The Quiet One

The disease spreads if you refuse to treat it

The banality of evil

Taking their cue from the guy who appointed people to serve in his administration because they looked like they were from “central casting,” Republicans in the House of Representatives unanimously elevated Mike Johnson to the Speakership. Like the vast majority of Americans, many of them didn’t know who Johnson was. They didn’t know that he’d served fewer than eight years in Congress, or that he had no leadership experience. They were unaware that he has never chaired a committee. And perhaps they remained in ignorance of his extreme religious views and bigotry.

So why did members who’d never heard of him give him their support? In part, because after 22 days of Republican in-fighting and ineptitude; 22 days of embarrassment, exhaustion frustration, anger, and self-loathing; the Party wanted it to be done. Also, because there is literally no such thing as a moderate Republican in Congress, it would have to be either be an extremist or an ultra-extremist. Once Republicans made it clear that having voted to certify the 2020 election was disqualifying (Tom Emmer, we hardly knew you), it would have to be the latter.

Besides, Johnson looks and acts the part—he’s a bespectacled, suit-jacketed, quiet, and respectful back-bencher who, according to The New York Times, has a “gentle style.” As David Kurtz, at Talking Points Memo, pointed out this morning, though, because of the intense scrutiny Johnson is now under, his days of flying below the radar are over.

And suddenly having a Speaker of the House feels infinitely worse and more dangerous than not having one.

Why? Because the man who is now second in line to the presidency and holds, arguably, the second most powerful political position in America is, among other things (and we’ll get to those), a religious extremist. Please let us dispense with the term “conservative” when trying to describe people like Johnson and his ilk—in the context of this country’s right-wing politics, the word has no meaning.

In his acceptance speech, Johnson sounded more like a Christian revivalist. (I half-expected to hear Neil Diamond’s “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show” in the background.) He explained his ascension (irony intended) as having been “ordained by god.” (I confess, I can’t listen to the man speak at any length, but from what I can tell, every third word out of his mouth is “god.”)

In explaining why his wife wasn’t at his swearing in, Johnson said, “She’s spent the last couple of weeks on her knees in prayer to the Lord. And, um, she’s a little worn out.”

I am so tired of the Republican Party shoving religion down our throats. Zealots like Johnson push policies that ruin the lives of their fellow human beings because they’re convinced that their “beliefs” trump the humanity of the people whose existence they disdain. Johnson, who is in favor of a total, nationwide abortion ban, is a viciously homophobic, misogynistic bigot.

This offends me

As recently as 2016, Johnson said: "What's happened over the last 60, 70 years is that our generation has been convinced that there's a separation of church and state. We hear that term all the time, and most people think that that's part of the constitution, but it's not." He also claimed that we live in a “biblical republic” which is not a thing, while completely ignoring the Bill of Rights—and Johnson claims to be a constitutional lawyer.

On the secular front, Johnson:

• wants to cut Medicare and claims Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme.”

• described January 6th as a “legitimate protest.”

• claims catastrophic climate change is a hoax.

As for the 2020 election, Johnson didn’t simply refuse to vote to certify the results, he was responsible for giving the big lie the patina of legal legitimacy. In doing so, he relied on the “independent state legislature” theory, which essentially claims state legislatures have the authority to overrule state courts in matters relating to the Elections Clause. (Earlier this year, in its decision in Moore v. Harper, the Supreme Court ruled that the opposite is the case.)

So it wasn’t Italian satellites or Chinese ballots containing chards of bamboo that were to blame for the “stolen election,” it was, according to Johnson, the unconstitutionality of the expansion of mail-in voting during COVID which, while equally false, sounds much more reasonable.

Remember Ken Buck, the guy who said he wouldn’t vote for Jim Jordan because he didn’t vote to certify the 2020 election? He voted for Johnson despite the fact that there is no daylight between the him and Jordan. It turns out Buck’s objection wasn’t to election denialism; it was to Jordan personally.

Which puts the second worst thing we can say about Mike Johnson in an even more disturbing light—he considers Jim Jordan to be his mentor. I can’t think of any one statement that so tidily sums up Johnson’s unfitness and total lack of judgment. The worst thing we can say about Mike Johnson is that he is now Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.

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The most immediate reason we’re here, besides the fact that there is not one Republican in Congress who has any principles, is that the most extreme of the extremists simply refuse to play by any rules at all. In every other previous race for the Speakership, the candidate who got the majority of the votes in the caucus meeting went on to become Speaker.

The larger reason we’re here is because there is no mechanism in place in a closely divided government to hold even the most vile actors against the government accountable. This is especially true when the side that supplied those actors is more interested in holding power than in protecting democracy.

The DoJ has done a good job getting indictments and convictions for the foot-soldiers who stormed the Capitol on January 6^th. Nothing has been done, however, to hold to account the foot-soldiers who continue to roam the halls of Congress—the elected representatives who were simultaneously victims, witnesses, and, in some cases, participants in the crimes against the Capitol. Those who may not have been involved in the planning of the insurrection became accessories after the fact when they refused to vote to certify the results of the 2020 election mere hours after their lives and the lives of every one of their colleagues and staffers had been endangered.

So, Donald is soon going to be on trial for the his role in January 6^th early next year. Meanwhile, he is actively engineering the next coup. Make no mistake, that is the end goal of this broken, democracy-weakening travesty in the House. Mike Johnson will do anything in his now-considerable power to make sure Donald gets back into the White House, regardless of what the American people choose.

It’s demoralizing, of course, that a Johnson Speakership is a win for Matt Gaetz, the man who single-handedly destroyed Kevin McCarthy’s political career. And it’s a win for Jim Jordan and Donald Trump, too. Much more importantly, it’s a loss for us, for democracy, and a blow to the Democrats’ chances of retaining the White House in 2024. What are the odds that a House of Representatives run by Speaker Mike Johnson will abide by the results of a presidential election Joe Biden wins?

There is literally nothing the Republicans will find disqualifying about Donald. Everything will have been rigged in advance. They learned a lot from their failures in 2020 and they won’t make the same mistakes again.

But the good news is, on January 6, 2025, Mike Johnson will probably no longer be Speaker of the House—Hakeem Jeffries will almost certainly be. The rest of us learned a lot from their failures, too. And we’ll be ready.