Mike Johnson is As Dangerous as Jim Jordan

I suspect many are relieved that the House of Representatives again has a Speaker and hope that the three weeks of paralysis is over.  Yet the selection of Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana should worry anyone not deeply entrenched in MAGA world or who doesn't subscribe to a Christian nationalist agenda.  Prior to being elected to Congress, Johnson worked for the hate group Alliance Defending Freedom which is virulently anti-LGBT - he'd criminalize homosexuality - and favors a national ban on abortion.  In short, he wants to inflict a Christofascist world view on America with, as always is the case with such extremists, Christian extremists have superior rights to everyone else who must subscribe to a toxic form of Christianity best defined by who its adherents hate, which is basically everyone but themselves.  Equally disturbing is Johnson election denialism and unwavering support for Donald Trump, a would be autocrat and an individual who embodies the seven deadly sins.  Thus, like other evangelicals Johnson displays extreme hypocrisy of mouthing Christian platitudes and wearing religion on his sleeve while supporting someone who has throughout his life made a mockery of true Christian values and who has no allegiance to anyone or anything other than himself.  That Johnson can  now control what legislation gets to the House floor is nothing less than frightening.  A Column in the Washington Post looks at Johnson's dangerous ideology and slavish deference to Trump.  Here are highlights:

If you are feeling any sense of relief that Jim Jordan won’t be the next House speaker, stop and worry again.

The new speaker, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), might be more dangerous than the firebrand Ohio Republican. For Jordan’s shirt sleeves demeanor and wrestler’s pugnacity, substitute a bespectacled, low-key presentation, a law degree and an unswerving commitment to conservative dogma and former president Donald Trump.

This is not an upgrade. It is Jordan in a more palatable package — evidently smoother, seemingly smarter and, therefore, potentially more effective.

Johnson, now serving his fourth term in Congress, was the moving force behind a Supreme Court brief that helped lay the shoddy intellectual groundwork for Jan. 6, 2021. In December 2020, he rallied fellow Republican lawmakers to support Texas’s brazen bid to overturn the election results. In a lawsuit that fizzled almost as soon as it was filed, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sought to have the Supreme Court intervene in the election by blocking the certification of electoral college votes in four swing states — Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin — where voting rules had been changed in the course of the election and voters, not coincidentally, had favored Joe Biden. The justices swiftly rejected the case . . . . But not before Johnson rallied the GOP troops to sign on to a friend-of-the-court brief backing the Texas lawsuit — and took pains to emphasize that Trump was keeping score. “He said he will be anxiously awaiting the final list to review,” Johnson wrote on what was then Twitter.

The Johnson brief was a full-throated endorsement of the “independent state legislature” theory, ultimately rejected by the Supreme Court in 2023’s Moore v. Harper. The brief asserted that under the terms of the Constitution, only state legislatures — without any review by state courts or involvement of other state parties — have power to set rules for choosing presidential electors.

Don’t rely on the assessment of Democrat Josh Shapiro, then Pennsylvania’s attorney general, now its governor, that Texas’s effort to interfere in those states’ determinations was a “seditious abuse of the judicial process,” as he told the justices. Rather, listen to Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy, no liberal squish, who declined to sign the Johnson brief and denounced the Paxton bid as “a dangerous violation of federalism” that “sets a precedent to have one state asking federal courts to police the voting procedures of other states.”

The Texas episode was of a piece with Johnson’s conservative worldview. Before being elected to Congress, he was a senior lawyer and national spokesman for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative [hate group] group that opposes abortion, same-sex marriage and LGBTQ+ rights.

Running for Congress in 2016, he described himself as “a Christian, a husband, a father, a lifelong conservative, constitutional law attorney and a small business owner in that order, and I think that order is important.” Johnson said he had been “called to legal ministry and I’ve been out on the front lines of the ‘culture war’ defending religious freedom, the sanctity of human life, and biblical values, including the defense of traditional marriage, and other ideals like these when they’ve been under assault.”

His congressional career has been more of the same, including backing a federal ban on abortion after 15 weeks. Johnson twice served on the impeachment teams defending Trump and pushed to expunge the first impeachment from the record.

His fealty to the former president seems to have paid off. “My strong SUGGESTION is to go with the leading candidate, Mike Johnson, & GET IT DONE, FAST!” Trump advised on his social media site Tuesday. So, they did.

Be very worried about what this man may do to erode the rights of the many while giving special rights to Christian extremists and white supremacists.