Republican Senator Susan Collins was asked by a Fox journalist what she thought of Mike Johnson’s nomination for the new speaker of the House of Representatives. The senator He confessed that he didn’t know him and that he was going to look him up on Google. Mike Johnson’s rise to become the third authority in the United States was so hasty and unforeseen that his wife did not have time to catch a plane from Louisiana to arrive in time to see him pick up the gavel. speaker for the first time.
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, a defender of cuts in social benefits and a Trumpist electoral denier. who led the legal efforts of a large group of Republican congressmen to annul Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential elections.
He was born in January 1972, in Shreveport, the third largest city in Louisiana. He was the oldest of four children, the son of a deputy fire chief who was injured and disabled in a fire when he was 12 years old. As a child, as he said in his first speech, he wanted to be “chief of the Shreveport Fire Department,” but he ended up studying law, making him the first college graduate in his family. Before entering politics, he worked as a private attorney and at the service of conservative organizations, where he supported the ban on same-sex marriages in his state and even defended laws that criminalized homosexuality. He promoted a law to allow marriages in which divorce would be more difficult and he himself married with that 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 has become president of the House partly by rejection and partly by exhaustion. Maybe also 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 parliamentary group mates against you to ruin your election, a requirement that those preferred by the group did not meet, starting with the dismissed Kevin McCarthy and continuing with Steve Scalise, Jim Jordan and Tom Emmer, who won the internal votes before 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 points of understanding with Democrats, but his ultraconservative positions threaten to set American politics on fire.
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In his first speech as speaker He attributed his choice to a divine design. “The Scriptures, the Bible, is very clear that God is the one who lifts up those in authority,” he said. Stefanik had defined him shortly before as “a man of deep faith.” In January, when McCarthy’s election seemed deadlocked, he knelt to pray along with other Republican congressmen in the chamber so that the situation would be unblocked, as it happened that 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,” says Congressman Greg Steube, one of those who knelt with him. Just before his own election, Johnson tweeted a photo of a Chamber inscription which says: “In God we trust.”
His evangelical faith has guided his personal and political life. The newly elected man gave an interview to the also ultra-conservative Fox network in which he said that to understand his political views it was enough to pick up the Bible from the shelf and read it. A few years ago, in a speech in her native Louisiana, she argued that the ease of getting divorced, the “sexual revolution,” “radical feminism,” and abortion (which she refers to as a “holocaust” or “murder of the unborn”) ) have made the United States “a completely amoral society.” AND He linked school shootings to all of this: “How can a young man enter his school and open fire on his classmates? Because we have taught an entire generation or two of Americans that there is no right and wrong.”
Since 2022, it has a podcast of politics and religion with his wife: “Truth Be Told with Mike and Kelly Johnson”. He accumulates 69 episodes in which both attack the “leftist” Biden government and the “murder of children” (in reference to abortion). They enter fully into the cultural battles against progressivism, they attack trans people and companies that incorporate diversity and equality criteria, they attack Disney for “imposing an agenda woke up radical” and “overtly satanic programming” to their audiences. 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,” he says in one chapter. “There is a time for every purpose under heaven; There is a time for war. “There is a time when you must rise up and contend for the faith.”
Johnson represents a district in Louisiana so conservative that Democrats did not even field a candidate in the last midterm elections. He has been a congressman since January 2017. Never before has someone with such a short parliamentary career managed to preside over the House of Representatives. He does not have great allies on Capitol Hill and has promised to “decentralize the power” that his office gives him. It’s still early to know what that means.
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