By a Thread
The new Speaker of the House is an election denier. As crises multiply around the world, will his fealty to Donald Trump matter when the nation's security is at stake?
"The illegal we do immediately,” Henry Kissinger quipped to reporters a half century ago, “the unconstitutional takes a little longer." Little did Kissinger realize that his black humor about Richard Nixon’s White House and its Watergate scandal would fit today’s Speaker of the House and his Republican Party’s election-denying majority to a tee.
The Speaker, Mike Johnson, a self-described expert in constitutional law, bona fide right-wing ideologue, and Donald Trump loyalist, exemplifies the GOP stalwarts who stand four-square behind the Big Lie. Johnson lawyered on Trump’s behalf to overturn the 2020 election. “I think he’s going to be a fantastic speaker,” Trump said last week. The ex-president’s praise doubtless reminds Johnson his mission continues. After all, Trump worked hard for three weeks torpedoing several other candidates for the job before anointing the unknown Louisianan a few days ago.
The new Speaker’s grip on the gravel in any event positions him to do whatever he can on Trump’s behalf next year. Three years ago Johnson wrote the brief signed onto by his 125 Republican colleagues that backed a suit to overturn the 2020 election results in four battleground states. The Supreme Court threw out the case. Nonetheless, with polls pointing to the ex-president as a shoo-in for the GOP’s 2024 nomination, Speaker Johnson will have other levers to pull if a Trump loss next November rallies the GOP’s seditionists to mount Coup 2.0.
Trump’s loyalists won’t need to learn new lines to back another Mar-a-Lago-authored putsch. As their continuing fealty to the Big Lie attests, the old ones will do just fine. On January 6, 2021, lacking facts, legal or constitutional justification, or any court that even questioned Joe Biden’s election victories, 65 percent of House Republicans—139 members—voted against certifying the 2020 election. More to the point, none, Johnson included, have repudiated the Big Lie, their own mendacity, or the groundless votes that violated their sworn oaths of office.
Having the junior Louisiana congressman in the Speaker’s chair if Trump needs help isn’t the only worrisome prospect presented by Johnson in a seat of power. Even a cursory look at his pronouncements provides ample reason for concern. From dog-whistle Christian nationalist vocabulary and bizarre interpretations of constitutional basics such as the separation of church and state to assertions that teaching evolution to school children has eviscerated the nation’s moral core, the congressman pegs the ideological needle hard right.
Consider individual rights. Like the great minds of the 1930s that devised the Third Reich’s Lebensborn program—it encouraged racially pure women to reproduce to fill Aryan ranks—Johnson lamented Roe vs. Wade’s effects in a hearing this year. Fixing social security would be easy, he said, if only American women had been compelled to have children, adding bodies to the labor force. Twenty years ago, Johnson was eager to strengthen the state as society’s morality police. His amicus brief on behalf of the Alliance Defense Fund in 2003 opposed the Supreme Court decision decriminalizing gay sex between consenting adults.
The new Speaker’s record on national security issues is scanty to say the least, but what’s clear is his far-right politics don’t stop at water’s edge. Ukraine is a case in point. Last July 70 House Republicans voted to cut all aid for Kyiv from the annual defense appropriations bill. Republican election deniers including Johnson accounted for 47 of the 70 votes—two-thirds of the GOP House members who backed the cutoff. The amendment failed but its sponsor, Congressman Matt Gaetz, tried again in September adding 23 more Republicans. Election deniers accounted for 54 of those 93 House Republicans voting to end all support for Ukraine.
Johnson’s rationale for his no-votes mimics the mumbo-jumbo from his party’s far right. Rather than authorizing needed ammo and anti-missile systems, they argue, the US government first should lock, load, and launch its auditors to make sure the Ukrainians, fighting for their existence, aren’t stealing a dime. “We can’t allow Vladimir Putin to prevail in Ukraine,” Johnson intoned on Fox News the other day, “because I don’t believe it would stop there.” Before that, of course, war or not, the green eyeshade types need to do their work.
How much trouble Johnson and his would-be House seditionists can cause the Biden administration’s national security policymakers remains to be seen. But their prominence on key House committees should be a worry. Election deniers represent 48 percent—15 of the 31 Republicans—on Armed Services; 35 percent, five out of 14 Republicans, on Intelligence; and 33 percent, or nine out of 27 Republicans, on Foreign Affairs. On Homeland Security, the committee that oversees the federal response to domestic threats, seven of the 18 Republicans who will be examining such dangers saw nothing amiss while voting to overturn the 2020 election only hours after a mob had broken down their doors.
Are Johnson and his fellow election deniers, their allegiances, and their behavior really that important when it comes to Ukraine, or for that matter other national security concerns? After all, the Gaetz amendments to cut Ukraine loose failed. On aid to Israel the Republicans are eager to be in the class picture. And on China, a challenge that evokes agreement between Republicans and Democrats, a special House committee examining the key issues seems to reflect shared views.
In November 1939, only weeks after Poland fell to Hitler’s blitzkrieg, President Franklin Roosevelt asked Congress to amend the Neutrality Act, lifting the prohibition against trade with Europe’s belligerents and allowing its financing. With a 281-seat Democratic House majority, the amendment passed by 243-172, a 71-vote margin. For FDR, it was the foundation for Lend-Lease, the military aid program that sustained Britain during the darkest days of World War II.
In June 1941, with Europe under Nazi control and the threat from Imperial Japan rising in Asia, Roosevelt asked the Congress to extend the one-year term of service for the 900,000 American draftees then completing their 12-month obligation under the new selective service law passed the year before. Without the amendment, the draftees’ active duty would have ended, returning them to civilian life and massively drawing down an American army preparing for war.
That August, just four months before Pearl Harbor, with a 268-seat Democratic majority, the House of Representatives finally approved the extension by a single vote.
Do the election deniers and their numbers matter? As Napoleon put it, all great events hang by a single thread.