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      Speaker Johnson, Israel, government shutdown and Virginia – podcast

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      The new speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson of Louisiana, faces the tough task of uniting a fractured Republican party, and preventing a quick-approaching government shutdown. Jonathan Freedland and Marianna Sotomayor of the Washington Post discuss what we have learned about his approach to the job from his first week with the gavel.
      Plus, as we prepare for next week’s off-year elections, Jonathan speaks to Carter Sherman about Virginia – the last remaining southern state without extensive abortion restrictions. They look at why results there could prove pivotal for Republican chances in 2024

      You can support the Guardian at theguardian.com/fullstorysupport

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      Mike Johnson, theocrat: the House speaker and a plot against America

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      The new House speaker, Mike Johnson, knows how he will rule: according to his Bible. When asked on Fox News how he would make public policy, he replied: “Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.” But it’s taking time for the full significance of that statement to sink in. Johnson is in fact a believer in scriptural originalism, the view that the Bible is the truth and the sole legitimate source for public policy.He was most candid about this in 2016, when he declared: “You know, we don’t live in a democracy” but a “biblical” republic. Chalk up his elevation to the speakership as the greatest victory so far within Congress for the religious right in its holy war to turn the US government into a theocracy.Since his fellow Republicans made him their leader, numerous articles have reported Johnson’s religiously motivated, far-right views on abortion, same-sex marriage and LGBTQ+ rights. But that barely scratches the surface. Johnson was a senior lawyer for the extremist Alliance Defending Fund (later the Alliance Defending Freedom) from 2002 to 2010. This is the organization responsible for orchestrating the 303 Creative v Elenis legal arguments to obtain a ruling from the supreme court permitting a wedding website designer to refuse to do business with gay couples. It also played a significant role in annulling Roe v Wade.The ADF has always been opposed to privacy rights, abortion and birth control. Now Roe is gone, the group is laying the groundwork to end protection for birth control. Those who thought Roe would never be overruled should understand that the reasoning in Dobbs v Jackson is not tailored to abortion. Dobbs was explicitly written to be the legal fortress from which the right will launch their attacks against other fundamental rights their extremist Christian beliefs reject. They are passionate about rolling back the right to contraception, the right to same-sex marriage and the right to sexual privacy between consenting adults.Johnson’s inerrant biblical truth leads him to reject science. Johnson was a “young earth creationist”, holding that a literal reading of Genesis means that the earth is only a few thousand years old and humans walked alongside dinosaurs. He has been the attorney for and partner in Kentucky’s Creation Museum and Ark amusement park, which present these beliefs as scientific fact, a familiar sleight of hand where the end (garnering more believers) justifies the means (lying about science). For them, the end always justifies the means. That’s why they don’t even blink when non-believers suffer for their dogma.Setting aside all of these wildly extreme, religiously motivated policy preferences, there is a more insidious threat to America in Johnson’s embrace of scriptural originalism: his belief that subjective interpretation of the Bible provides the master plan for governance. Religious truth is neither rational nor susceptible to reasoned debate. For Johnson, who sees a Manichean world divided between the saved who are going to heaven and the unsaved going to hell, there is no middle ground. Constitutional politics withers and is replaced with a battle of the faithful against the infidels. Sound familiar? Maybe in Tehran or Kabul or Riyadh. But in America?When rulers insist the law should be driven by a particular religious viewpoint, they are systematizing their beliefs and imposing a theocracy. We have thousands of religious sects in the US and there is no religious majority, but we now have a politically fervent conservative religious movement of Christian nationalists intent on shaping policy to match their understanding of God and theirs alone. The Republicans who elected Johnson speaker, by a unanimous vote, have aligned themselves with total political rule by an intolerant religious sect.The philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard eloquently explained that religion is a “leap of faith”, not susceptible to reasoned discourse. The framers of the constitution and Bill of Rights thought the same. Under the first amendment, Americans have an absolute right to believe anything we choose and courts may not second-guess whether a believer’s truth is supported in reason or fact. For a believer, their belief is their “truth”, but for the republic, it is simply one of millions of beliefs across a country where all are free to believe. Thus, a scriptural originalist is by definition incapable of public policy discussions with those who do not share their faith.The grand irony is that being a “scriptural originalist” is oxymoronic. The colonies were first populated by those fleeing the theocracies of Europe – a fact the founders knew and respected. Millions were killed during the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation and the Spanish and Roman inquisitions, because only one faith could rule. Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, as well as many other kings and queens, ordered apostates killed, imprisoned or exiled. Current theocracies underscore this historical reality. The Pilgrims fled England because they were at risk of punishment and even death for observing the wrong faith. So did the Quakers, Baptists and Presbyterians. Despite the ahistorical attempts of rightwing ideologues to claim we are or were a monolithic “Christian country”, this was always a religiously diverse country, and they did not all get along at first. Jews arrived in 1654. Early establishments faded away in the early 19th century as they could not be sustained in the face of our diversity.The primary drafter of the first amendment, James Madison, was keenly aware of these realities as he reflected on the dangerous history of theocracies in his famous Memorial and Remonstrance, opposing Virginia taxes for Christian education, asking: “Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other sects?”Madison further invoked the Inquisition, stating that a bill funding religious education through taxes “degrades from the equal rank of citizens all those whose opinions in religion do not bend to those of the legislative authority. Distant as it may be in its present form from the Inquisition, it differs from it only in degree. The one is the first step, the other the last in the career of intolerance.” US history is proving him correct.Johnson isn’t just talking about a tax to support his brand of Christian nationalism, though the right’s religious movement, with the approval of the supreme court, has gone all out to ensure that as many tax dollars flow to their mission as possible. Johnson has asserted the hackneyed conservative theory of original intent – that the constitution must be interpreted precisely according to what the founders said – but with a twist. According to Johnson, George Washington and John Adams and all the others “told us that if we didn’t maintain those 18th-century values, that the republic would not stand, and this is the condition we find ourselves in today”. The founders, according to Johnson, were scriptural originalists and he’s here to take us back to their “true” Christian beliefs. In fact, the founders’ 18th-century enlightenment values directly repudiate Johnson’s 21st-century theocratic dogma.The Constitutional Convention itself shows how little support there is for the view that America started from a dogma-soaked worldview. During debates, Benjamin Franklin proposed bringing in a member of the clergy to guide them with prayer. Only three or four out of 55 framers agreed. The matter was dropped.Less than a decade ago, it looked like the religious right had lost the culture wars. The turning point seemed to be the decision in Obergefell v Hodges in 2015, which established same-sex marriage as a constitutional right. “It’s about everything,” Focus on the Family’s James Dobson mourned, “We lost the entire culture war with that one decision.”But instead of surrendering, the truest believers vowed to supplant democracy. They doubled down on furiously grabbing political power, to force everyone else to live their religious lives. Led by the likes of Leonard Leo, a reactionary Catholic theocrat who is chair of the Federalist Society’s board of directors, Dobson and many other Republicans, including the then little-known Mike Johnson, remade the supreme court and instituted stringent religious litmus tests for Republican candidates. Unable to control the culture, they have mounted a legal-political crusade against all who refuse to embrace their religious worldview.In little over a year, since Dobbs, the theocrats have converted their belief in the divinity of the fetus and disdain for the life of the pregnant into law, in one Republican-dominated state after another. But that is just a preview. Johnson and his crusaders would like to insert their scriptural originalism into every nook and cranny of federal law and public policy, to create a blanket of religious hegemony. Conservative governors and legislators have shamelessly invoked their God as the legislative purpose behind such draconian limitations.In the US, the peaceful coexistence of thousands of faiths was made possible in great part by the separation of church and state, which was demanded by Baptists in Massachusetts, Virginia and other places where they were being ostracized, taxed, flogged, imprisoned and even killed for their beliefs. That separation, which is the wall that protects religious liberty and prevents religious hegemony, was engraved in the constitution. How cruel an irony that some of the spiritual descendants of those persecuted Baptists should, like Mike Johnson, pervert American history and the constitution to impose a theocracy that would mean the end of democracy.
      Marci A Hamilton is a professor of practice and the Fox Family Pavilion non-resident senior fellow in the Program for Research on Religion at the University of Pennsylvania More

