Republican Senator Susan Collins was asked by a Fox journalist what she thought of Mike Johnson’s nomination to be the new Speaker of the House of Representatives. The senator admitted that she didn’t know him and wanted to look him up on Google. Mike Johnson’s rise to the third authority in the United States was so hasty and unforeseen that his wife did not have time to take a plane from Louisiana to arrive in time to see him pick up the speaker’s gavel for the first time took.
Those who know him – or those who have searched on Google – know that Johnson, 51, is an ultra-conservative evangelical Christian, an anti-abortion activist, with radical positions against LGTBI rights, an advocate for welfare cuts and a Trumpist Election deniers. He led the legal effort by a large group of Republican congressmen to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.
He was born in January 1972 in Shreveport, the third largest city in Louisiana. He was the oldest of four children, the son of the assistant fire chief, who was injured and disabled in a fire at the age of 12. As a child, he wanted to be, as he said in his first speech, “chief of the Shreveport Fire Department,” but he ended up studying law and becoming the first college graduate in his family. Before entering politics, he worked as a private attorney and in the service of conservative organizations, where he supported his state’s ban on same-sex marriage and even defended laws criminalizing homosexuality. He supported a law that allowed marriages where divorce would be more difficult, and he himself married under the same formula in 1999. The Johnsons have two sons and two daughters, but they also took in a 14-year-old black boy who is now an adult.
He became President of the House of Representatives partly through rejection and partly through exhaustion. Maybe because, as Congresswoman Elise Stefanik said when presenting her nomination, she has no enemies, at least within her party. It was enough to have five caucus colleagues against you to ruin your election, a requirement that the group’s preferred people did not meet, from the fired Kevin McCarthy to Steve Scalise, Jim Jordan and Tom Emmer, who won the internal election won votes earlier than Johnson. The latter, polite, humble and respectful, managed to put out the Republican fire after three weeks of chaos. He has promised to seek common ground with Democrats, but his ultra-conservative positions threaten to throw American politics into turmoil.
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In his first speech as a speaker, he attributed his election to a divine plan. “The Holy Scripture, the Bible, makes it very clear that God is the one who exalts those in authority,” he said. Stefanik had recently described him as “a man of deep faith.” In January, when McCarthy’s election appeared deadlocked, he knelt with other Republican members of Congress in the chamber to pray that the situation would be defused, which happened the same day. “Mike Johnson is a staunch conservative, but above all he is a staunch Christian. He is not afraid to seek guidance in his faith,” said Congressman Greg Steube, one of those who knelt with him. Shortly before his own election, Johnson tweeted a photo of an inscription in the House of Representatives that read, “In God we trust.”
His evangelical faith determined his personal and political life. Recently elected, he gave an interview to the ultra-conservative channel Fox in which he said that to understand his political views, all it took was to take the Bible off the shelf and read it. A few years ago, in a speech in her native Louisiana, she argued that ease of divorce, the “sexual revolution,” “radical feminism” and abortion (which she calls the “holocaust” or “murder of the unborn”) ) have turned the United States into “a completely amoral society.” And he linked school shootings to all of this: “How can a young man walk into his school and open fire on his classmates?” Because we’ve taught an entire generation or two of Americans that there is no right or wrong .”
Since 2022 he has been running a politics and religion podcast with his wife: “Truth Be Told with Mike and Kelly Johnson”. It includes 69 episodes attacking both Biden’s “left-wing” administration and the “murder of children” (referring to abortion). They participate fully in the cultural battles against progressivism, they attack transsexuals and companies that take diversity and equality into account, they attack Disney for offering its audience “a radical, woke agenda” and “openly satanic programs.” imposes. And they describe Christianity as a beleaguered religion. But he is not in favor of always turning the other cheek, but rather fighting: “The kingdom of God allows aggression,” it says in one chapter. “For every purpose there is a season under heaven; There is a time for war. “There comes a time when you have to stand up and fight for the faith.”
Johnson represents a district in Louisiana that is so conservative that Democrats didn’t even field a candidate in the last midterm elections. He has been a congressman since January 2017. Never before has anyone with such a short parliamentary career managed to become chairman of the House of Representatives. He has no major allies on Capitol Hill and has vowed to “decentralize the power his position gives him.” It’s still too early to know what that means.
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