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      Mike Johnson Is a Right-Wing Fever Dream Come to Life

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      Last week, on the eve of his first attempt to become speaker of the House, allies of Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio confidently predicted that his more mainstream and institutionalist opponents would cave rather than resist his ascent.Jordan’s allies were wrong about that particular caving. But they were right that those same moderates and institutionalists would eventually fall in line with the far-right of the House Republican conference because, on Wednesday, they did just that.After three weeks of chaos, the House Republican majority finally chose a speaker. The lucky legislator? Representative Mike Johnson from Louisiana’s Fourth Congressional District. A four-term backbencher with little leadership experience, Johnson was too obscure to have enemies, giving him an easy ride to the top after three previous nominees — Steve Scalise, the House majority leader; Jordan, the first chairman of the House Freedom Caucus; and Tom Emmer, the House majority whip — faltered in the face of opposition. After winning a nearly unanimous vote of the House Republican majority (one member was absent), Johnson became the 56th speaker of the House of Representatives.Mike Johnson is neither a moderate nor an institutionalist. Just the opposite. A protégé of Jordan’s, he comes, as you have doubtless heard, from the far-right, anti-institutionalist wing of the congressional Republican Party. And while he was not a member of the Freedom Caucus, he did lead the Republican Study Committee, a group devoted to the proposition that any dollar spent on social insurance is a dollar too much.When push came to shove, in other words, the supposedly moderate members of the House Republican conference were happy to defer to their most extreme colleagues on substance, if not on style.And what does Johnson believe? He is staunchly against the bodily autonomy of women and transgender people and supports a nationwide ban on abortion and gender-affirming care for trans youth. He is also virulently anti-gay. In a 2003 essay, Johnson defended laws that criminalized homosexual activity between consenting adults. In 2004, he warned that same-sex marriage was a “dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic.” Last year, Johnson introduced legislation that has been compared to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, and he continues to push to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015.If Johnson is known for anything, however, it is for his tireless advocacy on behalf of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.Johnson wrote one of the briefs purporting to give a legal justification for throwing out the voting results in several swing states. He advanced the conspiracy theory that Venezuela was somehow involved with the nation’s voting machines. On Jan. 6, 2021, he urged his Republican colleagues to block certification of the election on the grounds that state changes to voting in the face of the pandemic were illegitimate and unconstitutional. When questioned, during his first news conference as speaker, whether he stood by his effort to overturn the 2020 election, he ignored the question, and his fellow Republicans shouted down the reporter who asked it.The new speaker is, in short, an election-denying extremist who believes that his allies have the right to nullify election results so that they can impose their vision of government and society on an unwilling public. He is Jim Jordan in substance but not Jim Jordan in style, which was enough for Republicans to come together to make him leader of the House and second in line to succeed the president of the United States in the case of emergency.The fractious House Republican majority cannot agree on how to fund the government. It cannot agree on whether to fund the government. It cannot agree on the scope of federal spending. It cannot even agree on whether it should do anything to govern the nation. But it can agree, it seems, to hand the reins of power to someone who showed no hesitation when asked to help overturn American democracy.During the summer of 2012, President Barack Obama told supporters that if he won the White House again, it would “break the fever” among Republicans. Instead, after Mitt Romney lost to Obama, the party embraced the worst version of itself and nominated Trump in 2016 and 2020. After Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, he expressed his hope that this time, with Trump’s departure from power, the Republican fever would finally break. Instead, the Republican Party went even deeper into the hole, hailing the former president’s failed attempt to keep himself in office as another lost cause and defending his leadership again and again.It’s not that the fever won’t break. It’s that there is no fever to break. The far-right extremism and open contempt for democracy that marks much of modern Republicanism is not an aberration. It’s not a spell that might fade with time. It is the Republican Party of 2023 and it will be the Republican Party of 2024. And while Trump may, for either legal or political reasons, eventually leave the scene, there’s no reason to think the Republican Party will revert to a state where the Mike Johnsons are back on the sidelines.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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      Biden Faces Backlash From Party’s Left Wing on Israel

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      As a raw divide over the war ripples through liberal America, a coalition of young voters and people of color is breaking with the president, raising new questions about his strength entering 2024.The Democratic Party’s yearslong unity behind President Biden is beginning to erode over his steadfast support of Israel in its escalating war with the Palestinians, with a left-leaning coalition of young voters and people of color showing more discontent toward him than at any point since he was elected.From Capitol Hill to Hollywood, in labor unions and liberal activist groups, and on college campuses and in high school cafeterias, a raw emotional divide over the conflict is convulsing liberal America.While moderate Democrats and critics on the right have applauded Mr. Biden’s backing of Israel, he faces new resistance from an energized faction of his party that views the Palestinian cause as an extension of the racial and social justice movements that dominated American politics in the summer of 2020.In protests, open letters, staff revolts and walkouts, liberal Democrats are demanding that Mr. Biden break with decades-long American policy and call for a cease-fire.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please More

