He seems to have had a working moral compass in 2015:
Years before he played a lead role in trying to help President Donald J. Trump stay in office after the 2020 election or defended him in two separate Senate impeachment trials, Speaker Mike Johnson bluntly asserted that Mr. Trump was unfit to serve and could be a danger as president.
“The thing about Donald Trump is that he lacks the character and the moral center we desperately need again in the White House,” Mr. Johnson wrote in a lengthy post on Facebook on Aug. 7, 2015, before he was elected to Congress and a day after the first Republican primary debate of the campaign cycle.
Challenged in the comments by someone defending Mr. Trump, Mr. Johnson responded: “I am afraid he would break more things than he fixes. He is a hot head by nature, and that is a dangerous trait to have in a Commander in Chief.”
Mr. Johnson, then a state lawmaker in Louisiana, also questioned what would happen if “he decided to bomb another head of state merely disrespecting him? I am only halfway kidding about this. I just don’t think he has the demeanor to be President.”
The comments came at a time when many Republicans who would later become loyalists of Mr. Trump were disparaging him and declaring him unfit to hold the nation’s highest office. Only later did they fall in line and serve as the first-line defenders of his most extreme words and actions.
But then both Johnson and the Very Stable Genius arrived in Washington and Johnson got to know the VSG personally and "grew to appreciate the person that he is and the qualities about him that made him he extraordinary president that he was."
And that conversion experience has led him to already make up his mind regarding who to endorse for 2024:
Speaker Mike Johnson said he's "all in" for former President Donald Trump's 2024 bid to return to the White House during a Tuesday morning appearance on CNBC's "Squawk Box."
"I have endorsed him wholeheartedly," Johnson said, adding he was "one of the closest allies that President Trump had" in Congress during his first term as president.
This guy is the gatekeeper regarding what bills get consideration from the entire House, and he's third in line for the presidency.
This makes some judgement by two Christian intellectuals that I merely said was questionable in a post at Precipice the other day look downright disturbing:
Currently up at the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s website are two pieces that bother me a fair amount. EPPC has long been a think tank that has particularly won my admiration, but these essays are causing me misgivings.
Of the two essays in question, Patrick T. Brown’s does the far better job of taking into consideration what Never Trumpers find objectionable about the selection of Mike Johnson as House speaker:
The MAGA wing of American conservatism often seems more unified by its enemies than what policies they share. They dislike globalists, a left wing they see as obsessed with race and gender, and Republicans who seem to care more about mainstream approval than “fighting” for conservative victories.
But which battles are worth fighting for can sometimes be nebulous. The right flank of the GOP applies its populist impulses in, at times, opposite directions — some want to protect entitlements, others to reform them. Some seek to dismantle the administrative state, others to use it to advance conservative principles. Some Republicans still talk about balancing the budget or ending the Fed, while others want to see investments in industrial policy or pro-family tax incentives.
This fluid swirl of priorities made the intense drama over replacing former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy largely about internal party dynamics rather than any meaningful policy disagreements.
But that doesn’t mean Rep. Mike Johnson’s elevation as speaker won’t have a significant impact on the priorities of the Republican caucus going forward. No one can question his bona fides as a conservative’s conservative — which may help different factions of the party feel like their concerns are being heard and keep the thin Republican majority in the House together.
Johnson, who represents the Shreveport, Louisiana, area was a relative unknown before this week, even to political insiders. But he has long been an ally of social conservative groups who see their mission as protecting the unborn from abortion and strengthening traditional family values.
His official website proclaims an appreciation for “free markets and free trade agreements,” and hits familiar notes around cutting spending and regulations, reducing the scope of government and ensuring America “remain[s] the strongest military power on earth.”
If McCarthy was willing to wear any number of new skins to position himself as leader of the Republican conference, Johnson can’t hide his spots even if he wanted to — a dyed-in-the-wool conservative who stands up for traditional Republican principles even if others in the party wish the GOP would evolve past them.
