The Republican Speakership battle

https://bsky.app/profile/sarahposner.bsky.social/post/3kcqfvy3qsg2i

Mike Johnson says America’s problems today are because “we didn’t maintain 18th century values”

https://x.com/BidenHQ/status/1718025560301994263?s=20

A Q&A with historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez on the Christian nationalist ideas that shaped House Speaker Mike Johnson.

The Christian Nationalist Ideas That Made Mike Johnson - POLITICO


“That is the creed that has animated our nation since its founding and has made us the great nation that we are,” Johnson said.

That line caught the attention of Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a historian who specializes in evangelical Christianity and politics. The idea that America is founded on a creed is a common one among evangelicals, and it was a sign to her that Johnson adheres to a worldview that can be described as Christian nationalist.



Johnson, a Shreveport, Louisiana, native, entered politics after spending more than two decades defending conservative Christian causes as a litigator at the conservative legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom, and throughout his career, he has argued in courts and drafted legislation to outlaw same-sex marriage and restrict abortion.

That was one reason I reached out to Du Mez, who combed through his long record of statements about his beliefs and influences to help me understand how his faith drives his politics. “As he understands it, this country was founded as a Christian nation,” Du Mez told me. “So really, Christian supremacy and a particular type of conservative Christianity is at the heart of Johnson’s understanding of the Constitution and an understanding of our government.”

Rep. Mike Johnson, the newly elected House speaker, has repeatedly flirted with what’s known as the “great replacement theory,” the idea that Democrats are scheming to supplant American voters with immigrants. The Louisiana Republican’s views show how fringe conspiracy theories have gone mainstream in the Republican Party at the highest levels of power.

Opinion | New GOP House speaker flirts with dangerous conspiracy theories - The Washington Post

"Corporate media seems to lack the vocabulary to accurately describe the modern Republican Party.
The latest example, of course, is the election of a new Speaker of the House: Mike Johnson, an insurrectionist anti-gay right-wing extremist Trump proxy. Those words accurately describe the little-known congressman from Louisiana. In fact, they’re quite restrained.
It would be even more accurate to call him a bigoted Christofascist member of the Trump cult willing to end democracy as we know it.
Any of those descriptions, of course, are way too blunt for the dignified editors of our top newsrooms — all of whom believe in balance more than accuracy."

As Republicans embrace theocratic authoritarianism, the political media is tongue-tied | Press Watch (presswatchers.org)

Johnson turns out to offer the perfect example of how in today’s gerrymandered world, people can ride to the highest levels of power without facing a real election their entire careers.
Which means they can be complete extremists and never face accountability for it. It also means that not only do they not know democracy, they actually come to fear it. Not just because they have never experienced it, but because it poses the biggest risk to their grasp on power.
Let’s take a look at Johnson’s career to see how it works:


Before entering office, he spent his years fighting for right-wing causes as a lawyer—like fighting same-sex marriage and to keep in place laws criminalizing sodomy. That’s his right to do, of course, and I’m glad he was largely unsuccessful.
But then his political career began:
In early 2015, when the state representative where he lived in Louisiana ran for another office, Johnson ran for the vacancy.
Incredibly, even that first run for office was unopposed. There ended up not even being an election! So he initially assumed power without ever having faced the voters in a general election.
(No wonder he thinks we’re not a democracy!)
Once in office, he got to work advancing the goals he had fought for as a lawyer, but now as a legislator. One law he pushed within months was so extreme that major Louisiana companies lobbied against it, and even Republicans rejected it, tabling it 10-2 in committee.
What did the voters think about the fact that in only months, he had already proven to be too extreme for even his own party?
We don’t know, because when Johnson ran again that Fall for next 2-year term, he was again unopposed.
No primary.
No general.
How easy! He pays the filing fee, gathers some signatures, and gets to go right back to the legislature with no accountability to the people whatsoever.
(Again, no wonder he doesn’t think we’re a democracy!)
On the strength of his failed bill, and unopposed election victories—on that unmistakable mandate from a people who had no choice in the matter—Johnson decides it’s time to take his political juggernaut to Congress.
And then he encounters the marvels of lopsided districts. He wins in 2016, 2018 and 2020 with the winning margins we have come to expect in a gerrymandered world:
30% (2016)
30% (2018)
35% (2020)
And then in 2022, even after being one of the most active participants in Trump’s January 6 coup attempt, he returns to his roots and runs unopposed again.
For the third time—no wonder he thinks we’re not a democracy!

Mike Johnson and Democracy - by David Pepper (substack.com)

Well, MSNBC probably calls it that way, but they're "evil radicals as bad as Fox" or whatever.

From his first speech to the House:


“I want to tell all my colleagues here what I told the Republicans in that room last night. I don’t believe there are any coincidences in a matter like this. I believe that scripture, the Bible, is very clear that God is the one that raises up those in authority.
“He raised up each of you. All of us. And I believe that God has allowed and ordained each and every one of us to be here at this specific moment. This is my belief. I believe that each one of us has a huge responsibility today to use the gifts God has given us to serve the extraordinary people of this great nation, and they deserve it."