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      Cornel West’s Improvisational Run for President: ‘It’s Jazz All the Way Down’

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      Is the celebrity professor’s candidacy a wild variable in the 2024 presidential campaign or performance art? Yes, he says.Cornel West, the left-wing public intellectual and independent presidential candidate, stood on a rainy stretch of suburban highway in New York’s Rockland County. “Watch that truck!” he called out, holding up a United Auto Workers sign.A dump truck blew past, the spray from its wheels momentarily knocking Mr. West back on his feet and further soaking his already damp suit.It was not supposed to be like this. The week before, on Sept. 20, Mr. West had announced he was going to Michigan, the epicenter of a strike against the three unionized American auto manufacturers over wage increases. But then President Biden announced that he, too, would be going to Michigan, a crucial swing state, on the same day. Soon, Mr. West said, union officials urged him to delay his Michigan trip and in the meantime join workers picketing a local auto parts distribution center in Tappan, N.Y., instead.(A U.A.W. spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.)Still, Mr. West seemed determined to make the best of this Siberia of solidarity. “That’s it!” he shouted, fist raised, after the dump truck driver let out a low blast on his horn. “Now you know!”Even by the standards of outsider politics, Mr. West’s presidential campaign has been uncommonly chaotic. He has embraced and discarded political parties the way other people try on outfits before going to work. He has predictably infuriated Democrats, who fear that his campaign could draw a decisive number of voters away from Mr. Biden in 2024. But he has also irked activists from the Green Party, whose nomination he sought before announcing this month that he would run as an independent instead.That latest move is perhaps the most perplexing. Independent candidacies face far more hurdles than third-party runs. Mr. West’s decision threatens to transform his candidacy from a wild variable in the 2024 contest into a minor curiosity.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please More

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      The Conflicted Legacy of Mitt Romney

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      After factional infighting dominated the G.O.P.’s struggle to elect a House speaker, it feels weirdly quaint to revisit Mitt Romney’s career. He’s served as governor, U.S. senator and presidential nominee for a Republican Party now nearly unrecognizable from what it was when he started out. At the end of his time in public office, Romney has found a new clarity in his identity as the consummate institutionalist in an increasingly anti-constitutionalist party. But as a newly published biography of him shows, that wasn’t always the case.McKay Coppins, a staff writer at The Atlantic, interviewed Romney dozens of times over the past several years and had access to his private journals, emails, and text messages. In this resulting biography “Romney: A Reckoning,” Coppins pushes Romney to wrestle with his own role — even complicity — in what his party has become.[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]In this conversation, guest host Carlos Lozada and Coppins examine Romney’s legacy at a time when it may seem increasingly out of place with the mainstream G.O.P. They dive deep into the key decisions and events in Romney’s life; discuss the looming influence Mitt Romney’s father, George, also a Republican presidential candidate, had over his life; how Romney rationalized appeasing figures on the campaign trail he found disdainful, including Tea Party populists and an early 2010s Donald Trump; how he failed to articulate just why he wanted to be president; the many grudges he has against members of his own party who acquiesced or embraced Trump; how Romney will be remembered by history; and much more.This episode was hosted by Carlos Lozada, a columnist for The New York Times Opinion, and the author of “What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era.” Lozada is also a host on “Matter of Opinion,” a weekly podcast from New York Times Opinion.You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Jessie PierceThis episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Emefa Agawu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero. More

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      Dean Phillips Will Run Against Biden