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      Speaker Johnson, Israel, government shutdown and Virginia – podcast

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      The new speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson of Louisiana, faces the tough task of uniting a fractured Republican party, and preventing a quick-approaching government shutdown. Jonathan Freedland and Marianna Sotomayor of the Washington Post discuss what we have learned about his approach to the job from his first week with the gavel.
      Plus, as we prepare for next week’s off-year elections, Jonathan speaks to Carter Sherman about Virginia – the last remaining southern state without extensive abortion restrictions. They look at why results there could prove pivotal for Republican chances in 2024

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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      US House passes $14.3bn aid package for Israel despite Democratic opposition

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      The US House of Representatives on Thursday passed a Republican plan to provide $14.3bn in aid to Israel as it fights Hamas, despite Democrats’ insistence it has no future in the Senate and the White House’s promise of a veto.The measure passed 226-196, largely along party lines, with most Republicans supporting the bill and most Democrats objecting.The bill’s introduction was the first major legislative action under the new Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson. President Joe Biden has threatened a veto, and Chuck Schumer, the majority leader of the Democrat-controlled Senate, said he would not bring it up for a vote.Biden has asked Congress to approve a broader $106bn emergency spending package including funding for Israel, Taiwan and Ukraine, as well as humanitarian aid. Schumer said the Senate would consider a bipartisan bill addressing the broader priorities.The House bill would provide billions for Israel’s military, including $4bn for Israel’s Iron Dome and David’s Sling defense systems to be able to counter short-range rocket threats, as well as some transfers of equipment from US stocks.“This is the first step in the process and I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting the bill so we can get funds to Israel as soon as possible,” said the representative Kay Granger, who chairs the House appropriations committee, during debate on the legislation.Republicans have a 221-212 majority in the House, but Biden’s fellow Democrats control the Senate 51-49. To become law, the bill would have to pass both the House and Senate and be signed by Biden.House Republican leaders said they would cover the cost of the aid to Israel by cutting some funding for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that Democrats included in Biden’s signature 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.Republicans objected to the increased IRS funding from the beginning, and said cutting the agency’s budget was essential to offset the cost of military aid to Israel, whose tanks and troops took on Hamas on the outskirts of Gaza City on Thursday.Democrats objected to cutting money for the IRS, calling it a politically motivated “poison pill” that would increase the country’s budget deficit by cutting back on tax collection. They also said it was essential to continue to support Ukraine as it fights against a Russian invasion that began in February 2022.The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office on Wednesday said the IRS cuts and Israel aid in the standalone bill would add nearly $30bn to the US budget deficit, currently estimated at $1.7tn.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe representative Rosa DeLauro, the ranking Democratic on the appropriations committee, accused Republicans of delaying aid by backing a partisan bill that does not include Ukraine or humanitarian aid for civilians. “This bill abandons Ukraine. We will not abandon Israel and we will not abandon Ukraine. But their fortunes are linked,” she said.While Democrats and many Republicans still strongly support Ukraine, a small but vocal group of Republicans question sending more money to the government in Kyiv at a time of steep budget deficits.Johnson, who voted against Ukraine aid repeatedly before he became speaker last month, plans to introduce a bill combining assistance for Ukraine with money to increase security at the US border with Mexico.“Ukraine will come in short order. It will come next,” Johnson said at a news conference on Thursday. “We want to pair border security with Ukraine, because I think we can get bipartisan agreement on both of those matters.”Congress has approved $113bn for Ukraine since the invasion began. More

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      Speaker Johnson says decision coming ‘very soon’ on Biden impeachment – as it happened

