Rep. Mike Johnson won. Faith in elections lost.
The winner of the game of House Speaker musical chairs is … Rep. Mike Johnson, R-LA, who won the job Wednesday with unanimous GOP support.
After a 22-day struggle among Republicans to agree on Kevin McCarthy’s replacement, the right-wingers and the mainstream members in the conference decided to settle on Johnson, despite — or perhaps because of — his limited experience in leadership and lack of a national profile.
As in all good face-saving compromises, there’s some ambiguity over which side has caved — but overall, the right-wingers appear to have emerged triumphant.
Johnson is a movement conservative close to the Christian right. He’s also a stalwart Trump ally who actively worked to help the former president try to overturn Joe Biden’s victories in key 2020 swing states — a fact which could have sobering implications come January 2025, if Johnson holds onto the gavel for that long.
Winner (for now): Mike Johnson When this saga started 22 days ago, no one would have predicted that it would end with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. And yet it has.
Johnson was first elected to the House in 2016, which would make him the least experienced speaker since the 1880s.
Yet for close House watchers, Johnson didn’t totally come out of nowhere. Since 2021 he’s been the fifth-ranking member of the House GOP leadership’s team, serving as vice chair of the conference. Before that, Johnson chaired the Republican Study Committee.
But now he’s suddenly speaker, in large part because all the other contenders who were more prominent than him — McCarthy; Steve Scalise, R-La.; Jim Jordan, R-Oh.; and Tom Emmer, R-Mn. — had made too many enemies. Since it currently only takes a mere five Republican defections to sink a GOP speaker nominee on the House floor, having few haters in the party is actually more important than having passionate supporters.
Speaker Johnson has no secret plan to force President Biden and 60 senators to bend the knee and accept massive cuts to government spending. He may be talking a big game about passing 12 separate appropriations bills with Republican votes, but McCarthy made that same promise in January and found it impossible to fulfill. And inevitably, a spending deal has to be cut with Democrats, or the government shuts down and Republicans get blamed, imperiling their chances of holding the chamber in 2024. Johnson’s best hope is that he can convince the hardliners to chill out for a bit and give him more leeway to cut those deals than they gave McCarthy. But the longer he remains in the speaker job, the more he’ll inevitably disappoint some Republicans. And it is worth noting that he has never done this job before. Can he do it?
Loser: The stability of the US electoral system
After Johnson won the GOP conference’s speaker nomination Tuesday night, one reporter asked him about having led Trump’s challenges to the 2020 election results. The assembled GOP leadership team booed, with one member yelling “shut up!” Johnson demurred: “Next question.”
In January 2021, when Trump was trying to stay in power, the House of Representatives was under Democratic control, so the actions of House Republicans didn’t matter all too much. Most of them could vote to throw out Biden’s wins in key states, but they didn’t have a majority, so they couldn’t actually do that. January 2025 could be different. The House that meets to certify the presidential election results that month will be newly elected, but Johnson could well still be speaker. If so — and if there’s a similar dispute where Trump is denying a Biden victory — it’s far from clear what Johnson will do.
Generally, from November 2020 through January 2021, the Republican Party behaved terribly irresponsibly, but just enough Republicans in positions of power did the right thing — certifying the results at some political cost. Since then, critics of Trump’s attempt to seize power have largely been purged from the party, and election denial has been increasingly normalized.
Would a GOP-controlled House certify a Democratic victory in the 2024 presidential election? With Johnson in charge, that may have grown less likely — and that has ominous implications for the state of American democracy.