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      The Minnesota lawmaker is undertaking a long-shot bid against an incumbent president who has significant financial advantages.Representative Dean Phillips, a moderate Minnesota Democrat who has for months publicly argued that President Biden should not run for re-election, announced his candidacy for president on Thursday, setting up an underdog challenge for the Democratic nomination.In an interview with CBS News, Mr. Phillips — who plans to officially launch his campaign on Friday in New Hampshire — argued that finding an alternative to Mr. Biden was essential because of polling showing the president at risk of losing to former President Donald J. Trump.“I will not sit still and not be quiet in the face of numbers that are so clearly saying that we’re going to be facing an emergency next November,” he said. Late Thursday evening, he posted his campaign announcement on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, saying, “It’s time to put our country back together again.”Mr. Phillips, a third-term congressman who represents a district that includes suburban Minneapolis, enters the race with long-shot odds.The Democratic establishment and major donors have already lined up behind Mr. Biden, who raised $71.3 million with the Democratic National Committee and his joint fund-raising committee during the three-month reporting period that ended Sept. 30.Mr. Phillips will also need to work fast to get his name on the ballot in several early-voting states. Already, he has missed the deadline to appear on the ballot in Nevada, the second nominating state on a new presidential primary calendar approved by the national committee this year.Mr. Phillips, 54, has for months stressed his belief that Mr. Biden, 80, should face a serious primary challenge, citing the president’s age and low approval ratings as evidence that Democrats are eager for a new generation of candidates. (Several Republican candidates have made similar arguments in their bids against former President Donald J. Trump, who is 77.)An heir to a Minnesota liquor company who also ran the gelato company Talenti, Mr. Phillips was first elected in 2018, as part of a wave of Democrats who flipped Republican-held suburban districts in a backlash to Mr. Trump. He stepped down from a position in Democratic leadership in the House this month as he weighed joining the presidential race.Mr. Phillips will join two other primary challengers to the president: Marianne Williamson, the self-help author who unsuccessfully ran against Mr. Biden in 2020, and Cenk Uygur, the co-creator and co-host of the progressive talk show “The Young Turks.”Another candidate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., had initially planned to compete for the Democratic nomination but announced this month that he would instead run for president as an independent candidate. More

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      Larry Elder Ends Long-Shot Presidential Bid

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      Mr. Elder, a Los Angeles Republican who bills himself as “the sage from South Central,” endorsed Donald Trump.Larry Elder, a conservative talk radio host from California whose run for the Republican presidential nomination never gained traction, ended his campaign on Thursday and endorsed Donald J. Trump, the front-runner in the crowded field.“Throughout my campaign,” Mr. Elder wrote in a message posted online, “I have been steadfast in my belief that the biggest issues facing our nation are the crisis of fatherlessness, the dangerous lie that America is systemically racist, the need for an amendment to the constitution to set federal spending to a fixed percentage of the GDP — otherwise government gets bigger whether Republicans or Democrats are in charge, and the need to remove the Soros-backed DAs across the country who refuse to endorse the law.”(George Soros’s indirect donations to a prosecutor’s campaign have animated Mr. Trump’s allies, and Mr. Soros’s name comes up often among conspiracy theorists in attacks frequently viewed as antisemitic.)Mr. Elder added, “I hope my campaign has helped shine a light on these critical issues and sparked important conversations about how we can solve them.”He never surpassed the Republican Party’s donation or polling thresholds to qualify for candidate debates.Mr. Elder, a Los Angeles Republican who bills himself as “the sage from South Central,” was the top vote-getter among challengers to Gov. Gavin Newsom in the state’s attempted recall election in 2021. Voters instead chose to keep Mr. Newsom in office.“Now that I am exiting the race,” Mr. Elder added in his message on Thursday, “I am proud to announce my endorsement of Donald Trump for President of the United States. His leadership has been instrumental in advancing conservative, America-first principles and policies that have benefited our great nation. We must unite behind Donald Trump to beat Joe Biden.”While Mr. Trump is the dominant front-runner for the Republicans’ presidential nomination, he is facing seven major cases in six courthouses in four cities. Two of the cases relate to his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, which he still falsely maintains was rigged. More

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      The G.O.P. Goes Full-on Extremist

