The new laws of American politics can sometimes seem to bear little resemblance to the old laws of American politics. It wasn’t so long ago, after all, that our politicians aimed to get a majority of the vote and conceded defeat when they did not get it, that running from the center rather than the extremes was seen as a winning strategy, and that lack of experience was viewed as a political liability which, if not exactly fatal, needed somehow to be addressed. Criminal indictments were generally considered career-ending. Governing was at least theoretically the goal of those who sought to run the government. But in the eighth year since Donald Trump took over the Republican Party, the G.O.P. continues to do things that would seem to defy logic.
For more than three weeks, amid a brewing crisis in the Middle East and with a national election year looming, House Republicans shut down the one branch of government that they control, having allowed a faction of just eight rebels to depose their leader and then finding themselves unable to agree on who should replace him. It was “perhaps the dumbest set of politics—or decision-making—a majority party in this institution could make,” as Patrick McHenry, the North Carolina Republican who served as acting Speaker for the duration of the follies, bluntly put it. When they finally settled the matter on Wednesday, twenty-two days into the mess, their new chosen Speaker, the Louisiana congressman Mike Johnson, appeared to have two main qualifications for the post: his obscurity and his record of extreme fealty to Trump.
In the hours after Johnson’s unexpected ascension on Wednesday, the press and the political commentariat feasted on examples of the previously little-known congressman’s ideological extremism: his calling gay people “dangerous” and “deviant” threats to the American way of life; his sponsorship of a national abortion ban and warning that those who performed an abortion would, at least in Louisiana, end up doing hard labor; his insistence that, if only women would bear more “able-bodied workers,” there would be no need to cut back Medicare and Social Security. His climate-change denialism, his belief in creationism over evolution, and his promotion of “covenant marriage” were all examined. It was pointed out that Johnson, after only six years in Congress, was the least experienced Speaker in a hundred and forty years, and the most hard-right House leader anyone could remember.
But none of those were the reasons for his rise, which had less to do with his stealth brand of political extremism than with his stellar record of support for Trump’s unprecedented effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Many members of the House Republican Conference—two-thirds of them, in fact—had voted to back Trump’s lies about the election. But few had worked as actively to foist bogus conspiracy theories about 2020 on the American public as did Johnson, a constitutional lawyer who enlisted dozens of fellow-members to support a Texas court case seeking to cancel the election results in battleground states. Johnson even promoted the bizarre falsehood, also amplified by Trump, that Dominion voting machines had been rigged because they came from “Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela.” (One thing that always bothered me about this: Didn’t anyone ever point out to them that Chávez died in 2013, seven years before the election that he somehow stole?) Johnson’s role, little noted at the time, was such that the Times later called him “the most important architect” of the campaign to block congressional certification of the Electoral College results and thus overturn Trump’s defeat.
On Tuesday, it had looked like the Speakership might go to Minnesota’s Tom Emmer, but the Republican whip turned out to have a fatal black mark on his résumé, at least as far as House Republicans were concerned: his vote on January 6, 2021, to certify President Joe Biden’s election. After five rounds of voting in the Republican Conference on Tuesday, Emmer defeated Johnson, a hundred and nineteen votes to ninety-seven votes. But then Trump weighed in. No way he wanted an election enabler as House Speaker. In a Truth Social post, Trump warned against the “tragic mistake” of choosing a “globalist RINO” like Emmer. Enough Republicans then refused to go along with Emmer in a prospective House floor vote—where the Republican majority is so slim that a Speaker candidate can lose no more than four members of his own party—that he was soon forced to give up his bid. (“It’s done. It’s over. I killed him,” Trump reportedly bragged in a phone call with members.) It says everything about today’s House G.O.P. that Johnson lost the race against Emmer but then won the job anyway.
Just a few days before the dénouement of the Speaker drama, Ken Buck of Colorado had declared himself a proud holdout against installing an election denier in the Speakership. “If we don’t have the moral clarity to decide whether President Biden won or not, we don’t have the moral clarity to rule in this country, period,” he told reporters. Yet on Wednesday he, along with every other Republican in the House, voted to install Johnson as Speaker. There is moral clarity in this unanimous G.O.P. choice, but not the kind that reflects well on Buck or his colleagues.
On Wednesday morning, Matt Gaetz, the Florida congressman who sparked all this chaos earlier this month, when he moved to oust Kevin McCarthy, gave Johnson a new nickname, soon embraced by everyone from the Biden campaign to Trump himself: “MAGA Mike.” The gentleman from Louisiana may or may not be able to govern his unruly caucus, but he has already proved one thing: that lying for Trump is the essential prerequisite for winning power in the Republican-controlled House.
I imagine that Democratic strategists—not to mention all those frenetically Googling opposition researchers—are delighted with how this particular circus on Capitol Hill played out. They were already planning to run against the “MAGA extremists” in 2024—now there’s a Speaker to lampoon whose positions are so extreme they hardly seem believable for the twenty-first century. Republican House candidates, meanwhile, will have a hard time arguing that their constituents should elect them to run Congress—what’s the point, after all, if they’re so busy fighting among themselves that they can’t even keep the House open for business?
Still, it’s hard to regard Johnson’s elevation as a good development, no matter what comes out of it. The U.S. government looks foolish and, with federal funding once again set to run out in just a few weeks, Congress is no closer to passing even the bare minimum of bills to keep the government open. The new Speaker, a politician who opposes basic human rights for many Americans and who would forswear his oath to the Constitution to keep a dishonest demagogue in power, represents an extreme minority of the country. He is also untested and unvetted, so little known that, before he became Speaker on Wednesday, he had never even met with the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell. And yet he went to bed Wednesday night as second in the line of succession to the U.S. Presidency.
Kevin McCarthy, the deposed House Speaker, had a reputation as an establishment type with whom Democrats could do business. But his years of accommodation to Trump and the Trumpists who came to dominate his caucus shredded any claim he once had to credibility. It should be noted that McCarthy, too, was an election denier who voted against certification on January 6th, as were the majority of candidates who emerged at one point or another in October trying to succeed him.
The lesson of the last month is that it doesn’t really matter whether it was Johnson or some other House Republican who won. There is no such thing as a political moderate among them. They are all Trumpists now. ♦
