After 22 days without a Legislature, the United States once again has a Congress capable of functioning. The Republican Party has managed to overcome its fragmentation and agree on the appointment for the presidency of the House of Representatives of Mike Johnson, a tough Trumpist, but without the verbal aggressiveness of the former president or another of the candidates for the position, Jim Jordan. , who was resoundingly defeated last week after failing to win the votes of his party colleagues.
With his rise to office, Johnson – who believes that the Universe is 6,000 years old, God created it in 6 days, and opposes aid to Ukraine, gay marriage and abortion – becomes the second person in the line of succession. of the president of the United States, after the vice president, Kamala Harris.
Unlike most of the protagonists in this crisis – Jordan himself, the ousted President Kevin McCarthy, and other candidates, such as Steve Scalise – Johnson is not a personality of national projection. He has been in the House for seven years, which is a relatively short time, and he has never played a prominent role. Perhaps that is the reason why the totally fragmented Republican Party has unanimously supported him: Johnson has never insulted anyone. In addition, he has the most important endorsement of the Republican: the support of Donald Trump.
On Tuesday, a message from the former president on his social network Truth Social was enough to sink, without any vote, the candidacy of centrist Tom Emmer. Trump called Emmer, among other things, a “globalist”, although it would have been enough for him to have said that he did not support him for the candidacy to be liquidated. Such is the power of the former president among Republicans.
Johnson is different. He not only voted against the ratification of the results of the 2020 presidential election, which Donald Trump lost, but he was also the mastermind of a painful lawsuit by the state of Texas to suspend the counting of votes… in Pennsylvania. The Justice Department refused to accept the case, which in a federal state like the United States raised enormous constitutional doubts.
Now, Johnson, an evangelical Christian who represents rural Louisiana, assumes leadership of the House of Representatives at a critical time for the United States and the world. In just over three weeks, the US Public Administration runs out of resources to continue operating, which would imply its progressive closure. Added to this is the urgent aid package of 106.6 billion dollars (100.6 billion euros) that Joe Biden has requested for Ukraine, Israel and the countries of the Pacific Rim. Johnson supports Israel – like virtually all members of the United States Congress – but opposes giving more aid to Ukraine, even though he voted in favor of it in 2022. In two votes held in September and October, Johnson said not to help Kiev.
Johnson, 51, belongs to the most conservative wing of the Republican Party, what the weekly The Economist baptized two decades ago as “paleoconservatives.” Although, in reality his relationship with Paleontology (the science that studies life forms prior to the appearance of human beings on Earth) is not good. The new president of the House of Representatives regularly collaborates with the Genesis Answers organization, which has built the Creation Museum, a huge museum of History and Natural History in the state of Kentucky in which it explains the Universe according to the literal interpretation of the Bible. That means, for example, that the Earth is about 6,000 years old, that God created the Universe in six days, and that Noah saved all the animals from extinction by putting them in his ark. Other beliefs of Genesis Answers are that dinosaurs are not completely extinct (although many disappeared due to the action of the knights of the Middle Ages), since Noah saved them from the Flood by putting the adult specimens in the ark, but to reptile eggs, as the organization’s founder and president, Ken Ham, explained to the author of these lines in October 2005. Johnson has also defended the establishment of tax exemptions for the Meeting on the Ark, a creationist theme park.
Leaving aside the origin of the Universe, Johnson has very specific ideas about earthly issues. He opposes same-sex marriage, and is a prominent supporter of so-called conversion therapy, which maintains that medicine can cure homosexuality. Likewise, he rejects abortion, and among his objectives is the establishment of a law that prohibits this practice throughout the United States. Since last year, abortion, once legal nationwide, has been banned in more than a dozen states, and significantly limited in several more.
