Well shit, look what just happened! After over three weeks of what the Twitter wags are calling Operation Enduring Clusterfuck, the GOP arrived at a consensus candidate for the Speakership, and the guy actually wanted the job, so here he is, by unanimous vote of the Republican caucus:
Say again? Who the f#%k is Mike Johnson? You’ll probably wish you hadn’t asked, but I’m going to tell you anyway.
O.K., let’s just get this over with.
Mike Johnson is, first and foremost, a coup-plotting, election denying, insurrectionist MAGA-fied worshiper at the altar of Donald. As an otherwise virtual non-entity with nothing on his governance to-do list, he’s kept a really, really low profile until now, so very low that I’d never heard of him until yesterday, and I pay attention to these things. Outside of Congress, and I guess his own district (though I wonder), I’d wager a fair sum that there aren’t more than 200 American citizens who’ve ever heard of him either. Why would they? Mike is one of those elected representatives dedicated to the proposition that the federal government exists mainly for depriving people of their civil rights, cutting taxes on the rich, and abolishing regulations that vex his paymasters in the donor class, after which, with maybe the exception of removing any impeachable Democrat within a six-light-year radius, and imposing evangelical religious dogma, not a whole hell of a lot else. Not even pass a budget, unless the budget cuts taxes on the rich and harms the poor and the helpless, in which case that would be worth the effort. As a staunch no-government-is-good-government conservative, he’s never been much for passing bills. He just voted against anything that came along, like so many of his colleagues, and blended in with the crowd. The media took no note of him, and as near as I can tell, he also avoids talking to reporters as if they’ve all got Ebola. There was no reason for anybody to notice him, or what he was up to, and in a just Universe there still wouldn’t be.
It’s not that he was lazy. He was working feverishly behind the scenes, especially in January 2021, when he was positively on a mission. Oh yes, he was busier than a termite in a timber mill, busier indeed than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest**, doing everything he could to overturn the election of Joe Biden. He wasn’t just a garden variety go-along-to-get-along drone who dutifully voted against certifying the vote, either, he was a major player in formulating the strategy that Mike Pence was supposed to help execute. He lobbied fiercely within the GOP caucus to motivate election denial in the House, and was also a key mover behind the parallel submission of a Republican amicus brief in the Texas lawsuit that sought to invalidate the Electoral College results in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Georgia, an attempt to get the courts to do what the people wouldn’t, and hand the election to Trump. He remains adamant that Trump won the election, and Joe Biden is therefore an illegitimate President.
He is, in short, a low-down, dirty rotten traitor, which these days is a minimum qualification if you want a prominent role in the Party of Trump. That’s why it’s him in the Speaker’s chair today, and not the hapless Tom Emmer, another obscure back bencher who seemed to be somebody everybody could tolerate, until Trump took a break from being crucified at his civil fraud trial in New York to belch out one of his faux-tweets, and torpedoed the guy’s candidacy when it was only three hours old:
Geez, you might well ask, why the vitriol? What was Emmer’s cardinal sin, that Donald found it necessary to bisect him at the waist like that? Well, he wasn’t a dyed-in-the-wool election denier, silly! He voted to certify Biden’s election. Now, he did this not because he felt any fealty to the Constitution, the institution in which he served, his oath of office, or the American people, but because he was one of the few to admit to the logic that if it was a bunch of phoney ballots that won Biden the White House, it followed that his own election to Congress was quite possibly also invalid, since, in all 50 States, everybody up for federal office is listed on the same form as the candidate for President. It’s a unified process. That’s why those seeking offices other than the Presidency are referred to colloquially as “down-ballot”. Their names are literally down the ballot. Throw out the votes in your district that were cast for Biden, and per force you likewise threw out some percentage of the votes for you. Unlike the schemers in the MAGA crowd, Emmer just couldn’t wrap his mind around it.
He had to go, then. Donald said so.
One of the bleakest aspects of Emmer’s summary execution and Johnson’s subsequent elevation to power is that now we have to listen to the gloating of that arsehole Matt Gaetz, who clearly perceives himself as the hero of the story, and was crowing to Steve Bannon – who, yes, is still out and about and on the air, and not in a cage where he belongs – about the Glory of MAGA Triumphant. As the wonderful Tim Miller ruefully acknowledged, he’s not wrong, either:
Mike Johnson, on top of everything else, owes Matt Gaetz big time, and isn’t even sad about that. Whatever Matt wants, he wants too.
Not sure what else there is to say about him that isn’t blindingly obvious, given that after one look at him you already know what he’s about. He’s White, in the sense that Whiteness is thought by the MAGA crowd to embrace a certain ideology, indeed a whole philosophy of being (actually he’s whiter than White), and he’s vehemently opposed to anything you think is right and decent, like, say, female reproductive autonomy, banning assault weapons, gay rights, or putting a titanium muzzle on the constantly flapping piehole of the intolerable J.D. Vance. He’s a religious absolutist, one of those smug unmerciful Christians who’d have been first in line to nail up the Christ of the Gospels, whose philosophy amounted to what they’d call communism today. He’s a religious nut bar, actually. Every time he opens his yip it’s likely to be about how God’s will governs our fate (with the Supreme Being, of course, ensuring outcomes pleasing to Johnson, as would only be expected when a fellow like Mike has reached a perfect understanding of the mind of God). He’s also prone to parroting the bogus right wing dogma that “America isn’t a democracy, it’s a constitutional republic” – it’s amazing how many of these guys spew that ridiculous talking point – which presumably is a way of justifying the minority rule that he covets, especially if the minority establishes an autocratic ethno-nationalist theocracy. Like in Iran, maybe. Or something like those guys in the Taliban have come up with, only not Muslim. More like the regime in that TV show about handmaids.
As examples of what sort of policy prescriptions this guy would impose if he could, he wants a nationwide, no-exceptions abortion plan, promotes the idea of a federal “don’t say gay” regime just like the one in Florida, and oh yeah, advocates banning the teaching of evolution. He thinks there’s a direct causal link between Darwin and mass shootings. Same deal with feminism. No fooling.
He’s so f#@king pious and full of evangelical zeal that I wouldn’t be surprised if he spins out scandals having to do with, well, let’s call it “taboo sexuality”.
About the only nice thing you can say about the prick is that he’s not Jim Jordon, though he’s certainly the next best thing, and his grabbing of the gavel brings with it all sorts of horrifying possibilities. I’ll let conservative never-Trumper Bill Kristol explain the very worst of them:
Oh. Right. This isn’t just about keeping the government funded, helping Ukraine, doing right by the 98.7% of the American population that’s getting screwed under the status quo, and all that jazz. This is about all the marbles.
The Republic is doomed.
I can see only one way out of this death spiral (or at least, only one way that doesn’t involve unspeakable things about which the less said here the better). Henceforward, all American White males must be stripped of their right to vote, for the duration of the emergency (i.e. until every one of them now over 30 dies off down the road). I realize this will involve a little constitutional jiggery-pokery, and some deft stick-handling in the courts, but surely we can get some sharp and dedicated lawyer to write an amicus brief, which would have to be least as legally persuasive as the one Johnson hoped would help steal the election for Trump.
**I found these on line. There’s a million of ‘em!
the needlefish 
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