He didn't say whether it was God's will that they beclown themselves for three weeks before resigning themselves to him.
He also didn't say whether the same reasoning applied to Biden (and Obama and Bill Clinton)

Spoiler alert: there are no republics of any sort in the Bible.



Wonder where Johnson gets the idea that the U.S. is a biblical republic? Take one guess.

https://x.com/RightWingWatch/status/1686781920825294859?s=20

Christian nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton baselessly claims the Founding Fathers modeled our government on "the Hebrew Republic" found in the Bible: "There's so many clauses of the Constitution that we put in there to model the Hebrew republic." None of that is true.

Mike Johnson And The Christian Nationalist Pseudo-Historian (rightwingwatch.org)

WHAT THE NRCC THINKS OF JOHNSON No organ of house r leadership is as jammed by Johnson’s election as the NRCC. McCarthy transferred $18.5M of the $70M raised by the committee. Doesn’t include digital solicitations.

Johnson has raised $5M in his career. KM raised 3x that last quarter. Hours after Johnson became speaker, he got a briefing by Chair Richard Hudson on what he’s expected to do for the NRCC. ALSO: speaker has to raise $250M for CLF/AAN

https://t.co/ruDBLeeMAp

Per the LEEEEBRAL NYT...



AND YET...



But wait! THERE'S MORE!

in 2023, he co-sponsored the Life at Conception Act, which would ban all abortion, nationwide, without any execeptions

More from that David Barton article above...

When Rep. Mike Johnson was elected Speaker of the House earlier this week, Christian nationalist religious-right activist Rick Green was “literally in tears” because, he said, Johnson “is one of our guys.”

Johnson himself confirmed as much back in 2021 when he spoke at a WallBuilders Pro-Family Legislators conference where he heaped praise on Christian nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton, saying that Barton’s work “has had such a profound influence on me and my work and my life.”

Green and Barton produce a daily “WallBuilders Live” radio program together, and on Thursday, they were downright giddy about Johnson’s elevation to the speakership, declaring that Johnson “sounds like a WallBuilders speaker” and proclaiming that “this is literally the kind of guy that we have been praying for.”

Johnson certainly does “sound like a WallBuilders speaker” and given that Right Wing Watch has covered Barton and WallBuilders for decades, it is worth taking a look at just what that means.

David Barton has built an entire career out of misusing, misrepresenting, and outright falsifying history, the Bible, and current events and doing so to promote his Christian nationalist political agenda. He has been highly influential not only within Republican politics, where he has many fans among current and former GOP legislators, but also internationally. On top of that, Barton’s Christian nationalist pseudo-history is shaping both Christian and secular educational institutions across the country.

Barton, who has repeatedly misrepresented his academic credentials and personal history, had his book on Thomas Jefferson pulled by his own publisher in 2012 after it concluded that “basic truths just were not there.”

Undaunted, Barton has soldiered on, repeatedly declaring that Christians who share his far-right worldview are supposed to be choosing our elected leaders and ruling the world because everything must operate according to biblical principles.

Barton falsely insists that our Constitution and entire system of government are based on the Bible and thus asserts that everything from the minimum wage to the income tax to the teaching of evolution are unconstitutional because they supposedly violate Biblical teachings. Barton also believes that there should be literally no limits on the Second Amendment, meaning that average citizens are entitled to own tanks, fighter jets, and even nuclear weapons.

Predictably, Barton takes a far-right position on issues like abortion—going so far as to proclaim that life actually begins before conception—and on LGBTQ issues, asserting repeatedly that AIDS is God’s punishment for sin and therefore a cure will never be found.

David Barton is almost single-handedly responsible for creating the Christian nationalist myths that the far-right uses to justify its push to enact harmful public policies that weaken the separation of church and state, undermine women’s rights, and deny legal equality to LGBTQ Americans. The fact that Rep. Mike Johnson, who is now Speaker of the House and second in line for the presidency, is an acolyte of Barton and his teachings ought to be alarming to all Americans who care about core American values of church-state separation and religious pluralism, not to mention teaching the truth about our founding and history





Mike Johnson And The Christian Nationalist Pseudo-Historian (rightwingwatch.org)

On a similar theme
(I'm glad this is getting a lot of media attention)

The Christian Nationalism of Speaker Mike Johnson | TIME

Although he has never called himself a Christian Nationalist nor publicly embraced the term as other House Reps have done, each example points to the strong embrace of the ethos of Christian nationalism—a cultural framework that advocates for a particular expression of Christianity to be fused with American civic life, with the government vigorously promoting and preserving this version of Christianity as the principal and undisputed cultural framework.

Speaker Johnson has explicitly embraced the idea that the U.S. was founded upon particular Christian principles, in 2016 claiming, “You know, we don’t live in a democracy . . . It’s a constitutional republic. And the founders set that up because they followed the biblical admonition on what a civil society is supposed to look like.”

In the same interview, he reiterated his belief that the separation of church and state is not a constitutional principle. “Over the last 60 or 70 years our generation has been convinced that there is a separation of church and state . . . most people think that is part of the Constitution, but it’s not.” And in 2022, he stated “The founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around.” Johnson, and those he has famously represented, insist the United States is a nation with “Judeo-Christian roots” at which “secular forces are chipping away.”