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      The Republican speaker of the House Mike Johnson said a decision will be made “very soon” on whether to push forward with the effort to impeach Joe Biden.His predecessor Kevin McCarthy announced the inquiry into the president’s conduct in September, weeks before rightwing Republicans and Democrats removed him from the speaker’s post. The investigation centers on allegations of corruption surrounding the president and his family, particularly his son Hunter Biden.Republicans held a single committee hearing into the matter, which was widely seen as a flop after their witnesses said the investigation had merit but there was still no evidence the president broke the law. Another blow to the effort came when Ken Buck, a conservative Republican who yesterday announced he would not seek re-election in 2024, wrote a column in the Washington Post to argue that impeaching Biden was a bad idea.The investigation was put on pause for weeks while the House grappled with McCarthy’s ouster, and whether and how to continue it is one of the major issues Johnson has to decide. Here’s what the speaker had to say when asked about it at a press conference today:The Republican speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, says the party will soon decide on whether to continue its impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden, but all indications point to the GOP pressing on. Republicans have been showing off evidence they say proves the president received money from a Chinese company, but the White House says Biden merely received a loan repayment from his brother during the period when he was out of office. Elsewhere in the House, George Santos survived a removal attempt, while Marjorie Taylor Greene is furious at some of her Republican colleagues for refusing to support her resolution to censure progressive Democrat Rashida Tlaib, which died on the House floor last night.Here’s what else happened:
      The White House said Biden would veto the House GOP’s proposal to send Israel security assistances while slashing funding to the IRS, and Senate leader Chuck Schumer said he would not bring the bill up for a vote anyway.
      Jamie Raskin, a Democrat who voted against expelling Santos, said he did so over concerns for due process.
      Biden appeared to endorse “a pause” in Israel’s invasion of Gaza.
      The Minnesota supreme court began hearing a case in which voters want to keep Donald Trump off the ballot for his involvement in an insurrection.
      Indiana’s supreme court found that the state’s Republican attorney general, Todd Rokita, “engaged in attorney misconduct” for comments he made about an obstetrician-gynecologist who performed an abortion for a 10-year-old rape survivor.
      Indiana’s supreme court has found that the state’s Republican attorney general, Todd Rokita, “engaged in attorney misconduct” for comments he made to Fox News about a doctor in the state who performed an abortion on a 10-year-old girl who had traveled from Ohio, the Indianapolis Star reports.The incident was one of the first high-profile examples of the fallout from the supreme court decision in June 2022 to overturn Roe v Wade and allow states to ban abortion entirely. In Ohio, a state law immediately went into effect that cut off access to the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy, but it was later halted by a court ruling.The Indiana supreme court took issue with Rokita’s description of Caitlin Bernard, an obstetrician-gynecologist, as an “abortion activist acting as a doctor – with a history of failing to report” in a Fox News interview in July 2022. In September, the supreme court’s disciplinary commission filed charges against Rokita, saying he violated professional conduct rules, and three of the state’s five supreme court justices agreed in today’s ruling. The court has ordered that Rokita receive a public reprimand and pay a $250 fine, though the two justices who dissented said the punishment was too lenient.Ohio voters will next week decide on a ballot measure to enshrine abortion access in the state’s constitution. Here’s the latest on that, from the Guardian’s Carter Sherman:The Senate’s Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, now says the House GOP’s Israel aid proposal will not be put up for a vote in his chamber:That means that even if the House approves the bill, the Senate will not send it to Joe Biden’s desk – whose administration said he will veto it anyway.Joe Biden would veto a proposal by House Republicans to send military aid to Israel while slashing funding for the IRS tax authority, White House national security council spokesman John Kirby told reporters at today’s briefing.“The president would veto an only Israel bill. I think we’ve made that clear,” Kirby said.Biden last month requested a $106b security measure to help Israel respond to Hamas’s terrorist attack, shore up Ukraine’s defenses against Russia’s invasion and improve border security. Led by speaker Mike Johnson, House Republicans responded by offering to approve Israeli security assistance, while considering funding for Ukraine and the southern border at a later date. Johnson has billed cutting the IRS as a way to pay for the cost of the foreign assistance, but an analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office yesterday found it would actually cost the government money because it would lower tax revenues.The White House national security spokesperson John Kirby said that a call by Joe Biden on Wednesday evening for a pause in fire by both Israel and Hamas in Gaza “does not mean we are calling for a general ceasefire”.At the daily press briefing from the west wing, Kirby asked rhetorically whether the White House thought a strategic and temporary “pause by both sides” was a good idea to help facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza and the evacuation of foreign citizens and hostages taken by Hamas from southern Israel on 7 October. Kirby answered himself: “You betcha we do.”He went on to explain why the US is willing to accept Qatar’s assistance with the passage of Americans and hostages out of Gaza, despite the small Arab country’s harboring of Hamas members, including the leader Ismail Haniyeh. Reporters questioned Kirby about this at the daily briefing at the White House moments ago.