Don Moynihan (2026), Can We Still Govern? (Substack newsletter) — https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/mike-johnsons-institution…
Key takeaways
- Moynihan argues that, in the 2026 DHS funding lapse, Speaker Johnson’s choice to back the President’s House bill and the President’s claimed authority to pay TSA staff, over the Senate’s bill, surrendered Congress’s power of the purse. He treats this as an institutional betrayal.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-084. What follows is what the work says about itself.
Moynihan, writing as a public-administration commentator, recounts the state of a Department of Homeland Security shutdown. The Senate passed a bill funding DHS except ICE and CBP. The House, under Johnson, passed instead a Trump-backed bill funding all of DHS, and both chambers recessed. Meanwhile the President announced he would pay TSA employees without naming a legal appropriation source. Moynihan argues that letting the executive both impound appropriated money and spend unappropriated money guts Congress’s central check. He quotes Matt Glassman and Josh Chafetz in support.
Standing in the record
Filed from the survey of 2026-09-25 of work the anthology set aside as out of scope (tier C): 365 seconds of active reading over 1 session in the papers-feed tracker. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-084 is the close reading of 2026-09-25, and it placed the work: Active — A clear, well-sourced piece of commentary on one episode of the 2025–26 appropriations conflict, worth reading as argument. Its main factual premise (the memo names no appropriation) checks out against the memo, and its timeline comes from news reports it links.
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-084, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: low — Commentary that has been read in full, out of the anthology’s ML scope. The survey’s triage (“drop: commentary”) seems right.
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-084 is that reading):
- It is political commentary, attributed to its author. Any factual claim in it (the memo’s wording, vote timing, the TSA sick-call rate) should be sourced to primary documents before it is used.
- As a source for the anthology it is weak. If this episode matters, the President’s memo, the bills and any GAO or OLC opinions are the citable sources.
Access when seeded: The batch URL was truncated. I reconstructed the full slug, which matches the prefix and the title, and fetched the full post (datePublished 2026-03-28T15:09Z; subtitle “The DHS shutdown is morphing into a constitutional crisis”). The body was read in full; it did not appear to be paywalled.