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      There are no moderate Republicans in the House of Representatives.Oh, no doubt some members are privately appalled by the views of Mike Johnson, the new speaker. But what they think in the privacy of their own minds isn’t important. What matters is what they do — and every single one of them went along with the selection of a radical extremist.In fact, Johnson is more extreme than most people, I think even political reporters, fully realize.Much of the reporting on Johnson has, understandably, focused on his role in the efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Let me say, by the way, that the widely used term “election denial” is a euphemism that softens and blurs what we’re really talking about. Trying to keep your party in power after it lost a free and fair election, without a shred of evidence of significant fraud, isn’t just denial; it’s a betrayal of democracy.There has also been considerable coverage of Johnson’s right-wing social views, but I’m not sure how many people grasp the depth of his intolerance. Johnson isn’t just someone who wants to legalize discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q. Americans and ban gay marriage; he’s on record as defending the criminalization of gay sex.But Johnson’s extremism, and that of the party that chose him, goes beyond rejecting democracy and trying to turn back the clock on decades of social progress. He has also espoused a startlingly reactionary economic agenda.Until his sudden elevation to speaker, Johnson was a relatively little-known figure. But he did serve for a time as chairman of the Republican Study Committee, a group that devises policy proposals. And now that Johnson has become the face of his party, people really should look at the budget proposal the committee released for 2020 under his chairmanship.For if you read that proposal carefully, getting past the often mealy-mouthed language, you realize that it calls for the evisceration of the U.S. social safety net — not just programs for the poor, but also policies that form the bedrock of financial stability for the American middle class.Start with Social Security, where the budget calls for raising the retirement age — already set to rise to 67 — to 69 or 70, with possible further increases as life expectancy rises.On the surface, this might sound plausible. Until Covid produced a huge drop, average U.S. life expectancy at age 65 was steadily rising over time. But there is a huge and growing gap between the number of years affluent Americans can expect to live and life expectancy for lower-income groups, including not just the poor but also much of the working class. So raising the retirement age would fall hard on less fortunate Americans — precisely the people who depend most on Social Security.Then there’s Medicare, for which the budget proposes increasing the eligibility age “so it is aligned with the normal retirement age for Social Security and then indexing this age to life expectancy.” Translation: Raise the Medicare age from 65 to 70, then keep raising it.Wait, there’s more. Most nonelderly Americans receive health insurance through their employers. But this system depends greatly on policies that the study committee proposed eliminating. You see, benefits don’t count as taxable income — but in order to maintain this tax advantage, companies (roughly speaking) must cover all their employees, as opposed to offering benefits only to highly compensated individuals.The committee budget would eliminate this incentive for broad coverage by limiting the tax deduction for employer benefits and offering the same deduction for insurance purchased by individuals. As a result, some employers would probably just give their top earners cash, which they could use to buy expensive individual plans, while dropping coverage for the rest of their workers.Oh, and it goes almost without saying that the budget would impose savage cuts — $3 trillion over a decade — on Medicaid, children’s health coverage and subsidies that help lower-income Americans afford insurance under the Affordable Care Act.How many Americans would lose health insurance under these proposals? Back in 2017 the Congressional Budget Office estimated that Donald Trump’s attempt to repeal Obamacare would cause 23 million Americans to lose coverage. The Republican Study Committee’s proposals are far more draconian and far-reaching, so the losses would presumably be much bigger.So Mike Johnson is on record advocating policies on retirement, health care and other areas I don’t have space to get into, like food stamps, that would basically end American society as we know it. We would become a vastly crueler and less secure nation, with far more sheer misery.I think it’s safe to say that these proposals would be hugely unpopular — if voters knew about them. But will they?Actually, I’d like to see some focus groups asking what Americans think of Johnson’s policy positions. Here’s my guess, based on previous experience: Many voters will simply refuse to believe that prominent Republicans, let alone the speaker of the House, are really advocating such terrible things.But they are and he is. The G.O.P. has gone full-on extremist, on economic as well as social issues. The question now is whether the American public will notice.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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      Blake Masters Announces Run for Congress, Skipping New Senate Bid

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      After losing his Senate race last year in Arizona, Mr. Masters, a Trump-backing Republican, is running in a primary against a onetime conservative ally.Blake Masters, a Republican who lost his U.S. Senate campaign in Arizona last year, announced on Thursday that he would run to represent the state’s Eighth Congressional District — ending speculation that he would pursue a second Senate run in 2024.“I’m running for Congress, to fight for Arizona’s 8th,” Mr. Masters wrote on X, the site formerly known as Twitter. “Biden has failed. We need Trump back. We need to stop inflation, Build the Wall, avoid WW3, and secure Arizona’s water future. We need to fight for our families.”Representative Debbie Lesko, a Republican, has represented the district, in the Phoenix suburbs, since 2018. Ms. Lesko announced this month that she would not seek re-election.Also this month, Kari Lake, a former news anchor who ran for governor in Arizona last year, declared that she would run for the seat held by Senator Kyrsten Sinema.The New York Times reported in September that former President Donald J. Trump had called Mr. Masters to tell him that he didn’t believe Mr. Masters could win a primary race against Ms. Lake, a staunch Trump ally. Last fall, Mr. Masters lost an expensive race trying to unseat Senator Mark Kelly after gaining Mr. Trump’s endorsement in the primary.In a video accompanying Mr. Masters’s announcement — which depicted him standing with Mr. Trump — Mr. Masters said he was particularly concerned about border security, the economy and water rights issues with California.Already running in the Eighth District is Abraham Hamadeh, who ran for Arizona attorney general last year on a ticket alongside Mr. Masters. Mr. Hamadeh entered the race shortly after Ms. Lesko announced she would not seek re-election and was endorsed by Ms. Lake on Thursday.“It is sad to see the establishment tricking @bgmasters into driving up all the way from Tucson and getting in the race,” Mr. Hamadeh wrote on X. (Property records indicate that Mr. Masters lives in Tucson, more than 100 miles from the Eighth District.)Mr. Hamadeh continued, “They want the America First movement divided. Voters will remember who stood tall against the entrenched political class and who ran into their arms.”Sheelagh McNeill More