“Qatar has lines of communication with Hamas that almost no-one else has,” Kirby said.A reporter asked why the US was not asking Qatar to hand over the Hamas chief. Kirby said the US was busy working with Qatar on evacuations “and we are also helping Israel go after Hamas”.Kirby also said the US supports pauses in hostilities, not just a single pause. This is a point he’s made before.Kirby said the White House “has not seen evidence that Hezbollah is ready to go full force”. Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia militant group, said it had attacked 19 positions in Israel on Thursday evening in the latest escalation on Israel’s northern border. The Guardian’s report is here.The Guardian’s global live blog with all the details on the crisis in Gaza and the Israel-Hamas war is here.Antony Blinken has urged Russia to hold to its commitment not to resume nuclear weapons testing, Reuters reports.The secretary of state said the US is deeply concerned by Moscow’s planned action to withdraw its ratification of the comprehensive test ban treaty (CTBT).“Unfortunately, it represents a significant step in the wrong direction,” Blinken said in a statement released by the state department.The latest development happened this last month, when, the Guardian’s Julian Borger reported, a senior Russian diplomat said that Moscow will revoke its ratification of the CTBT, in a move Washington denounced as jeopardising the “global norm” against nuclear test blasts.Mikhail Ulyanov, the Russian representative to the international nuclear agencies in Vienna, was speaking after Vladimir Putin suggested Moscow might resuming testing for the first time in 33 years, signalling another downward turn in relations between the world’s two biggest nuclear powers.Ulyanov said on X, formerly known as Twitter: “Russia plans to revoke ratification (which took place in the year 2000) of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty.“The aim is to be on equal footing with the #US who signed the Treaty, but didn’t ratify it. Revocation doesn’t mean the intention to resume nuclear tests.”The US signed the CTBT in 1996 but the Senate did not ratify the treaty. Successive US administrations however have observed a moratorium on testing nuclear weapons.Any Russian nuclear test would be the first since 1990, the last conducted by the Soviet Union. Renewed testing by a nuclear superpower would undo one of the principal advances in non-proliferation since the cold war.Since the all-out invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin and other Russian officials have frequently drawn attention to the country’s nuclear arsenal, the biggest in the world, in an attempt to deter other countries from helping Ukraine resist the invasion.The US has been able to get 74 Americans with dual citizenship out of Gaza, Joe Biden said at the White House a little earlier, one day after evacuees began crossing into Egypt, Reuters reported.Meanwhile the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, talked to reporters before leaving Washington for a flight to Israel and said the US is determined to prevent escalation of the war there on all fronts, including southern Lebanon, the West Bank or elsewhere in the region.He will be talking to the Israeli government “and partners” in the region, he said.You can follow more details on all the developments in the crisis in Gaza and the Israel-Hamas war in our global live blog, here.This post was updated at 2.56pm ET to reflect a clarifying detail in a later wire piece by Reuters to specify that the 74 dual citizens Biden referred to were Americans with dual citizenship.The Republican speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, says the party will soon decide on whether to continue their impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden, but all indications point to them pressing on. The GOP has been showing off evidence it says proves the president received money from a Chinese company, but the White House says the president merely received a loan repayment from his brother during the period when he was out of office. Elsewhere in the House, George Santos survived a removal attempt, while Marjorie Taylor Greene is furious at some of her Republican colleagues for refusing to support her resolution to censure progressive Democrat Rashida Tlaib, which died on the House floor last night.Here’s what else is going on:
      Jamie Raskin, a Democrat who voted against expelling Santos, said he did so over concerns for due process.
      Biden appeared to endorse “a pause” in Israel’s invasion of Gaza.
      The Minnesota supreme court began hearing a case in which voters want to keep Donald Trump off the ballot for his involvement in an insurrection.
      All signs point to the House GOP continuing its impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden.Yesterday, the oversight committee, one of three bodies tasked with handling the effort, published an infographic purporting to show how the president received money from a Chinese company that was funneled through his family members:They even have an image of the check:The White House replied by saying that the money was a loan repayment to Biden from his brother, James, and it all took place in the period after Biden concluded his term as vice-president, and before he returned to the White House in 2021.As Ian Sams, the Biden administration spokesman handling the GOP’s inquiries, put it:This post has been corrected to say Biden received the loan repayment from his brother James.The Republican speaker of the House Mike Johnson said a decision will be made “very soon” on whether to push forward with the effort to impeach Joe Biden.His predecessor Kevin McCarthy announced the inquiry into the president’s conduct in September, weeks before rightwing Republicans and Democrats removed him from the speaker’s post. The investigation centers on allegations of corruption surrounding the president and his family, particularly his son Hunter Biden.Republicans held a single committee hearing into the matter, which was widely seen as a flop after their witnesses said the investigation had merit but there was still no evidence the president broke the law. Another blow to the effort came when Ken Buck, a conservative Republican who yesterday announced he would not seek re-election in 2024, wrote a column in the Washington Post to argue that impeaching Biden was a bad idea.The investigation was put on pause for weeks while the House grappled with McCarthy’s ouster, and whether and how to continue it is one of the major issues Johnson has to decide. Here’s what the speaker had to say when asked about it at a press conference today: More