Having studied Christian nationalism for over a decade, we find it is consistently made up of several different elements. When we say Speaker Johnson is a Christian nationalist, we mean he provides a near-perfect example for each element.

Traditionalist Social Arrangements
First, Christian nationalism strongly favors traditionalist social relationships and hierarchies. This ideal society revolves around patriarchy, heterosexual marriage, and pronatalism. Consequently, certain citizens and family arrangements should have easy access to various civil rights and liberties, while others should be denied access.

As an attorney working for the Alliance Defense Fund, now known as Alliance Defending Freedom (founded by leaders with similar Christian nationalist commitments, like James Dobson, D. James Kennedy, and Bill Bright), Speaker Johnson opposed the decriminalization of homosexual activity through Lawrence v. Texas in 2003 and in 2004 proposed banning same-sex marriage.

He argued how both will “de-emphasize the importance of traditional marriage to society, weaken it, and place our entire democratic system in jeopardy by eroding its foundation,” and that “experts project that homosexual marriage is the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic.”

Mike Johnson has sponsored multiple bills aimed at a nationwide ban on abortion, which he once publicly blamed for school shootings. He also once structured opposition to Roe v. Wade in terms of how it—in his view—limited the number of able-bodied workers in the economy, which fundamentally weakens the government’s ability to fund various social programs.

Like a car engineered to run on gasoline, Johnson sees our nation—and any nation for that matter—only running properly on the social arrangements elevated in the conservative Anglo Protestant tradition. Johnson’s politics are those that formally privilege gender traditionalism and heterosexuality as the national ideal.

Authoritarian Social Control
Second, Christian nationalism adheres to a desire for strong leaders who through the threat of violence, or actual violence, defend the preferred social arrangements and hierarchies. This includes setting aside the results of free and fair elections to ensure a chosen leader remains in power. Americans who embrace Christian nationalism are more likely to support anti-democratic tactics and approve of political violence if an election does not return favorable results.

Mike Johnson was a central figure in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election, joining 146 other Republicans in Congress. Repeating debunked claims about “rigged” Dominion voting machines, Johnson went so far as to author an amicus brief for a case where Texas moved to have swing-state results thrown out. His consistent efforts to deny and overturn the 2020 election earned him the nickname “MAGA Mike” from fellow lawmakers.

Speaker Johnson exemplifies this aspect of Christian nationalism disregarding the values of democracy to instead embrace any means through which political power remains in the “right” hands. And this comfort with setting aside democratic ideals aligns with another element of Christian nationalism.

(more at the link)

The FEC found Russian oligarchs, including Roman Abramovich, funneled cash to some of the biggest names in Louisiana GOP: Sens. Kennedy and Cassidy, a fund run by Steve Scalise, a PAC backing AG Jeff Landry, and Reps. Mike Johnson and Garrett Graves.



Russians Used a US Firm to Funnel Funds to GOP in 2018. Dems Say the FEC Let Them Get Away With It. – Mother Jones

House Speaker Mike Johnson holds ties to Israel's far right — traveling on a private visit organized by a top settler, meeting with the group behind Israel's judicial overhaul and touring the Temple Mount with an activist against maintaining the status quo

New House Speaker Mike Johnson, an Evangelical Christian, Holds Ties to Israel’s Far Right - U.S. News - Haaretz.com

The newly elected Speaker of the House introduced a dehumanizing bill last year that would classify "transgenderism" as sexually oriented material on par with porn.
It's so much worse than a national "Don't Say Gay" bill.

They missed Aunt Alice.

Speaker of the House connected with Northern Kentucky, Ark Encounter

Come for the Speaker jokes, stay for the ones about Trump and Moscow Mitch.

Great halloween costume for John Mikeson, he almost looks like a human male. How did they get him to walk upright like that? His grunting out christian proverbs gives him away. Next year they will have to train their talking monkey better.

https://x.com/petervroom1/status/1719007469794439199?s=46&t=iYW3foyqIA6Tn8VWwn3nwQ

As much as I hate to low-key root for a villain, it's going to be a very revealing test of the GOP to watch whether the old DC Master (Mitch) will thoroughly kick the ass of the in-over-his-head theocrat brat.

Enjoyable to watch if he does, somewhat terrifying if he can't.

https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/our-u...itle&isFreemail=true&r=l3wcu&utm_medium=email

https://www.thedailybeast.com/does-new-speaker-of-the-house-mike-johnson-have-a-bank-account

https://x.com/jeffpearlman/status/1721260718857822492?s=20

It gets weirder.



https://x.com/rollingstone/status/1721274337188040981?s=46&t=iYW3foyqIA6Tn8VWwn3nwQ

I learned something sad about my father. I always assumed his computer was so fucked up because he visited porn sites that weren't good. The other day I come by and see he has Chrome, firefox, and edge opened up and he is answering questions from email spam people telling him they have gift cards and freebies for him.

I really wish it was porn. I could give him clean porn sites. I can't fix that other shit.

Not content with just sacking the Capitol Republicans are turning it into a school yard.

https://x.com/cgrisales/status/1724452392811286565