Johnson, Mike (1972- )

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      Mike Johnson’s Speakership Reveals GOP’s Trump Loyalty Test

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      The developments on Capitol Hill highlighted the extent to which one of the greatest sins inside the Republican Party is to have certified Joseph R. Biden’s victory.Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana had just survived a closed-door vote to end a tumultuous period of paralysis without a House speaker on Tuesday night and was celebrating with smiling and exhausted Republican colleagues.“Democracy is messy sometimes,” he said, “but it is our system.”But moments later, Mr. Johnson was confronted at a news conference about his own past role in American democracy, when he worked in alliance with former President Donald J. Trump to block the certification of the 2020 election.Boos rang out at the reporter’s inquiry. Mr. Johnson closed his eyes and shook his head. “Shut up! Shut up!” one congresswoman shouted. “Next question,” Mr. Johnson said. Only hours earlier, the speakership bid of another candidate, Tom Emmer, the majority whip, had been felled amid a lobbying blitz from Mr. Trump himself. Among Mr. Emmer’s apparent apostasies: certifying President Biden’s election. His tenure as speaker designate lasted only four hours.Then, on Wednesday, when Representative Pete Aguilar, a Democrat, chastised Mr. Johnson for leading efforts to reject the Electoral College votes on the House floor in 2020, one Republican lawmaker shouted back, “Damn right!”The back-to-back-to-back developments on Capitol Hill underscored not only the extent to which loyalty to Mr. Trump has become a prerequisite to taking power in today’s Republican Party, but also how — two and half years after a riot that left the Capitol covered with blood and broken glass — the greater sin inside the G.O.P. is to have stood with the voters that day and certified the election of Joseph R. Biden.“Bottom line is the Trump wing of the House is dominant and has been dominant for some time,” said former Representative Charlie Dent, a moderate Republican from Pennsylvania. Mr. Dent called Mr. Johnson “affable” and “bright” but said the political takeaway was clear: “A member of the Trump populist wing is now speaker.”Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, a Trump ally who filed the motion that took down former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, beamed, “This is what victory feels like,” celebrating Mr. Johnson’s rise on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast on Wednesday before the official floor vote. Mr. Gaetz called him “MAGA Mike Johnson” — the same moniker that the Biden campaign used hours later.At a New York courthouse, where he and his company are on trial for financial fraud, Mr. Trump himself praised Mr. Johnson. “I think he’s going to be a fantastic speaker,” the former president said Wednesday.The internal politics of House Republicans do not revolve solely around Mr. Trump. The former president had publicly backed Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio for speaker earlier this month, only to see him blockaded by a more moderate faction in the conference.But the end of the three-week paralysis shows that the party remains yoked to the former president’s election denialism, with Mr. Johnson’s selection by his Republican colleagues coming on the same day that one of Mr. Trump’s former lawyers tearfully pleaded guilty in a Georgia racketeering case related to Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the election.“If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these postelection challenges,” said Jenna Ellis, a once-combative Trump attorney who is now cooperating with Mr. Trump’s prosecutors. Prosecutors struck deals with two other Trump figures, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, in the last week.It was a different story on Capitol Hill.With Mr. Trump dominating polls in the 2024 presidential primary — and even his top rivals staying relatively silent on his election fraud falsehoods — the party appears content to look past the fact that many of the party’s most prominent election deniers lost in key swing states such as Arizona and Pennsylvania in the 2022 midterm elections.For many Republicans, the primary victories that preceded those defeats are as politically significant. Last year, Mr. Trump sought to methodically cleanse the party of his critics, especially those who had voted to impeach him after the Jan. 6 riot. He mostly succeeded: Only two of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach him survived.In contrast, Mr. Johnson served on Mr. Trump’s impeachment defense team. And before that he recruited House Republicans to sign onto a legal brief to object to the outcome of the 2020 election. When that failed, he had played a key role in articulating a rationale for Republican lawmakers to oppose certification of the 2020 results on the floor. His guidance did not directly echo Mr. Trump’s wild allegations and was narrower in scope, but it led to the same final vote.“We know now it’s too high of a hurdle to be directly criticized by Donald Trump” and still become speaker, said Kevin Sheridan, a veteran Republican strategist. Referring to Mr. Johnson, he added, “He seems to have found the right temperature for the porridge so far.”But Jenna Lowenstein, executive director of Informing Democracy, a nonprofit devoted to vote counting and election certification, said she was “very concerned” about Mr. Johnson’s ascent.“As a member of the House, Johnson was willing to use the powers of his office to try to obstruct a fair election and interfere with certification,” she said. “And we have to assume he would do the same with the broader powers of the speakership.”Mr. Johnson has served as vice chairman of the Republican conference and was previously the chair of the conservative Republican Study Committee. He is initially expected to be a more policy-minded leader than Mr. McCarthy, who was best known for his backslapping personality. Mr. McCarthy also objected to certifying the election and visited Mr. Trump in Mar-a-Lago only weeks after the attack on the Capitol, in a trip that was widely seen to restore some legitimacy to the former president.An evangelical Christian, Mr. Johnson has vocally opposed abortion and gay marriage. (During the roll call vote in which he was elected as speaker, Representative Angie Craig, Democrat of Minnesota, pointedly declared, “Happy wedding anniversary to my wife!” to Democratic applause.) Democrats were quick to highlight some of his hard-line stances.Elected to the House in 2016, the same year that Mr. Trump won the presidency, Mr. Johnson, a former constitutional law attorney, will have the least years of House experience of any speaker in many decades. But he is representative of the wave of House Republicans who have served in Washington only since the party was reshaped by Mr. Trump — and who are now a majority of the conference.“If you don’t have a coup on your résumé,” Charlie Sykes, the Trump-tired editor in chief of The Bulwark, wrote in a column about the speakership fight, “don’t bother to apply.” More