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      Liz Cheney calls new House speaker ‘dangerous’ for January 6 role

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      The new Republican speaker of the US House, Mike Johnson, is “dangerous” due to his role in Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, the former Wyoming Republican congresswoman and January 6 committee vice-chair Liz Cheney said.“He was acting in ways that he knew to be wrong,” Cheney told Politics Is Everything, a podcast from the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “And I think that the country unfortunately will come to see the measure of his character.”She added: “One of the reasons why somebody like Mike Johnson is dangerous is because … you have elected Republicans who know better, elected Republicans who know the truth but yet will go along with the efforts to undermine our republic: the efforts, frankly, that Donald Trump undertook to overturn the election.”Johnson voiced conspiracy theories about Joe Biden’s victory in 2020; authored a supreme court amicus brief as Texas sought to have results in key states thrown out, attracting 125 Republican signatures; and was one of 147 Republicans who voted to object to results in key states even after Trump supporters attacked the Capitol.The events of 6 January 2021 are now linked to nine deaths, thousands of arrests and hundreds of convictions, some for seditious conspiracy. Trump faces state and federal charges related to his attempted election subversion (contributing to a total 91 criminal counts) yet still dominates Republican presidential primary polling.Cheney was one of two anti-Trump Republicans on the House January 6 committee, which staged prime-time hearings and produced a report last year. In Wyoming, she lost her seat to a pro-Trump challenger. The other January 6 Republican, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, chose to quit his seat.Like Kinzinger, Cheney has now written a memoir, in her case titled Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning. She has also declined to close down speculation that she might run for president as a representative of the Republican establishment – her father is Dick Cheney, the former defense secretary and vice-president – attempting to stop Trump seizing the White House again.Johnson ascended to the speakership last month, elected unanimously after three candidates failed to gain sufficient support to succeed Kevin McCarthy, who was ejected by the far-right, pro-Trump wing of his party.The new speaker’s hard-right, Christianity-inflected statements and positions have been subjected to widespread scrutiny.Cheney told Larry Sabato, her podcast host and fellow UVA professor: “Mike is somebody that I knew well.”“We were elected together [in 2016]. Our offices were next to each other, and Mike is somebody who says that he’s committed to defending the constitution. But that’s not what he did when we were all tested in the aftermath of the 2020 election.“In my experience, and I was very, deeply involved and engaged as the conference chair, when Mike was doing things like convincing members of the conference to sign on to the amicus brief … in my view, he was willing to set aside what he knew to be the rulings of the courts, the requirements of the constitution, in order to placate Donald Trump, in order to gain praise from Donald Trump, for political expedience.“So it’s a concerning moment to have him be elected speaker of the House.” More

