The cream of the GOP House seems curdled: Let’s meet Mike Johnson
So, is anyone taking bets on how long U.S. Rep. Mike Johnson will remain Speaker of the House before he’s ousted, as more and more red flags come springing into the air after the Republicans finally rallied around him as their choice for the top office in the House?
I mean, I was no fan of U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, whose ouster recently (after having to be voted on a bazillion times to get the post in the first place) created this vacuum. I’m really no fan of anyone in the GOP right now or anyone voting for GOP candidates.
But Johnson is making McCarthy look like a paragon of political virtue by comparison.
First thing I saw online about this guy was that and his wife were, I think, deleting podcasts he (or they) had done because the content was bigoted, homophobic, etc. Then the news more recently that his wife took down her counseling website that compared being gay to bestiality and incest—among, I’m sure, all sorts of other views that people might find objectionable.
It’s usually a bad sign when people start deleting their social media posts (as I’ve heard Johnson has been doing) and taking down their business websites because they hold awful views—views that they aren’t ashamed of, but that they know could hurt long-term plans to be a leader in Congress.
There’s a whole litany of Johnson’s red flags, listed in the early part of this article by Vanity Fair, that does a better job than I can do here. Each of those pieces of bad news with a link to more reading. But what this article focuses on is something that a lot of the rest of us have heard about from several sources now: Johnson hasn’t listed any bank accounts or assets in his name or his wife’s since 2016 when he joined Congress.
Am I supposed to believe this man just takes a physical check for his congressional salary and goes down to the check-cashing place? I am supposed to believe that with his salary and his wife’s salary they have zero assets at all? Please—I wasn’t born yesterday.
So, aside from trying to erase all the bad stuff they have online, they’ve been burying financial skeletons probably going on for at least eight years now?
This is a man who is supposed to be faithful to the Constitution and the laws of the land, who wants to lead via the Bible, who has either heavily implied or outright said that it is the duty of American women to each bear at least one able-bodied worker, who is clearly homophobic, and who—not to belabor the point that he is leading with biblical rather than secular focus—is a raging Christian nationalist who is allied, as is so much of the GOP, with far-right Christians above all others (OK, except probably for the uber-wealthy and big business).
Look, I’m Christian and I despise what this man stands for.
But bottom line, anyone who is arguing “both sides are terrible” needs to look at just how much more terrible the GOP side is. I mean, all day every day they are leading with conspiracy theories, outright lies, biblical passages they don’t even really understand the origins and context of, and levels of greed that are borderline criminal even when they aren’t committing outright crimes and fraud.
The Republicans haven’t cared about average Americans or even the actual well-being of the country since at least the mid-1980s. And they just keep getting worse. I can’t do much to give you hope of improvement or progress any time soon. But what I would like to do is urge you never to vote for a single one of them ever again unless and until they collectively get their act together to serve the public good.
Johnson is just the latest example of how low the members of the GOP will go and how little they stand for. This is who they put forward as a leader. Believe them when they so blatantly tell you they ain’t about anything good.