San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Speaker cloaks his inner MAGA
It’s not quite fair to say Mike Johnson did nothing to distinguish himself during his first four years in Congress.
Shortly after taking office in January 2017, the Louisiana Republican authored a “Commitment to Civility” pledge for his colleagues to sign.
In November 2018, the GOP caucus selected Johnson to be chairman of the Republican Study Committee, a group that helps drive conservative policy priorities on Capitol Hill.
But it was Johnson’s work in December 2020 that truly elevated him to a place of importance in Republican politics. That’s when he established himself as the thinking man’s extremist, the bland menace to democracy, the congenial face of right-wing bigotry. And that’s what positioned him for his election Wednesday as the new U.S. speaker of the House.
Johnson embraced and ran with then-President Donald Trump’s delusional theory that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen.
When scandal-prone Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against four battleground states that Trump lost to Joe Biden, Johnson rushed in to craft an amicus brief and enlisted 125 of his fellow House Republicans to lend their names to it.
Paxton sought to invalidate the 62 electoral votes Biden received in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin, arguing that they violated the U.S. Constitution by changing their election rules without the input of their state legislatures.
These rules changes were made in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which made in-person voting a health hazard and guaranteed that mail-in voting would spike to unprecedented levels.
For example, the State Election Board of Georgia decided to allow mail ballots to be processed three weeks before Election Day, rather than forcing election workers to wait until Election Day.
Johnson derided such actions. “The unconstitutional irregularities involved in the 2020 presidential election cast doubt upon its outcome and the integrity of the American system of elections,” he wrote in his amicus brief.
Neither Johnson nor Paxton (nor Trump, for that matter) seemed bothered that Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott made changes to this state’s election rules that same year with no involvement from the Texas Legislature.
Abbott extended the early voting period for the 2020 general election by one week. He also expanded the period in which voters could turn in their mail ballots in person.
Abbott said these rules changes would give Texans
“greater flexibility to cast their ballots, while at the same time protecting themselves and others from COVID-19.”
For some reason, Johnson did not cite Texas when he complained about legislatures having their authority “usurped” by state officials. He did not suggest that Texas’ 38 electoral votes should be invalidated. Could it have something to do with the fact that Trump carried Texas?
Thankfully, one day after Johnson filed his amicus brief, a conservative U.S. Supreme
Court that included three
Trump appointees threw out Paxton’s lawsuit.
Johnson got the speaker nod this past week despite his obscurity and relative lack of experience. Republicans picked him because, after the ouster of Kevin
McCarthy and the failure of three would-be successors to secure sufficient GOP support, they were worn out and embarrassed.
With his history of election denial and culture-war zealotry, Johnson is beloved by the party’s hard-core MAGA wing. With his smooth, soft-spoken manner and aura of humility, he also is palatable to party moderates.
But Johnson is no one’s idea of a moderate.
He has described same-sex relationships as “inherently unnatural,” “utterly harmful” and a “dangerous lifestyle.”
As a Louisiana state representative, Johnson filed two failed bills designed to protect people who oppose same-sex marriage, which he has described as “the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic.”
Johnson is a proponent of covenant marriage, which imposes strict limits on the conditions under which someone can get a divorce.
He also has advanced an increasingly common GOP argument that the United States is not a democracy but a constitutional republic — leaving out the fact that a nation can simultaneously be a representative democracy and a constitutional republic.
Too often in politics, we get hung up on tone rather than substance. On a superficial level, Johnson might seem comforting because he doesn’t radiate the alpha-dog aggression of a Jim Jordan or the frat-boy bullying of a Matt Gaetz.
But his ideas are every bit as toxic.