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      Mike Johnson says he ‘isn’t afraid’ to change House speaker removal rule

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      Republican House speaker Mike Johnson said Sunday he “isn’t afraid” of changing the rules governing how the speaker can be removed from the post by any one member, Democrat or Republican, who introduces a “motion to vacate” followed by a majority-wins floor vote.The rule was adopted earlier this year among a number of concessions to the Republican far right agreed by Kevin McCarthy to win the position. He was then brought down by Florida Republican Matt Gaetz who used the rule to force a vote against him after McCarthy made a budget deal with Democrats.McCarthy was forced out on 3 October, the first speaker ever to be ejected, leading to a prolonged effort by lawmakers to select a speaker before arriving at Louisiana’s Johnson, a comparative neophyte to intra-Republican party warfare. He was elected the 56th House speaker on Wednesday.“Everyone’s here in good faith … and everyone has told me that that rule has to change,” Johnson said Sunday on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures”.But he added: “I’m not afraid of it because I’m going to openly work transparently and work with every member and everyone will be … will fully understand what we’re doing and why.”He acknowledged that the motion vacate rule that led to the Gaetz-led mutiny “makes it difficult for any speaker to do their job”.Johnson has said it’s his wish to decentralize political power from the speaker to the committees in the legislative body and to lead the body in a more transparent fashion.On Sunday he said that his “highest priority is to get this work done and to do it an open and transparent way into as I said in my speech, the night when I took the oath, to decentralize the power from the speaker’s office”.“I really want to empower our chairman and the committees of jurisdiction and all the talented people in the House and make them more of a part of the big decisions and the situations and the processes here and ensure regular order,” Johnson said. “If we do that, we don’t have to worry about a motion to vacate and I’m doing that, working on that everyday.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMcCarthy had agreed to the rule change reducing the number of members required to call a confidence vote from five to one as part of a package with Republican hardliners who had forced him to endure 14 rounds of voting before winning the position on the 15th.Previously, under Democrat Nancy Pelosi, the speaker could only be threatened when a majority of one party supported the motion to vacate. Until McCarthy was ousted, it had only been used once before, in 1910, when it failed.Others had unsuccessfully tried to use it, including against Newt Gingrich in 1997 and in 2015 when Republican Mark Meadows filed the motion against speaker John Boehner, but it did not reach a vote and Boehner resigned months later. More

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      You can’t fight the Republican party’s ‘big lie’ with facts alone | Peter Pomerantsev

