Habemus speaker!

Commentary

Unlike the signal from the Vatican, puffs of white smoke, the signal from Capitol Hill was black smoke, very dark black smoke.

Yesterday, Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana, a backbench Republican who has been in Congress fewer than eight years, was elected as the 56th speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States of America. According to Axios, Johnson is the “least experienced representative to obtain the gavel in 140 years. It’s a stunning rise to power for Johnson, a low-ranking member of the GOP leadership team who was first elected in 2016. He has less experience serving in the House than any person elected speaker since John G. Carlisle in 1883. Since the Civil War, speakers have spent an average of 18 years in the chamber before ascending to the top of the ladder.”

Asked about Johnson’s rise, Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT), a former GOP presidential nominee who was not so long ago the leader of the Republican party, said, “Apparently experience isn’t necessary for the speaker job…. We’re down to folks who haven’t had leadership or chairmanship roles, which means their administration of the House will be a new experience for them.”

But Johnson’s lack of stature or experience is not really the problem.

As Heather Cox Richardson wrote in her Letters from an American newsletter today,

“[While] Democrats repeatedly offered to work with Republicans to elect a speaker who accepted the results of the 2020 presidential election and who agreed to bring to the floor for an up-or-down vote legislation that was widely popular in both parties. The Republicans rejected those offers. Instead, they have elected a pro-Trump extremist as speaker.”

Let me summarize Professor Richardson’s rationale for her characterization:

• Johnson was instrumental in Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
• Johnson was routinely in touch with Trump, he rallied his colleagues to object to counting the electoral votes from states that Democratic candidate Joe Biden won.
• As Trump’s legal challenges to the results failed, Johnson pushed a Texas lawsuit against the four states that had given Biden the win, calling for the invalidation of millions of his fellow Americans’ ballots, and echoed lies about Venezuelan interference with ballots.
• Johnson has also embraced the far right’s culture wars.
  • He is a self-described evangelical Christian who is staunchly anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ rights, anti-union, and anti-immigration.
• He has close ties to the Israeli right wing, and he opposes further aid to Ukraine, saying such money would be better spent at home.
• But he has also called for extensive cuts to domestic spending programs.

Professor Richardson continued with comments on what the ascension of Johnson says about the Republican party:

“When a reporter asked Johnson about his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, the colleagues surrounding him booed and told the reporter to ‘shut up.’* On the floor of the House, every single Republican voted for Johnson.

*The specific “colleague” who yelled “shut up,” was Virginia Foxx (R-NC), a self-styled “Proven Fighter for North Carolina’s Conservative Values” and “Card carrying member of the Anti-Civility Alliance of Particularly Rude and Unrefined Republicans (ACAPRUR).

“And so, the House Republicans have caved to the MAGA extremists. Representative Pete Aguilar (D-CA) said that for the Republicans, the search for a speaker hadn’t been about looking for someone interested in ‘growing the middle class, helping our communities, keeping the cost of healthcare lower, and making life for everyday Americans better.’ Instead, Aguilar said, ‘this has been about one thing…who can appease Donald Trump. House Republicans have put their names behind someone who has been called the most important architect of the [2020] electoral college objections.’ A Republican yelled back: ‘Damn right!’

“The Republicans appear to be planning to go before the voters in 2024 with a presidential candidate who is deeply enmeshed in trials over allegedly criminal behavior, whose hastily appointed Supreme Court justices overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion, and who tried to steal the 2020 election. Alongside him, they have now elevated a fervently anti-abortion House speaker who backed the former president’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.”

Having said all this, I urge you to review the new speaker’s qualifications and positions outlined above and ponder one thing Dr. Richardson did not include in her newsletter:

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is now SECOND IN LINE TO THE PRESIDENCY!