A Trump-anointed House speaker is an ominous step
What’s most disconcerting about Rep. Mike Johnson, the new House speaker, is not his extreme social and political conservatism, his wafer-thin resume of seven years in Congress, or his conspicuous efforts to help Donald Trump overturn the 2020 election.
It’s that Trump was instrumental in elevating this election denier to the speakership. The ultraconservative Louisiana politician, who in the past has advocated criminalizing sex acts between consenting gay adults, is now second in line for the presidency and augers an even more extreme tilt to the House than under the hapless Kevin Mccarthy.
It was always unprecedented for anyone with White House connections to meddle in congressional leadership politics. Trump has profoundly offended the separation of powers, a founding principle of American life. The issue was acute this time because the expresident is the odds-on favorite to be his party’s nominee in 2024, and some polls show he could beat President Joe Biden.
“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny,” James Madison wrote in The Federalist 47.
Congress owes the Constitution a respectful independence from the executive branch, especially when the president’s party has a majority in either or both houses. But Trump had most of the Republicans eating out of his hand when he was president, and he means to control them again.
Trump’s domination of virtually all elements of the GOP has no precedent, either. Not even the popular Ronald Reagan sought such iron-fisted control.
Johnson did more for Trump after the 2020 election than to vote against certifying Biden electors, as he and 146 other House Republicans did.
He also recruited 125 of them to sign onto an amicus brief in the Supreme Court backing a Texas lawsuit that challenged Biden’s election. His election denialism is something to worry about if the next electoral count is close.
Johnson became the last person standing in the political equivalent of a demolition derby. He won by being the least objectionable Republican option. One plus is that the uber-nasty Jim Jordan paid the price for having offended many colleagues.
But Johnson is, if anything, more extreme. Rolling Stone describes him as a “hardcore Christian nationalist” who has linked mass shootings — like those in Maine — to abortion and the teaching of evolution.
The magazine cited this Johnson quote from a 2016 sermon: “People say, ‘How can a young person go into their schoolhouse and open fire on their classmates?’ Because we’ve taught a whole generation — a couple generations now — of Americans, that there’s no right or wrong, that it’s about survival of the fittest, and (that) you evolve from the primordial slime. Why is that life of any sacred value? Because there’s nobody sacred to whom it’s owed. None of this should surprise us.”
In an interview in 2015, a year before his election to Congress, Johnson asserted that “When you break up the nuclear family, when you tell a generation of people that life has no value, no meaning, that it’s expendable, then you do wind up with school shooters.”
As a lawyer, he represented the Alliance Defending Freedom, which the Southern Poverty Law Center calls a hate group. He’s also a prominent climatechange skeptic.
For now, the nation must hope that Johnson was sincere when he told the House that his job is “to serve the whole body, and I will.”
— The Orlando Sentinel