artificial intelligence recognized that tech enthusiasts and critics, geeks and Luddites, were identifying threats that had to be addressed by members of Congress—each of whom, let’s not forget, pledges to guard the United States “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

Yet President Trump belligerently refused to take the threat seriously—effectively blocking immediate legal and regulatory remedies at the federal level. Trump dismissed all the expert testimony as “a HOAX,” making it clear that executive departments and agencies would not ride to the rescue.

But House members who had been following AI issues leapt into action. “The time for real guardrails on AI is now,” said US Representative Lori Trahan, a former tech-company executive from Massachusetts who is now a key member of the House Artificial Intelligence Caucus. She argued that it was time “to get Congress off the sidelines and put safety, transparency, and accountability first.”

US Representative Greg Casar, the Texas Democrat who leads the Congressional Progressive Caucus and represents the tech hub in and around Austin, warned, “Despite its potential deadly consequences, cutting-edge AI technology is less regulated than the average food truck. That must change. In just four years, we have gone from the first version of ChatGPT to AI models so powerful they cannot be properly controlled. Congress should immediately ban AI systems too powerful to control.” US Representative Ro Khanna, the California Democrat who........

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