A storm threatens the Capitol

Troubling as they are, it's not his hard-right stands on the issues that is the most threatening reality of the new House Speaker.

Americans need to prepare for a political hurricane season.(Photo by Hannah Tu on Unsplash)

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When a tropical storm blew up suddenly this week into Category 5 Hurricane Otis and slammed devastatingly into Acapulco, forecasters were shocked: Its intensification was almost the fastest ever seen in the eastern Pacific Ocean, a clear result, scientists said, of the human-caused climate crisis. It came at about the same time as another fast spin-up was astonishing people some 2,500 miles to the northeast: An obscure right-wing member of Congress from Louisiana named Michael Johnson was emerging as second in line to the presidency, as the new Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.

You have to hope that Mike won’t be as destructive as Otis, but it’s not at all clear that we’ll be so lucky. By the way, Mike Johnson thinks Otis and other climate disasters these days have nothing to do with humans’ impact on the environment, which is a decidedly irrational view for somebody who almost surely had to pass a science course to get a degree from Louisiana State University. Bear in mind, though, that Mike Johnson is a lawyer, not a scientist, meaning he thinks it’s ethical to argue passionately for whatever client he represents — and in this case, clearly, he has been retained by the oil and gas companies that have mainly financed his political career. As they might say down there, gotta dance with those that brung ya, right?

What Americans of all stripes need to weigh just now, though, as we are getting to know Mike Johnson, is how we will cope with the chaos that could result if the new speaker’s trajectory follows the course he has so far set. With the House back in session after a three-week shutdown as Republicans exhausted themselves fighting over who would become speaker, we haven’t yet felt the front edge of the storm that knowledgeable forecasters say will emerge from the most hard-right leader in Congress in generations. Mil-mannered Mike Johnson could be a Category 5 politician.

Mike Johnson was a key architect of the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, and laid out the bald-faced lie that voting machines somehow linked to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela had been, as he wrote, “rigged with this software” — a claim that Fox News pushed, costing the network $787 million in a legal settlement with Dominion, the voting machine company. There is no credible evidence that the presidential race was stolen from Donald Trump, which reveals that Mike Johnson can be either astonishingly gullible or willfully deceitful. We should tolerate neither in our elected leaders.

Mike Johnson supports a national abortion ban — which is opposed by about two-thirds of Americans. He has voted to end U.S. military aid to Ukraine, which would disastrously weaken NATO and leave that flank of Europe open to being overrun by Vladimir Putin’s Russian army. He helped craft budget amendments that would have cut $2 trillion from Medicare, $3 trillion from Medicaid and Obamacare and $750 billion from Social Security. He supported a ban on immigrants from Muslim countries and elimination of federal aid for refugees. He not only opposes equal rights for LGBTQ Americans, but has argued that states should re-criminalize “same-sex deviate sexual intercourse,” since such a “dangerous lifestyle” could lead to a collapse “of the entire democratic system.” (That’s some hot concept of gay power, dude!)

Many of those views were far outside the mainstream of American political thought until quite recently — that is, until the MAGA revolutionaries of Donald Trump’s claque took over the Republican party. No wonder Matt Gaetz, ringleader of the most radical right cluster of House Republicans, happily labeled him “MAGA Mike.”  If Speaker Mike Johnson insists in the weeks and months ahead on maintaining such extreme positions in negotiations with the Democrats who lead the Senate and hold the White House, not to mention the more moderate Republicans who sit in the Senate — as his far-right backers clearly expect he will — we could be facing a shutdown of the federal government for a long time (which, by the way, would surely challenge our democratic system more than do millions of gay Americans loving each other).

But there’s yet more to this storm that is bearing down on the Capitol. Whether or not you agree with the extreme views of Mike Johnson – in fact, polls suggest most Americans do not – it’s critical to understand: this In all of these positions, and in evaluating the role he plays as a member of the U.S. Congress, Mike Johnson is convinced that he is fulfilling God’s will. He has told us so: “God is the one who raises up those in authority,” he said in his first speech after the 220-209 vote that elevated him to the speakership. He told members of Congress that God “has allowed and ordained each and every one of us to be here at this specific moment.” That is, they may have been elected by voters, but God was their field organizer and political director, so that God’s will would be done by Congress.

It's not unusual for conservative politicians to link themselves to religion nowadays, because evangelical Christians have become key members of the Republican coalition. But there’s a danger when politicians of any persuasion insist that they’re leading a God-directed mission — because it implies that those who oppose their views are likewise defying God. And the Bible suggests penalties for the ungodlike, including eternal damnation, a judgment considerably more severe than a politician’s more appropriate warning of electoral defeat.

Those who claim to speak for God — which is really what you’re saying when you say your election and your role in government are fulfilling God’s will — have seemingly created a God in their own image, the better to justify what they believe. At its logical end, such religious extremism demands a rigidity that allows no compromise, and demands the surrender of the ungodly who oppose you.

That hardly reflects the humility that is a fundamental teaching of the Christian gospel that Mike Johnson claims to embrace — namely, the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”

Please pardon this short exposition on theology from an amateur in the study. It’s hardly the kind of argument I would typically make in the context of the political disputes that surround our government. But when a leading political figure so markedly invokes his religious beliefs as the standard for his views, and claims to be on a mission for God, it is not a time for us to bow down at that politician’s alter.

The spirit that Mike Johnson invokes is suspiciously like that of the Muslim radicals who attacked America on 9/11, who believed fervently that they were fulfilling a religious mission to eradicate infidels from the earth. That is not the tradition of tolerance for religious beliefs — and, indeed, non-beliefs — that has propelled American democracy forward, and which underlies the separation of church and state that our Constitution mandates.

This is why the man from Louisiana who is the new face of Republicans in Congress is as deceptive as Otis was when it formed as a tropical storm in the mid-Pacific: Behind his seemingly calm countenance, Mike Johnson is likely to be brewing up a powerful storm. Religious extremism can threaten Americans as surely as it does now the people of the Mideast, and it can catch us as unprepared as those poor people in Acapulco were this week when the pounding wind and water of a hurricane swept down upon them. We may need to ride out a tough storm.

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