Mike Johnson: House Speaker and Unknown Hard-liner

Mike Johnson, the new House Speaker in Congress, is a radical. He will soon face a tough test.

Mike Johnson’s election means that Congress can function again, at least for now. Electing Johnson to the third-highest office in the United States means Congress can pass legislation and approve a budget.

That’s the good news from Capitol Hill, where it took Republicans 22 days and four nominations to agree on a speaker. We can attribute the fact that this 51-year old “Mr. Nobody” did not face the same predicament as the other candidates to his being relatively unknown.

Mike Johnson’s Hour of Truth Approaches

Moderates and centrists are relying on their constituents’ ignorance of the man who is now taking the helm in Congress. It won’t be long, however, before word gets around that Johnson was an architect of the Jan. 6, 2021 challenge in Congress to Joe Biden’s election.

His neatly parted hair and smart-looking spectacles do not make him a sensible, politician in search of compromise. Johnson is, in fact, a MAGA radical in pinstripes, a speaker after Trump’s own heart. Johnson has distinguished himself as a culture warrior, a hard-liner on abortion rights and a skeptic regarding aid for Ukraine.

Johnson is facing immediate issues of a $106 billion aid package for Israel and Ukraine, humanitarian projects and border security. This will require him to show his true colors as to whether he stands with endangered democracies. The moment of truth will come on Nov. 17 when the federal budget expires. It will then fall to the new speaker to show if he can square the circle.

If not, he will meet a similar fate as Kevin McCarthy, who was ousted as speaker by a hard-core right wing for securing Democratic votes to pass an interim federal budget when he could not get support from within his own ranks.

At least there is now a speaker who can risk his position to avoid a government shutdown. That alone made his election worthwhile.

Johnson believes he knows the magic formula for bringing his friends from the right together with some two dozen centrists. He enthusiastically announced that he would not only get the show back on the road, but that he would also pass eight budget bills quickly.

The Republicans Want To Obstruct Proceedings

Well, good luck with this bunch of brawling bullies who have lost any sense of reality. As tough as the election of the speaker turned out to be, it was probably easier than it will be to convince “five families” in the Republican conference to coalesce around a single plan and approve anything at all.

Johnson faces the same problem that McCarthy was unable to overcome during his brief nine months in office -– governing with the slimmest of majorities. It takes merely four no votes to bury any legislative proposal. Such dissents are easy to come by in a gang of populists not bent on building but rather on obstruction.