Who is Mike Johnson?
The new speaker of the House is a far right-winger, an election denier and the symbol of the far right’s grip on the Republican Party. The center did not hold in the selection of the new speaker. The more centrist Republicans — who represent the majority of the Republican caucus — caved.
Make no mistake. The new speaker is not well-known and not experienced, but he won because he was acceptable to the hard-liners who played chicken. And won.
The candidates who failed were not moderates by any stretch. They were all conservatives — but not conservative enough to win the favor of the far right, which has taken control of the Republican Party.
The Republicans looked like fools. With crises around the world, they could not get their act together. They had to coalesce around someone, and when it became clear that no one who voted to certify the 2020 election or work with the other side to keep the government running was acceptable to them, they gave in.
Surrounded by hard-right members after his election, the man who will presumably preside over the certification of the next election refused to answer questions about his record as an election denier. One of his supporters actually told the reporter who asked him about it to “shut up.”
The overwhelming majority of Americans want the two parties to work together to do the people’s business. That’s what Rep. Kevin McCarthy did, and he lost the speaker’s chair because of it. It’s why Reps. Steve Scalise and Tom Emmer, both of whom had more support than Johnson in the Republican caucus, pulled out of the race, and Trump’s choice won.
Then the old-fashioned conservatives who respect the institution caved, coalescing around a lesser-known — though no less of a hard-liner — Rep. Jim Jordan, Johnson’s mentor.
The new speaker is as anti-gay as they come. Back in 2003, the supposed constitutional scholar defended laws that provided for criminal penalties for homosexual sex between consenting adults. The next year, he wrote that same-sex marriage was a “dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic.” He hasn’t changed his mind: He continues to support efforts to overturn the court’s ruling legalizing same-sex marriage. He is staunchly anti-abortion and a supporter of federal legislation to ban abortion in America. And, of course, as a die-hard Trumper, he embraced the crazy conspiracy theories that had Venezuela somehow tampering with voting machines in the 2020 election and wrote a legal brief in support of negating the election results. His style may be more restrained than Jordan’s, but in substance, he is no different. And he is now second in line to succeed the president. If that isn’t scary, what is?
There was, at least reportedly, some talk of a bipartisan effort by less extreme Republicans to work with Democrats to elect a more responsible, more representative speaker. But Democrats, who effectively joined forces with the extremist Republicans to vote out McCarthy, apparently preferred the devil they didn’t know to the one they did. They may be able to use Mike Johnson as an argument to win back control of the House in the 2024 election. But the question is, how much will that cost, between now and then? If Johnson and his allies have their way — and they have shown that they will stop at nothing to do so — the Democrats’ strategy may cost them, and the nation, dearly in the interim.
Because in the short run, at least, the lesson is that if you are willing to put everything at risk, if you have no respect for the institution, if you are willing to use the tactics that make your party look like fools, you win. So much for the will of the people. The bullies have taken power. How long Johnson will last is what remains to be seen.
