Mike Johnson – Sheila Kennedy

When The Speaker Of The House Talks To God…

On October 9th, I will join the Reverend Beau Underwood on a panel moderated by retired lawyer Don Knebel, to discuss why Christian Nationalism is a threat to democracy. (You can access information about that zoom event here.) Regular readers of this blog already know my concerns about the rise of Christian Nationalism–concerns shared by numerous members of the Christian clergy, who point out that the movement is many things, but “Christian” isn’t one of them.

The problem with much of the discussion of this troubling movement is that it tends to be future oriented–to stress the likely results if adherents gain political power. But as a recent article by Dana Milbank in the Washington Post makes clear, Christian Nationalists already occupy powerful positions in Congress, and are largely responsible for the current inability of that body to function properly.

Six weeks after his improbable rise from obscurity to speaker of the House in late 2023, Louisiana’s Mike Johnson decided to break bread with a group of Christian nationalists. He gave the keynote address (at the Museum of the Bible) to the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, a group whose founder, “proud” Christian nationalist Jason Rapert, has said: “I reject that being a Christian Nationalist is somehow unseemly or wrong.”

Rapert’s organization promoted the pine-tree “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which was among the banners flown at the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021 — and which, by total and remarkable coincidence, was proudly displayed outside Johnson’s congressional office.

The article noted that remarks by the event’s speakers and award recipients included: a man who proposed that gay people should be forced to wear labels across their foreheads, a woman who blamed gay people for Noah’s flood and other natural disasters, and forthright adherents of “dominionist” theology, which holds that the United States should be governed under biblical law by Christians.

“I’ll tell you a secret, since media is not here,” Johnson teased the group, unaware that his hosts were streaming video of the event. Johnson informed his audience that God “had been speaking to me” about becoming speaker, communicating “very specifically,” in fact, waking him at night and giving him “plans and procedures.”

God, you see, is taking Johnson across our “Red Sea moment” to the promised land. Unfortunately, as the article noted,

In 11 months as speaker, Johnson has led the House Republicans not to the promised land but into deeper water, where they have been thrashing, splashing and dog paddling without end. Johnson inherited a dysfunctional House GOP majority from Speaker Kevin McCarthy — the first in history to be ousted midterm — and managed to make it even worse by catering to the whims of former president Donald Trump even more than his predecessor had.

Milbank proceeded to remind readers just how dysfunctional this Congress has been, noting that It is “on course to be the do-nothingest since 1859-1861 — when the Union was dissolving.” It’s one thing to be a “do-nothing” legislative body, but as Milbank notes, Johnson’s House “isn’t merely unproductive; it is positively lunatic.”

Republicans have filled their committee hearings and their bills with white nationalist attacks on racial diversity and immigrants, attempts to ban abortion and to expand access to the sort of guns used in mass shootings, incessant harassment of LGBTQ Americans, and even routine potshots at the U.S. military. They insulted each other’s private parts, accused each other of sexual and financial crimes, and scuffled with each other in the Capitol basement. They screamed “Bullshit!” at President Joe Biden during the State of the Union address. They stood up for the Confederacy and used their official powers to spread conspiracy theories about the “Deep State.” Some even lent credence to the idea that there has been a century-old Deep State coverup of space aliens, with possible involvement by Mussolini and the Vatican.

What about the bills this sorry assemblage has passed? Well, they did manage to enact the Refrigerator Freedom Act, the Gas Stove Protection and Freedom Act and the Stop Unaffordable Dishwasher Standards (SUDS) Act. Milbank notes that on at least seven occasions, House Republicans even voted down their own leadership’s routine attempts to begin floor debates.

These people are not serious policymakers. They are performative wannabe’s–think Marjorie Taylor Greene or Jim Jordan or Jim Banks and several others–all of whom profess to be Christian Nationalists, and all of whom are playing to a MAGA base that is disproportionately Christian Nationalist, uninterested in policy, and dismissive of constitutional principles.

Christian Nationalism isn’t just a threat to our future. It is a threat to America in the here and now.

In November, we need to purge it from our governing institutions.

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How To Destroy A Government

Any lingering doubts about the good faith, patriotism or even sanity of the current Speaker of the House of Representatives can be put to rest. Mike Johnson is every bit as horrifying a culture warrior as many of us suspected. The fact that the Democrats stepped in on two occasions to save his Speakership was not evidence that they’d noticed some mitigating factors to his religious zealotry–it was, as many said at the time, an effort to keep government functioning at even its current minimal level.

Johnson has repaid that effort with a move that is unbelievably destructive–a move that is likely to destroy America’s intelligence capacity and erase any lingering trust our allies place in the United States.

I’ll let the Washington Post explain.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Wednesday appointed Reps. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) and Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.), two Trump loyalists who denied the results of the 2020 election, to the House Intelligence Committee, granting them oversight of the U.S. intelligence community and sensitive government material.

