The GOP finally got their shit together and elected a hard-core right-wing evangelical as the Speaker of the House because Trump didn’t object yet.
Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post:
If you are feeling any sense of relief that Jim Jordan won’t be the next House speaker, stop and worry again.
The new speaker, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), might be more dangerous than the firebrand Ohio Republican. For Jordan’s shirt sleeves demeanor and wrestler’s pugnacity, substitute a bespectacled, low-key presentation, a law degree and an unswerving commitment to conservative dogma and former president Donald Trump.
This is not an upgrade. It is Jordan in a more palatable package — evidently smoother, seemingly smarter and, therefore, potentially more effective.
Johnson, now serving his fourth term in Congress, was the moving force behind a Supreme Court brief that helped lay the shoddy intellectual groundwork for Jan. 6, 2021. In December 2020, he rallied fellow Republican lawmakers to support Texas’s brazen bid to overturn the election results. In a lawsuit that fizzled almost as soon as it was filed, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sought to have the Supreme Court intervene in the election by blocking the certification of electoral college votes in four swing states — Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin — where voting rules had been changed in the course of the election and voters, not coincidentally, had favored Joe Biden. The justices swiftly rejected the case, tartly noting that, “Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections.”
[…]
Running for Congress in 2016, he described himself as “a Christian, a husband, a father, a lifelong conservative, constitutional law attorney and a small business owner in that order, and I think that order is important.” Johnson said he had been “called to legal ministry and I’ve been out on the front lines of the ‘culture war’ defending religious freedom, the sanctity of human life, and biblical values, including the defense of traditional marriage, and other ideals like these when they’ve been under assault.”
His congressional career has been more of the same, including backing a federal ban on abortion after 15 weeks. Johnson twice served on the impeachment teams defending Trump and pushed to expunge the first impeachment from the record.
His fealty to the former president seems to have paid off. “My strong SUGGESTION is to go with the leading candidate, Mike Johnson, & GET IT DONE, FAST!” Trump advised on his social media site Tuesday. So, they did.
There will be a government shut-down, Ukraine will get stiffed, and the banshees will scream in glee, all for doing the bidding and the demands of an indicted felon. The House will get nothing done because they don’t believe in democracy.