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      The Speakership Is Yours, Mike Johnson. Good Luck With That.

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      That House speaker mess was all Donald Trump’s fault. Yeah, yeah, I know you’re not going to argue with me if I blame him for something bad. (“Saturday night’s block party was canceled because of the threat of rain and … Donald Trump.”) Still, follow this thought.The House Republicans are a rancorous crew, and they’ve got only a nine-member majority, one of the tightest in recent history. We’ve been hearing all week that a mere five rebels can halt progress on anything, even a basic task like electing a speaker. Interesting how narrow that majority is. Normally, in nonpresidential-election years, the party that didn’t win the White House gets a lift — often a huge one. Some voters are looking for balance, others are just kinda bored. Given the deeply nonelectric nature of Joe Biden’s victory, you’d figure the Republicans would have made a scary sweep in 2022.But no — and one of the reasons was the completely loopy candidates running on Republican lines in districts that should have been up for grabs. Some had been handpicked by Trump, like Bo Hines, a 28-year-old former college football star who moved into a North Carolina swing district a month before the May primary, won the nomination with the ex-president’s enthusiastic support and then, well, went down the drain.Trump endorsed three candidates in tossup districts last year; all of them lost. Plus there were lots of other dreadful Trump-backed contenders on the ballots — like Mehmet Oz, the longtime New Jersey resident who ran a disastrous race for the Senate in Pennsylvania and almost certainly pulled down the rest of his party’s ticket.POP QUIZ:Donald Trump, who’s facing 91 criminal charges around the country, is now on trial in New York for falsifying records to make himself look like an, um, non-failure in the real estate business. This week, he compared himself to a South African Nobel Peace Prize winner who served time in prison for his battles against apartheid. (“I don’t mind being Nelson Mandela, because I’m doing it for a reason.”) He’s also compared himself to:A) Abraham LincolnB) JesusC) George WashingtonD) The Mona LisaThe answer is everybody but Jesus. And he did recently post a sketch on Truth Social showing Christ next to him in the courtroom.All that flailing around over selecting a House speaker was due, in part, to the Republicans’ failure to corral their Flimsy Five around any of the original contenders. But it was also very, very much about Trump’s lack of enthusiasm for logical candidates like Tom Emmer, the House Republican whip, who’d made the dreaded mistake of voting to certify the results of the last presidential election.“I have many wonderful friends wanting to be Speaker of the House, and some are truly great Warriors,” Trump declaimed. “RINO Tom Emmer, who I do not know well, is not one of them. He never respected the Power of a Trump Endorsement.”RINO, of course, stands for Republican in Name Only, something Trump has truly hated ever since he registered as a Republican in Manhattan back in 1987. Until he registered with the Independence Party in 1999, followed by the Democratic Party in 2001. But hey, he became a Republican again in 2009, then dropped his party affiliation in 2011, and switched back to being a Republican in 2012. There is absolutely no reason to imagine he would ever switch again. Unless, you know, there was something in it for him.Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who finally won the speaker’s job, is exactly the kind of guy you’d expect to come up on top. Right-wing anti-abortion activist who gets along with his colleagues and who, crucially, has items in his résumé that won Trump’s heart. A former radio talk show host who helped lead the Republicans’ battle to overturn the election results! What could be more perfect?“GET IT DONE, FAST! LOVE, DJT!” our ex-president posted on Truth Social.(Earlier, once Emmer had crashed, Trump praised all the possible successors to the ousted Kevin McCarthy as “fine and very talented men.” Quick question: What’s missing in that description? One minor detail — the candidate swarm was notably lacking in female representation. Just saying.)So the beat goes on. Mike Johnson’s friends are celebrating. Much of the rest of the nation is wondering why the heck anybody would ever want to be speaker of the House with its current crush of Republican crazies.Welcome to your new job, Mike. Hope you enjoyed your big day. Just remember that it won’t be long before Congress has to pass another bill to keep the government operating or send the country teetering into disaster.Details, details.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Speaker Mike Johnson Helped Efforts to Overturn The 2020 Election