Just last month, former President Donald Trump was calling Florida’s six-week abortion ban, signed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a “terrible thing” and suggesting he’d be willing to compromise on an issue many conservatives see as one of life and death.
National Review’s Noah Rothman reacted to news of Johnson’s selection by lamenting Republicans had nominated a speaker who “opposes same-sex marriage” (as do about two-thirds of self-described conservatives). Buckets of ink have been spilled about the party’s increasingly complicated relationship with free trade and limited-government economic policy.
Johnson’s selection — at a time when the relationship between social and religious conservatives, establishment-wing Republicans and the MAGA movement had shown signs of fraying — may prove to have long-lasting ramifications. He has introduced bills seeking to prevent public schools from teaching children under 10 about sexuality and “gender ideology,” to prevent minors from being taken across state lines to procure an abortion without a parent’s consent and to require men to pay child support during pregnancy.
But when Brown gets around to describing the crux of what disturbs non-MAGA conservatives, he does so with kid gloves:
As many politicians have, Johnson has made some statements that strike many today as tone-deaf. Like many Republicans, he played footsie with conspiracy theorists after the 2020 election and his policy stances on cutting government spending may not be popular with the median voter.
“Played footsie”? Really?
He was up to his ears in culpability for what happened on January 6, 2021:
Johnson, who was the GOP caucus vice chair and is an ally of Trump, led theamicus brief signed by more than 100 House Republicans in support of a Texas lawsuit seeking to invalidate the 2020 election results in four swing states Biden won: Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The lawsuit, filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, called on the Supreme Court to delay the electoral vote in the four states so investigations on voting issues could continue amid Trump’s refusal to concede his loss. It alleged that the four states changed their voting rules without their legislatures’ express approval before the 2020 election.
Johnson at the time sought support from his GOP colleagues for the lawsuit, sending them an email with the subject line “Time-sensitive request from President Trump.”
“President Trump called me this morning to express his great appreciation for our effort to file an amicus brief in the Texas case on behalf of concerned Members of Congress,” Johnson wrote in the December 2020 email, which was obtained by NBC News.
“He specifically asked me to contact all Republican Members of the House and Senate today and request that all join on to our brief,” he continued. “He said he will be anxiously awaiting the final list to review.”
. . . As rioters were overtaking the Capitol on Jan. 6, Johnson told Fox News in an interview that there was "nothing unusual" about Republican lawmakers' objections to the Electoral College certification and that "there’ve been many objections over the years.”
“I’m here as one of the advocates on the Republican side, stating our concerns about this election and the allegations of fraud and the irregularity and all that," he said.
The other piece, by Andrew T. Walker, disturbed me even more. Its tone is along the lines of well-well-guess-all-the-secularists-will-have-to-hold-their-noses:
The American project ended on Wednesday with the ascendency of Congressman Mike Johnson to speaker of the House.
That’s what the political left is telling the American people.
The carnival barkers who warn of so-called “Christian Nationalism” have fired up their presses to do what they always do—find yet additional justifications to ridicule and exclude conservative Christians (mind you, from the same crowd championing “inclusivity”). All this is done under the banner of “analysis,” and the “analysts” function as America’s self-appointed defenders of democracy.
The label “Christian Nationalist” has been invoked over and over again in the last few days to describe Speaker Johnson. Bill Maher compared Speaker Johnson’s prayer life to the same “voices” allegedly running through the Maine mass shooter’s head. So, it’s clear that our elites are very obviously reasonable and cool-headed in their analysis. It’s as though the Bat Signal alert has flickered, churning out the same talking points whenever conservative Christianity is brought into political discourse.
My disappointment is profound. Walker is an EPPC scholar I’ve particularly admired. He’s always demonstrated a healthy set of priorities, as well as depth of faith formation. But I cannot understand why Johnson’s election denialism isn’t the glowing red factor of most importance for him. It seems to run counter to what I’ve come to know of Walker through his whole body of writings.
Wanted: some Christians able to resist any kind of glossing-over of cult thrall, much less the cult thrall itself.
It is so effing late in the day.
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