Seats on the committee are highly sought after in Congress and closely watched, as members have access to some of the nation’s most classified information and are charged with overseeing the spy agencies — including the intelligence gathering within the FBI — activities for which former president Donald Trump has routinely expressed disdain.

In case you’ve missed the “backstories” on these particular cult members, the Post has thoughtfully reminded readers.

First, Perry.

Perry, a hard-line Republican who previously served as the chair of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, played a key role in promoting false claims of election fraud and pushed the Trump White House and Justice Department to investigate baseless claims and prevent the transfer of power to President Biden. The FBI seized Perry’s cellphone records in 2022 as part of the criminal investigation into Trump’s efforts to subvert the election, and Perry sought to block what the federal investigators would be able to access on his phone. In December 2023, a federal judge ordered that Perry disclose nearly 1,700 records from his cellphone to the investigation being conducted by special counsel Jack Smith. Perry’s lawyer has said that U.S. officials never described Perry as a target of their ongoing investigation in their discussions with the congressman, and he has not been charged.

Then, Jackson.

Jackson, a retired U.S. Navy officer who joined Congress in 2021, served as the physician to Presidents Barack Obama and Trump. He was demoted in rank from retired rear admiral to captain in July 2022 following a damaging Pentagon inspector general’s report that substantiated allegations about his inappropriate behavior as a White House physician. Jackson has denied the report’s allegations and claimed they were politically motivated.

Johnson isn’t even trying to hide what he intended to accomplish by appointing extremist goofballs and devoted MAGA cult members to this extremely sensitive panel. The appointments came one day after he threatened a “three-pronged approach” to retribution for Trump’s trial loss, and outlined his plan for allowing the Republican majority to “target the Justice Department, New York and other jurisdictions for investigating Trump — using, among other things, House oversight powers.”

As one House member was quoted,

“Neither of these two gentlemen is qualified for the intelligence committee. Neither should ever be near the intelligence committee. And it’s going to make cooperation between our counterintelligence operations and the intelligence services and the Congress much more complicated.”

Former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger, who served on the House select committee that investigated the january 6th insurrection, called the appointments “insane.”

So here we are, incredible as it may seem.

A once-respectable center-right political party–a party that used to fly under a banner of patriotism and “law and order”– is willing to compromise the security of American citizens, tell our allies we’re unreliable, and signal to our enemies that we are no longer serious about defending our place in the global order, all to demonstrate its loyalty to a convicted felon who cares nothing about America, or about anything but himself and his need for vengeance.

I shudder to think of the damage these unqualified clowns can do between now and November–and even after, if Republicans continue to hold power in either house of Congress. Continued GOP control of either the House or Senate would take us further down the road to failed nationhood.

Even assuming we avoid the unthinkable disaster that would be a second Trump administration–continued “leadership” by members of this White Christian Nationalist cult would mean we can kiss goodby to the America most of us grew up in.

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A Battle Between Worldviews

Several sources have now reported on a speech that MAGA House speaker, Mike Johnson, recently gave at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., at an event for the National Association of Christian Lawmakers. Although the address was being livestreamed, Johnson seemingly believed he was speaking privately when he told the audience that “the Lord had called him to be a new Moses.”

The Lord! (Can we say “self-important”?)

Johnson then said something with which I do agree. He told the audience that the U.S. is “engaged in a battle between world-views” and “a great struggle for the future of the Republic.”

Johnson clearly believes that far-right Christians will prevail–a belief that the history of culture change fortunately doesn’t support, and that I don’t share. The conflict between world-views that Johnson referenced is not new. It formed the organizing thesis of my 2007 book, God and Country: America in Red and Blue. (Still available at Amazon…)

When I was researching that book, I came across a legal historian’s very useful description of the two different groups that created the United States–the “Planting Fathers” and the “Founding Fathers.” The Planters were the Puritans. They came to the New World for “religious liberty,” which they defined as freedom to worship the right God in the right church and to establish a government that would require their neighbors to do likewise. One hundred and fifty years later, those we call the Founders–the men who drafted the Constitution and Bill of Rights– defined liberty very differently. For them, liberty was the right to form and follow one’s own beliefs, free of government interference.

What had intervened between the two sets of founders– what had caused a significant change in Americans’ then-predominant world-views– was the Enlightenment. And therein lies the problem we still face today, because this country is still home to a significant number of Puritans.

Our Puritans are a minority, but they are a fervent and activist minority. America’s legal framework is based on the Enlightenment understanding of liberty and the proper role of government, but America is still grappling with the intransigence of the Puritans who reject that understanding– along with the Enlightenment’s emphasis on science, evidence and empiricism. The Speaker of the House is rather clearly one of them.

America’s increasingly acrimonious culture war is being waged between our contemporary Puritans, on the one hand, and the rest of us– secularists and adherents of non-fundamentalist religions– on the other. In the abstract, it raises some important and too often neglected questions: what good is religion? do modern societies still need it? what separates “good” religions from harmful ones? what’s the difference between a religion and a cult? between religion and philosophy?

The problem is, we don’t have the luxury of considering and debating those questions in the abstract.