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      Why do seemingly serious people repeat crazy political lies? This was the question the American anthropologist and political scientist Lisa Wedeen explored when she studied the Syrian dictatorship in the 1990s.She was struck by how people who were usually rational in private would repeat the utterly absurd slogans of the regime, such as claiming that the dictator Hafez al-Assad was the greatest chemist in the world.“From the moment you leave your house, you ask: what does the regime want?,” a Syrian explained to her. “The struggle becomes who can praise the government more.” The bigger the lie you uttered, the more loyal you were.“The regime’s power resides in its ability to impose national fictions and to make people say and do what they otherwise would not,” Wedeen concluded. “This obedience makes people complicit; it entangles them in self-enforcing relations of domination, thereby making it hard for participants to see themselves simply as victims of the state’s caprices.”I was reminded of Wedeen’s research when the US Congress finally selected a speaker after weeks of chaos. Their choice, Congressman Mike Johnson of Louisiana, is best known for ardently supporting ex-president Donald Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 election, which Trump lost to Jo Biden, was rigged. Johnson was the head of the committee to question the integrity of the election. He constructed spurious legal arguments that tried to discredit the vote, though his proposals were thrown out by the US supreme court. He raised the unfounded theory that the voting machines used in the election were tampered with.This claim is so groundless that Fox, the network that supported the allegation, had to pay nearly a billion dollars in a settlement with Dominion, the company that makes the machines.Many of the Republican representatives who supported Johnson’s candidacy have admitted both publicly and privately that the elections were, in fact, not falsified. Yet when journalists faced a gaggle of Republican congressmen and questioned Johnson’s record on this blatant lie, his colleagues jeered and he mockingly said: “Next question” – as if the facts were irrelevant here.And in a sense, they are. Agreeing to Trump’s claims about the rigged election is the absurdity you have to pledge allegiance to in order to show you belong to the tribe. It ensures your fealty by making you complicit. For anyone who has lived in authoritarian regimes, it’s a familiar sight.Along with Wedeen’s Syrian example, I’m reminded of the Czech dissident and playwright Václav Havel’s essay The Power of the Powerless, where he tells the story of a greengrocer in communist-era Prague who puts up pro-regime posters in his shop window. The greengrocer doesn’t believe the communist slogans; the people who make the slogans don’t believe in them; and the people who read them don’t believe in them.But as long as everyone plays along, the system continues. It’s the act of not believing and yet pretending, rather than of fervently believing, which is the power of such systems. Your will is corroded: you are made into moral mincemeat that can be shaped any which way by the leader.Havel nobly suggested that in order to fight such a system, what was needed was to “live in truth”, start being honest. Republican politicians face none of the danger communist-era Czechoslovaks or Syrians under the Assads have, but living in truth seems beyond them.Contradicting Trump’s absurdities risks falling out of favour with the leader and his supporters.Altogether, about 40% of Americans think the 2020 vote was illegitimate, and about 60% of Republicans (the figures fluctuate). A democracy will struggle to survive, let alone flourish, when such huge swathes of its population see it as their badge of loyalty not to trust its most fundamental processes.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut if the “rigged” election claim is more about identity than evidence, it also means it will be hard to fact check our way out of this situation. The issue can’t simply be resolved by “trusted” sources, even those on the far right, who can communicate the truth about the election to Trump supporters. Instead, sources only become trusted if they agree to the lie.Pledging loyalty to the “big lie” is more about identity than knowledge – and to fight it entails understanding the need for belonging and meaning it fulfils. Authoritarian propaganda can give the illusion of status and at its extremes a sense of supremacy to compensate for the lack of real agency.Self-styled “populists” can flourish in what sociologists call “civic deserts”: frequently rural areas where the old institutions that bonded communities, the local clubs and town halls have disappeared and where civic engagement is particularly low.But such communities can start to be regenerated for a digital age with, for example, online as well as offline town halls; reinvigorated local news that responds to people’s priorities; and online municipal budget making and other innovations that help people feel part of a community and have ownership over local politics.Historical lessons from understanding and fighting propaganda can be useful here too. When he investigated the psychology of German soldiers in the second world war, the British psychiatrist Henry Dicks thought that counterpropaganda needed to stress the bonds people had that went beyond belonging to the Nazi Volk: the emotional bonds they felt with loved ones and relatives, for example.The competition with the big lie is not just, or even primarily, about fact checking. It’s a competition between different models of belonging: can we build alternative communities that are more benign and yet fulfilling than the ones offered by the conspiracy theorists? More