Asshole of the Month: Mike Johnson

Choosing the speaker of the House of Representatives in Washington has usually been a routine, undramatic affair: The leadership of the party holding the majority selects a candidate, and the troops normally fall in line, voting almost unanimously to approve the new speaker. But the Republicans have turned this process into a dysfunctional clown circus. After they won a House majority in the 2022 midterm elections, it took a whopping 15 votes before Kevin McCarthy was elected, meaning the House was effectively a ship in a storm without a captain, because the speaker controls committee assignments and sets the legislative agenda. But the clown show was just beginning…

In October, Florida firebrand Representative Matt Gaetz led a successful coup to oust McCarthy—the first time ever, in the whole of American history, that a speaker has been evicted. This black swan event signals that the current Republican party is incapable of governing the country, because it can’t even govern itself. After McCarthy bit the dust, another round of musical-chair candidates—Steve Scalise, then Jim Jordan, then Tom Emmer—paralyzed the House for nearly three weeks before Republicans finally settled on a dark horse: the unknown Mike Johnson from Louisiana…the worst possible speaker imaginable.

According to Johnson himself, it wasn’t his fellow Republicans responsible for his promotion to the third most powerful office in American government, but a higher authority: “I don’t believe there are any coincidences in a matter like this,” he said in his first speech as speaker on the House floor. “I believe that scripture, the Bible, is very clear that God is the one that raises up those in authority. He raised up each of you. All of us.” Holy roller alert! The man doesn’t babble in tongues or fondle poisonous snakes, that we know of, but he’s a paragon of religious intolerance who wants to U-turn the United States back into something resembling the medieval Holy Roman Empire, with a Southern Baptist twist. And God has personally anointed him to do it! With the speaker’s gavel in his hands, Johnson said, “Someone asked me today in the media…‘People are curious, what does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, ‘Well, go pick up your Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.’”