Light in the Darkness

Last week, I said we avoided a disaster when House Republicans rejected Jim Jordan’s effort to become House speaker, and we did.  But then they chose Mike Johnson, and we’re right back to disaster.

How could it not be a disaster? Look at the man.

Mike Johnson (R-La.) has been a congressional backbencher for nearly eight years.  He has never headed a committee, and the only leadership role he has ever had was to lead the Republican Study Committee, a group devoted to the proposition that any dollar spent on social insurance is a dollar too much.

He is so unknown that some senators say they’ve never even heard of him.  An Economist/YouGov poll released last Wednesday found that just one percent of Americans wanted him to be the speaker.  He’s a Christian nationalist (which is not a good thing). He’s Trump lapdog. He’s a – call it what you will – totalitarian, authoritarian, fascist, neo-Nazi.

So yes, this person’s being elected leader of the United States House of Representatives is a disaster.

Worse, it means that Donald Trump now controls the House.  Johnson got to be speaker only because Donald Trump wanted him to be speaker.  And Republican House members caved.  As Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) put it, “This election has been about one thing, who can appease Donald Trump?”

The answer to that question is that Johnson can, and Johnson did.  He is as tightly bound to Trump as anyone, and more so than most. He was instrumental in Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.  He rallied his colleagues to object to counting the electoral votes from states that Joe Biden won.  And when Trump’s legal challenges to the election crumbled, he pushed a Texas lawsuit against the four states that Biden had won, calling for the invalidation of millions of Americans’ ballots.  He echoed lies about Venezuelan interference with ballots.

He’s a horror on abortion rights.  He has filed bills that would ban all abortions without exception, and he would make violations felonies.  He has praised Louisiana’s abortion ban that carries severe penalties for anyone who provides abortions — hard labor for up to 10 years and fines of as much as $100,000.

Actually, he’s a horror on just about everything.  He is staunchly anti-LGBTQ rights, staunchly anti-unions, staunchly anti-immigration, staunchly against any further aide to Ukraine.  He has strong ties to the Israeli far-right.

So yes again: disaster.  But within that disaster lie diamonds of opportunity, and Joe Biden’s re-election team is already on it.

They see a chance to make Johnson the poster boy for the anti-abortion movement, which would be a good thing because voters resoundingly rejected anti-abortion attempts in 2022 everywhere they were on the ballot, red and blue states.  Furthermore, polls consistently show that most Americans want women to be able to control their own bodies.

Those abortion-rights voters, especially women, helped Democrats keep control of the Senate in 2020 and turn the oft-feared red tsunami in the House into a dribble, and they can do it again in 2024.   The abortion issue, combined with all those other Johnson/Trump-type ideas, will sway a lot of voters’ choices and could help lead to a blue tsunami.

Another sad story is that virtually all polls show Biden and Trump are running neck-and-neck at 37 percent each.   The opportunity in that is that a new Gallup poll shows only 32 percent of American are paying close attention to the news while as many as 70 percent are expected to vote next year.  That means an awful lot of Americans who are sleeping rignt now will be awake by Election Day, and it would seem anyone who is going to support Trump is already on board with him.  In other words, 37 percent may be near Trump’s ceiling  and Biden’s floor.

Once Biden and Trump are running head-to-head, Trump will no longer be able to hide his fascism, and no longer will the Republican Party be able to hide its slavish relationship with him.

The MAGA Republican Party has become the Republican Party.  The race will become a clear democracy-vs.-authoritarian choice, up and down the ballot, and I refuse to believe that a majority of Americans will vote to end democracy.  So again, a blue tsunami might be in our future.

We can take heart in the words of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), who said after Johnson’s election that House Democrats will “continue to push back against extremism in this chamber and throughout the country.  House Democrats will continue to protect Social Security, protect Medicare, protect Medicaid, protect our children, protect our climate, protect low-income families, protect working families, protect the middle class, protect organized labor, protect the LGBTQ community, protect our veterans, protect older Americans protect the Affordable Care Act, protect the right to vote, protect  the peaceful transfer of power, protect our democracy and protect a woman’s freedom to make her own reproductive health care decision.”

Jeffries said it is understandable that Americans are alarmed by the chaos and disfunction that defines the House these days, and then he continued:

“But this, too, shall pass. Our country has often confronted adversity and the good news is we always find a way to make it to the other side … we always overcome.”