Jose Luis Magana/AP Photo
The new Speaker of the House, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA), is welcomed by other members of the Republican Conference, as he arrives to a news conference at the Capitol, October 25, 2023.
One year ago, standing before a gathering of officials in the Kremlin, Russian President Vladimir Putin proclaimed the annexation of four Ukrainian regions that Russian troops had occupied. Half of his speech, however, detoured into an attack on gay and transgender rights, which, he made clear, Russia would extirpate on every inch of Ukraine that it seized.
“Do we want children in elementary schools to be imposed with things that lead to degradation and extinction?” Putin asked, making very clear just what those things were. This has long been a Putin refrain. In a speech he delivered almost a decade earlier, he accused “the Euro-Atlantic countries” of “rejecting their roots, including the Christian values” and “implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex partnerships.”
Under the sway of an Eastern Orthodox Church much like Russia’s, Ukraine has hardly been a paradise for its LGBTQ citizens, but in recent years, under the presidency of Volodymyr Zelensky, it has grown more tolerant than Russia. Heckled by a homophobic listener as he delivered a speech in 2019, Zelensky responded, “We all live together in an open society where each one can choose the language they want to speak, their ethnicity, and [sexual] orientation. Leave those people be, for God’s sake.”
Now, is it any mystery which side of this conflict the new Speaker of the House is on? In the course of his career as a fundamentalist Christian lawyer, Louisiana Rep. Mike Johnson has excoriated not only the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing gay marriages, but also its earlier decision striking down a Texas law that criminalized gay sex. He is, as one “moderate” House Republican said yesterday, “a man of principle,” and of such principles is Johnson’s opposition to providing for Ukraine’s defenses made.
The unanimity with which House Republicans invested Johnson with the Speakership yesterday is not really all that surprising. Johnson is a leading advocate of the three strands of contemporary Republicanism. First, like his “mainstream” Republican predecessor as House Speaker, Paul Ryan, he favors gutting social provision, privatizing Medicare, reducing the annual Social Security COLAs, and raising the age for Social Security eligibility to 69. Second, he is a biblical culture warrior, mixing theocracy with statecraft even while reducing Christianity to a kind of pre-Enlightenment primitivism. Third, he is and has been the shrewdest Trump champion on Capitol Hill, having persuaded a majority of House Republicans in the aftermath of the 2020 election to attempt to overturn its outcome not on the grounds of fraud but on legal technicalities that the Supreme Court instantly rejected.
Unlike Jim Jordan, whose MAGA advocacy pales alongside Johnson’s, however, Johnson serves up his noxious brew with a calm and affable manner. One of my friends described him to me yesterday as “a calm maniac,” and after going through three weeks during which they rendered themselves not just despicable but ridiculous, even House Republicans who knew how loony-tune extreme Johnson really is decided that the calm made the mania sufficiently acceptable, particularly since voting against him would only extend and deepen their clown show.
Deciding to forgo suicide, one of William Faulkner’s beleaguered protagonists concludes, “Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.” That’s pretty much the choice that House Republicans made yesterday: refusing to prolong the nothing of a Speaker-less House, and richly deserving of all the electoral grief that, by anointing Johnson, they’ve heaped upon themselves.
