BREAKING: Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Insurrectionist)
Mike Johnson stayed below the radar during the petty squabbles among Republicans of the last decade. But on one issue he was on brand: he was a prominent leader of the election deniers.
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Wednesday, October 25, 2023, 6:30 p.m.
When last we dared to cast our gaze upon the desiccated husk of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Republican Conference had selected and then defenestrated Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota. Emmer’s mortal sin was that he had voted to certify the 2020 election, which earned him condemnation from none other than the LOSER of that election:
When I shared this info with you yesterday, I assumed the House GOPers would quit for the weekend, as they have the last few weeks. Who cares if there’s a shooting war in Ukraine and Israel? Who cares if the government will shut down in less than three weeks? Who cares if the House GOP Conference is the laughingstock of America, and indeed of the world?
SIDEBAR: Why is there a Republican Conference and a Democratic Caucus in the U.S. Congress? The nomenclature has been around for a long time, but I could not find any source to explain how they originated, and why it is different for each party. And the Conference : Republican :: Caucus : Democrat rubric seems to exist in some states as well, but not in Texas.
(Speaker Mike Johnson tells his first lie from the podium.)
Well, apparently House GOP members were embarrassed enough to nominate and elect a new Speaker, and this time to get the votes. They selected and unanimously voted for Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana to become the 56th Speaker of the House.
Most congresscritters develop subject matter specialties over time, and Mike has specialized in subverting our democracy. The New York Times describes him as “an architect of the effort to overturn the 2020 election (apparently now a requirement for advancement in the House GOP) and a religious conservative opposed to abortion rights, homosexuality and gay marriage.” Just their kind of guy!
In fact, Mike played a uniquely diabolical role in the attempt to overthrow the free and fair presidential election in 2020. According to the New York Times,
In formal statements justifying their votes, about three-quarters relied on the arguments of a low-profile Louisiana congressman, Representative Mike Johnson, the most important architect of the Electoral College objections.
On the eve of the Jan. 6 votes, he presented colleagues with what he called a “third option.” He faulted the way some states had changed voting procedures during the pandemic, saying it was unconstitutional, without supporting the outlandish claims of Mr. Trump’s most vocal supporters. His Republican critics called it a Trojan horse that allowed lawmakers to vote with the president while hiding behind a more defensible case.
He also played a key role in one of the more comical chapters of the fight to overturn the election: he organized House Republicans’ signatures for an amicus brief in support of Texas’s ludicrous lawsuit to throw out the election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It only took the Supreme Court three days to throw the entire thing out, and it was just being nice.
Mike Johnson is the Golden Boy for now. But, he presides over an unruly caucus desperately in need of grown-ups, and he does not look to be one of them. Their rules still require only one member to move to vacate the chair, which means he could suffer Kevin McCarthy’s fate, and very soon. The entropy that consumes the House Republican Conference, and the national GOP for that matter, shows little signs of abating, and Mike Johnson is not the kind of leader to do anything about it.
Congratulations, Speaker Johnson. And good luck with all that.
Sickening. At least I wrote my congresswoman and asked only that she not vote for an insurrectionist as Speaker. As expected this was all but a complete waste of time. Trump rewarded this former mayor of Irving who earned his attention by publicly bullying a 14 year old Muslim boy who was so proud of a clock he’d built that he took it to school to show his teacher. Imagine bullying a 14 year old kid, and publicly too!
At the beginning of the 20th Century, Senate Republican progressives discredited the term caucus because they felt it symbolized secret votes that bound its members, no matter their individual preferences. They began using the term conference, and it was officially adopted by Senate Republicans in 1913, to represent the election of officers and the general discussion of legislation.
Senate Democrats continued to use the term caucus but only asserted a binding party position when two-thirds of the caucus voted to make it so.
House Republicans were led by James Mann during this period and he had no need for a caucus nor conference (his predecessor Uncle Joe Cannon felt the same). It seems the term conference was not adopted by House Republicans until 1920 or so.
Representative Mo Udall frequently observed that the difference between a cactus and a caucus is that on a cactus, the pricks are on the outside.