After chaos in the House of Representatives regarding the selection of a speaker last month, we finally have someone to lead. But who is House Speaker Mike Johnson, and can he truly do any better than Kevin McCarthy?
Johnson is not a tenured Congressman — he has served for less than a decade. However, he has a long track record as a constitutional lawyer, working in litigations against some interesting cases — including gay marriage, which he admitted in an interview with Sean Hannity.
He was also pivotal in creating the formal legislative allegations against the 2020 presidential election. Steven Greene, a political science professor at NC State, said Johnson was the “intellectual architect” of Republican members of Congress not certifying the election.
Johnson has also engaged in conspiracy theories regarding immigration, claiming the Democratic Party has a plan to turn illegal immigrants into voters. His evidence regarding this ploy was a proposal to allow non-citizens to vote in only municipal elections in New York City, and not one to allow non-citizens to vote in national elections.
The new speaker related this to the policy on the border, claiming the Democrats are pro-immigration to get votes from immigrants. The immigration crisis, while certainly an issue, should not be considered an intentional plan by Democrats to get voters, especially considering their support for border security funding increases in the Senate earlier this year.
Such theories have led to criticism of the speaker for hinting at things like “great replacement theory,” a fringe theory that immigrants are being brought in to replace white people. This was a motivational theory behind a shooting in a Buffalo supermarket in 2022, as well as the violent 2017 Charlottesville protests that included members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Though not saying immigrants will replace us, playing into the idea of an intentional plot by members of the federal government to replace white Americans is extremely concerning and divisive.
“It’s not like he’s an outlier,” Greene said. “These are becoming talking points. He was approved by his Republican colleagues. He serves at the pleasure of his party.”
Yet it is a party divided — one that faces an identity crisis.
NC State political science professor Andrew Taylor said Johnson was elected out of exhaustion.
“There’s not a great deal of patience for what he might do wrong,” Taylor said.
Of course, Johnson still attests to traditional conservative values that have defined Republicanism since before Jan. 6. He has been especially expressive of this after being elected Speaker of the House.
“Now that he’s speaker, he’ll sort of downplay those kinds of things,” Taylor said in regard to Johnson’s claims. “He probably wishes he hadn’t said those things now that he’s speaker.”
Yet these qualities still linger in the background. Of course, you see a push from the left to play up these qualities to alienate the speaker before election season, and so these more divisive traits of Johnson’s might not factor into his job as he attempts to hold together a House divided.
“His great virtues in this is that he’s relatively new — he hasn’t made any enemies as Jordan, McCarthy and Scalise had,” Taylor said.
Jim Jordan, Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise were former House Speaker candidates, who failed to get voted in multiple times — McCarthy was the first speaker in American history to get ousted from the job.
Johnson could turn out to be a great collaborator in the House and perhaps bring an end to the chaos. Maybe his claimed faith in the system will lead to him righting the ship. He is also relatively young, a refreshing sign as our representatives get older and older.
Regardless, his election as speaker is a sign the Republican Party in its entirety is having to play into conspiracies to get anything done.
Despite Johnson’s claimed allegiance to traditional conservative values, the Republican Party isn’t the party of conservatives anymore. Rather, as its power keeps running further to the right, it is increasingly led on a leash by a tin foil hat.
What does it say to the moderates? Refusal to work across the aisle is part of the reason we’re in this situation in the first place. There was an option to keep the House together, and it failed due to partisanship.
This historical lack of collaboration shows how the institution has already been heavily undermined. It is in need of change. For the United States to have a functioning role in the world, and for the government to have a functioning democracy, the parties need to work together.
As Republicans continue to tear themselves apart, they lose their credibility with moderate voters who would win them the elections. To a moderate person, the sole difference between the Democrats and Republicans is that the Democrats can at least keep it together — they don’t even have to market themselves in the next election as moderate voters just seek for a quieter political scene.
The ousted speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy once said “there is no room in the Republican party for white supremacy.” However, these claims keep getting deeper and deeper roots in the party — McCarthy’s firing is symbolic of these theorists and supremacists taking hold.
Conspiracy theories have no place in politics when we have other issues to deal with. The Republican Party has the opportunity to fix itself in the coming election, but it requires it to turn about, and get back to what it has historically been — a socially conservative party of small government voters — and away from the cliques.
