Opinion | Why Mike Johnson’s Speakership Does Not Bode Well for America

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I’m David Firestone. I’m a member of the editorial board of The New York Times. I write about politics and government. Mike Johnson was the fifth choice, I believe, of members of the House who went through an agonizing three weeks to try and find a speaker.

This is a moment when the House needed somebody who was serious.

He wasn’t going to play games. He wasn’t going to see every bill as a political game. And it’s been a long time since we’ve had leaders like that in the Republican Party. I still held out some hope that maybe they could find someone who would take that role. But it’s pretty clear that that’s not what the party wants right now. That’s not what voters want. The same voters who want Donald Trump to be the leader of their party also want someone who’s not serious to be the speaker of the House.

During the three weeks when they were deciding who was going to be the speaker after Kevin McCarthy was deposed, they went through a number of different candidates, a few who were more to the center.

And then they went through candidates who were more to the right.

And they finally settled on somebody who really didn’t have much of a record. He’s never been in leadership. And he was considered neutral in the various factions that go on within the House. It later came out, after people started looking at his record, that he was very, very far to the right when it comes to social and cultural issues.

He is profoundly anti-abortion. He is against same-sex marriage. He has written about the importance of religion in public life as a guiding factor, which is very disturbing to people who want to see a separation between church and state.

So people in the center and people on the left started to get a little nervous about what kind of a speaker he would be. And then some of their worst fears were confirmed about a week later when President Biden’s request came over to provide billions of dollars for Ukraine, for Israel, and for Taiwan.

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So Mike Johnson proposed a bill, which the House later passed pretty much along party lines, that eliminates all funding for Ukraine, eliminates funding for Taiwan, and only gives money to Israel. The Ukraine money was deleted because there are many on the right wing of the Republican Party who have followed Trump’s lead and decided that Putin’s aggression in Ukraine is not really so bad.

If there was any hope that Michael Johnson was going to counter that and take a significant role in restoring the United States to a position where it can support democratic values around the world, that pretty much was lost when he put something incredibly unserious in the bill, the cut to the IRS. He said that in order to get the money for Israel, that President Biden would have to agree to cut the exact same amount out of the budget for the Internal Revenue Service.

That money had been designated as part of the Inflation Reduction Act that Biden passed earlier to crack down on wealthy tax cheats. If they insist on that, there’s not going to be a bill that gets passed because the Senate won’t go along with it. That means there won’t be any money, not just for Ukraine, but for Israel either. It will send a message to the rest of the world that the United States will not be there for them, that we just really don’t care about what’s going on in the rest of the world. You’re on your own. The United States is not going to help you.

In a few days we’re also going to see another huge issue facing the House. That’s the deadline when the stopgap runs out on November 17. The government is going to shut down if the House and Senate can’t agree on a measure to keep the government open. To make that happen, the House has to have some leadership, has to have a plan that senators agree on. And Mike Johnson is already talking about adding a whole bunch of other conditions to keeping the government open and preventing a shutdown.

I think we’re starting to see that this is someone who is simply going to cater to the whims of the extremists in the House. Not the bulk of the Republican Party in the House and Senate, but really those on the edge who want to score political points and who want to be able to tell their base, look at the way we made the Democrats give up their favorite projects.

I think that, in the end, Mike Johnson will put forward a bill that will keep the government open probably till January. It would not be a great thing for him to have a shutdown within a few days of his taking this new position and taking a leadership role in the Republican Party.

So he’ll probably just get this thing passed for a few weeks, maybe throw a condition or two in there just to show that he can’t be pushed around. Because for the Jim Jordan faction of the House, showing apparent signs of strength is everything. Whether you actually get anything of substance doesn’t seem to matter. You just have to look like you got a point scored as if you’re on the wrestling mat.

I think it’s likely that over the next year we will see more partisanship from the House than we would have if Kevin McCarthy had stayed as Speaker. Now, it’s true that McCarthy had agreed to things like an impeachment inquiry into President Biden and that they were doing this whole weaponization of government thing even before Johnson got in there. But I always had the feeling that McCarthy was basically just going along with it in order to keep his job. He never really had his heart in that.

I think somebody like Mike Johnson, because he’s more ideological than McCarthy, may actually want to see President Biden impeached. And I also think that there’s likely to be a lot more interest on his part in going after social issues. Some of it will be symbolic. Some of it will be real. But all of it will be designed to divide the two parties even further and to fracture the Republican Party.

I think it’s a shame that one of the two major political parties in this country has descended really into that level of gamesmanship and really schoolkid mudslinging on a regular basis. It doesn’t bode well for how the two parties are going to have to come together to reach bipartisan solutions for the future of this country.

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