We really are engaged in a battle between totally inconsistent intellectual paradigms. America’s two political parties have sorted themselves into tribes with contending and incommensurate world-views. Today’s GOP has for all intents and purposes become a cult, fixated upon imposing fundamentalist religious precepts (and its disdain for nonWhites and nonChristians) on the rest of the country, and discarding inconvenient impediments like Separation of Church and State. The Democratic Party is far less cohesive, but despite deep disagreements on a wide array of issues, virtually all Democrats have accepted secular modernity and rejected Puritanism and theocracy.

Talk about “alternative realities”!

Of course, not every Republican is a Puritan. But every single vote cast for a Republican candidate is a vote for a Puritan world-view that has been publicly and fervently embraced by Republicans like Michael Johnson and Jim Banks.

It really is not an overstatement to say that the 2024 election will be pivotable. That election will tell us whether Johnson is right in believing that, at least in the short term, Puritans will prevail–or whether my faith in the essential common sense and good-will of the American public will be vindicated.

The assertion that we are engaged in a battle of world-views may be the only thing on which Johnson and I agree.

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Taking The Country Down With Them

In the run-up to electing a Speaker of the House, Moira Donegan considered the underlying reason for the GOP’s chaos. She wrote that “Republicans have no interest in public service, an ideological hostility to functional government and an insatiable thirst for attention.”

As Donegan also noted, there are few, if any, adults in the GOP’s room.

The “adult in the room” is a person willing to make difficult compromises, a person willing to sacrifice vanity for pragmatism, a person with a clear eye of their own priorities and needs and more determination to achieve them than a desire to make a point.

What the Republicans need, she wrote, is

someone more level-headed and serious, someone willing to accept imperfect compromises and to subvert his own ego for the good of the party, someone who might even possess a quality that passes for dignity.

Evidently, someone who isn’t currently a Republican.

Donegan was writing before the House GOP settled on someone who is emphatically not the adult she described. Instead, the GOP chose a previously-unknown theocrat with a dubious past, a set of extreme rightwing bigotries and a total lack of any leadership experience.

Donegan’s essay was written just after Jordan and Scalise had both failed to grab the brass ring, and she pointed out that these men– both “extremists and election deniers, comfortable with white supremacy and willing to discard democratic principles.”–had “ascended to what counts for leadership in the Republican conference, not in spite of the depravity of their positions, but because of them.”

They are the products of rightwing political, fundraising and media apparatuses that incentivize candidates to move further and further to the right – and which have left the Republican party itself both unable and unwilling to impose discipline on its politicians…

In a project that spanned decades, Republicans and their allies built a vast conservative media infrastructure and developed an impressive skill for shaping and whetting the ideological appetites of their audience, creating a more and more conservative base.

And as we now know, Republicans proceeded to elect extremist and election denier Mike Johnson as Speaker. Johnson was aptly desscribed by Jamelle Bouie as a right-wing fever dream come to life.

Mike Johnson is neither a moderate nor an institutionalist. Just the opposite. A protégé of Jordan’s, he comes, as you have doubtless heard, from the far-right, anti-institutionalist wing of the congressional Republican Party. And while he was not a member of the Freedom Caucus, he did lead the Republican Study Committee, a group devoted to the proposition that any dollar spent on social insurance is a dollar too much….

And what does Johnson believe? He is staunchly against the bodily autonomy of women and transgender people and supports a nationwide ban on abortion and gender-affirming care for trans youth. He is also virulently anti-gay. In a 2003 essay, Johnson defended laws that criminalized homosexual activity between consenting adults. In 2004, he warned that same-sex marriage was a “dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic.” Last year, Johnson introduced legislation that has been compared to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, and he continues to push to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015.

If Johnson is known for anything, however, it is for his tireless advocacy on behalf of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

As Bouie accurately notes, Johnson is Jim Jordan in substance but not Jim Jordan in style, which was evidently enough to win him the coveted title. Media, which had previously ignored Johnson, has begun an “after the fact” investigation.

The Guardian, for example, found that Johnson is “a believer in scriptural originalism, the view that the Bible is the truth and the sole legitimate source for public policy.”

Chalk up his elevation to the speakership as the greatest victory so far within Congress for the religious right in its holy war to turn the US government into a theocracy.

Since his fellow Republicans made him their leader, numerous articles have reported Johnson’s religiously motivated, far-right views on abortion, same-sex marriage and LGBTQ+ rights. But that barely scratches the surface. Johnson was a senior lawyer for the extremist Alliance Defending Fund (later the Alliance Defending Freedom) from 2002 to 2010. This is the organization responsible for orchestrating the 303 Creative v Elenis legal arguments to obtain a ruling from the supreme court permitting a wedding website designer to refuse to do business with gay couples.

There’s much, much more.

This delusional ideologue is Speaker of the House at a time when the U.S. faces a government shutdown and the global imperatives of two hot wars.

I suppose it could get worse, but I’m not sure how…..

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