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      If Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio was the most prominent public face of the congressional effort to fight the results of the 2020 election, his mentee, the newly elected Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, was a silent but pivotal partner.The election on Wednesday of Mr. Johnson, 51, to the post second in line to the presidency has focused new attention on his behind-the-scenes role in trying to overturn the election results on behalf of former President Donald J. Trump.A social conservative, Mr. Johnson played a leading role in recruiting House Republicans to sign a legal brief supporting a lawsuit seeking to overturn the results.In December 2020, Mr. Johnson collected signatures for a legal brief in support of a Texas lawsuit, rooted in baseless claims of widespread election irregularities, that tried to throw out the results in four battleground states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr.The Supreme Court ultimately rejected the suit, but not before Mr. Johnson persuaded more than 60 percent of House Republicans to sign onto the effort. He did so by telling them that the initiative had been personally blessed by Mr. Trump, and that the former president was “anxiously awaiting” to see who in Congress would defend him.A constitutional lawyer, Mr. Johnson was also a key architect of Republicans’ objections to certifying Mr. Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, 2021. Many Republicans in Congress relied on his arguments.In 2020, Mr. Johnson embraced Mr. Trump’s wild and false claims of fraud. In a radio interview, he asserted that a software system used for voting was “suspect because it came from Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela.”Mr. Johnson also falsely claimed the election was “rigged.”“You know the allegations about these voting machines, some of them being rigged with this software by Dominion, there’s a lot of merit to that,” Mr. Johnson said.No credible evidence has ever emerged to support the conspiracy theories about Dominion and another voting machine firm having helped to ensure Mr. Trump’s defeat. In April, Fox News agreed to pay $787.5 million to settle a defamation suit by Dominion over reports broadcast by Fox that Dominion machines were susceptible to hacking and had flipped votes from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden.On the eve of the Jan. 6 votes, Mr. Johnson had honed his arguments undermining the election to be more palatable. He presented colleagues with arguments they could use to oppose the will of the voters without embracing conspiracy theories and the lies of widespread fraud pushed by Mr. Trump. Mr. Johnson instead faulted the way some states had changed voting procedures during the pandemic, saying it was unconstitutional.After a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters, believing the election was rigged, stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 and injured about 150 police officers, Mr. Johnson condemned the violence. But he defended the actions of congressional Republicans in objecting to Mr. Biden’s victory.He wrote a two-page memo of talking points meant to buck up Republicans, and lamented that the violence had almost eclipsed his careful arguments. “Most of the country has also never heard the principled reason,” he wrote.Over a year later, on “Truth Be Told,” the Christian podcast he hosts with his wife, Kelly, Mr. Johnson continued to argue that he and his colleagues had been right to object to the election results.“The slates of electors were produced by a clearly unconstitutional process, period,” he said.Mr. Johnson came to Congress in 2017 with support from the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, though he has never joined the group.In an interview this year, he referred to Mr. Jordan, a co-founder of the Freedom Caucus, as a “very close friend” who “has been a mentor to me since I got here.”Mr. Johnson said Mr. Jordan called him when he was running for office, because “he knew I was a conservative,” contributed money to his campaign and invited him to Washington for a meeting with him and other Freedom Caucus members.“He started providing advice to me,” Mr. Johnson said. “So now we’ve become very close.”In 2020, the two men and their wives traveled to Israel together and met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.Mr. Johnson has also made a close ally of Mr. Trump, and he served on Mr. Trump’s impeachment defense team.On Nov. 8, 2020, Mr. Johnson was onstage at a northwest Louisiana church speaking about Christianity in America when Mr. Trump called. Mr. Johnson had been in touch with the president’s team on his myriad legal challenges seeking to overturn the results, “to restore the integrity of our election process,” according to a Facebook post by Mr. Johnson recounting the exchange.“We have to keep fighting for that, Mike,” he said Mr. Trump told him.“Indeed we do, sir!” Mr. Johnson said he replied.Karoun Demirjian More