This is not an upgrade. It is Jordan in a more palatable package — evidently smoother, seemingly smarter and, therefore, potentially more effective.
Johnson, now serving his fourth term in Congress, was the moving force behind a Supreme Court brief that helped lay the shoddy intellectual groundwork for Jan. 6, 2021. In December 2020, he rallied fellow Republican lawmakers to support Texas’s brazen bid to overturn the election results. In a lawsuit that fizzled almost as soon as it was filed, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sought to have the Supreme Court intervene in the election by blocking the certification of electoral college votes in four swing states — Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin — where voting rules had been changed in the course of the election and voters, not coincidentally, had favored Joe Biden. The justices swiftly rejected the case, tartly noting that, “Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections.”
But not before Johnson rallied the GOP troops to sign on to a friend-of-the-court brief backing the Texas lawsuit — and took pains to emphasize that Trump was keeping score. “He said he will be anxiously awaiting the final list to review,” Johnson wrote on what was then Twitter.
Johnson later told the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner that he regretted that wording. “It did not cross my mind that somebody would interpret it as making an enemies list or something,” he said. “It should have, in hindsight. It was a very casual conversation. The President was not making a threat. Nor was I, of course.” Of course not. Purity test or no, 126 of his House colleagues fell dutifully in line.
The Johnson brief was a full-throated endorsement of the “independent state legislature” theory, ultimately rejected by the Supreme Court in 2023’s Moore v. Harper. The brief asserted that under the terms of the Constitution, only state legislatures — without any review by state courts or involvement of other state parties — have power to set rules for choosing presidential electors. “The clear authority of those state legislatures to determine the rules for appointing electors was usurped at various times by governors, secretaries of state, election officials, state courts, federal courts, and private parties,” the brief argued.
“Due in large part to those usurpations, the election of 2020 has been riddled with an unprecedented number of serious allegations of fraud and irregularities. National polls indicate a large percentage of Americans now have serious doubts about not just the outcome of the presidential contest, but also the future reliability of our election system itself,” it continued, as if the supposedly serious doubts had not been sowed by Trump himself.
Don’t rely on the assessment of Democrat Josh Shapiro, then Pennsylvania’s attorney general, now its governor, that Texas’s effort to interfere in those states’ determinations was a “seditious abuse of the judicial process,” as he told the justices. Rather, listen to Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy, no liberal squish, who declined to sign the Johnson brief and denounced the Paxton bid as “a dangerous violation of federalism” that “sets a precedent to have one state asking federal courts to police the voting procedures of other states.” (Not that this stopped Roy from voting Wednesday to make Johnson speaker.)
The Texas episode was of a piece with Johnson’s conservative worldview. Before being elected to Congress, he was a senior lawyer and national spokesman for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative group that opposes abortion, same-sex marriage and LGBTQ+ rights.
Running for Congress in 2016, he described himself as “a Christian, a husband, a father, a lifelong conservative, constitutional law attorney and a small business owner in that order, and I think that order is important.” Johnson said he had been “called to legal ministry and I’ve been out on the front lines of the ‘culture war’ defending religious freedom, the sanctity of human life, and biblical values, including the defense of traditional marriage, and other ideals like these when they’ve been under assault.”
His congressional career has been more of the same, including backing a federal ban on abortion after 15 weeks. Johnson twice served on the impeachment teams defending Trump and pushed to expunge the first impeachment from the record.
His fealty to the former president seems to have paid off. “My strong SUGGESTION is to go with the leading candidate, Mike Johnson, & GET IT DONE, FAST!” Trump advised on his social media site Tuesday. So, they did.
