So, the Dog Caught the Car Again

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Q-GA) takes a selfie with newly elected Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA).

This is bad, right? After three weeks of paralysis in the House, an exhausted GOP lined up behind a smiling, mild-mannered, Christo-nationalist Trump acolyte, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA). The new Speaker is an election denier who helped architect efforts in Congress to overturn the 2020 election and is squarely aligned with the far-right extremists in the House.

That sure sounds really bad. And there are good summaries out there today on the new Speaker Johnson that will leave your eyes wide and mouth agape, as pieces of his appalling record come to public light. I’ll cover some of that today, but I want to focus on five constructive ways to frame what his election means—and why it could be another case of careful-what-you-win for the GOP. Sometimes when the dog catches the car, as abortion foes did with Roe v. Wade, the consequences are quite high. I also hope this breakdown lets you breathe just a bit easier, despite this frightening win by the MAGA forces.

First, this is no doubt a sign of MAGA ascendancy within the GOP. But while hardliners see it as a triumph, history will mark it as a collapse of the traditionalists. And as I’ll explain below, swing voters aren’t likely to be happy or excited about MAGA being in the driver’s seat.

Second, by electing a staunch election denier and actual organizer of the attempted January 6 coup, the GOP has put the issue front and center once more for voters, not just with their top presidential nominee, but with House leadership. That’s an unforced error.

Third, by electing a co-sponsor of three national abortion bans as Speaker, Republicans have centered abortion rights as well in 2024. That is their biggest vulnerability, and it is causing them to lose elections in places like Kansas and Ohio. Another big error.

Fourth, Johnson will inherit all the problems McCarthy faced but with less time, fewer resources, and far less experience to solve them. He will face the stark choice of shutting down the government or working with Democrats. Same conundrum, different villain.

Fifth, one of the principal roles for any Speaker is to win, or in Johnson’s case preserve, the House majority. This means having strong relationships with recruits and donors and a formidable ability to fundraise. But Johnson has none of these things.

Now let’s look at these considerations in greater detail and see why none of them looks good for the Republican Party over the long term.

Voters don’t like MAGA extremists

The MAGA right has now successfully decapitated its own party leadership, with Nos. 1, 2 and 3 in the GOP all failing in their bids to unite the ranks behind them. 

“If you don’t think that moving from Kevin McCarthy to MAGA Mike Johnson shows the ascendance of this movement and where the power in the Republican Party truly lies, then you’re not paying attention,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz (F-FL).  

How did that happen in just three weeks? After the far-right knocked out former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and then his No. 2, Steve Scalise (R-LA), the “moderates” in the GOP found enough energy to oppose the combative, burn-all-bridges Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH)—but not before the party went through a painful several days of actual death threats and intimidation. 

Then, after the last of the old guard, No. 3 Tom Emmer (R-MN), failed in his bid, the GOP establishment ran out of people with any actual experience to run for the office. They also rebuffed Democratic overtures to work together on electing a Speaker who would lead the budget bills and Ukranian aid to a House floor vote. 

That opened the door for a basically unknown figure on the right to take Jordan’s place. The “moderates” threw in the towel, knowing they had no cards left and eager for someone, anyone, to save them from the chaos.

But in their haste to elect someone who passed the sniff test, they chose an extremist in a suit. Johnson is measured instead of pugilistic, and he has no enemies because he has made few waves in his scant, six-plus years in the House. But make no mistake: Johnson is among the most extreme members of the right. He is not just an election denier but an actual organizer of the efforts to overturn the election in Congress; not just a pro-lifer but a former senior counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which overturned Roe v. Wade and is gunning for the abortion pill; not just anti-LGBTQ but a cosponsor of a national “Don’t Say Gay” bill and someone who believes consensual gay intimacy should be re-criminalized.

This record may make conservatives cheer, but it is a gift to Democrats seeking to take back the House and looking to put a face on extremism, especially in the 18 districts that Biden won in 2020 now occupied by GOP representatives. As one commentator aptly noted,

For decades the GOP ran ads in purple [districts] about Pelosi & SF values. They are about to experience the reverse. 

Nobody knows this guy so voters in Biden districts will be introduced to him as a coup organizer who wants no exceptions for abortion & thinks being gay is bad. 

If the 2022 midterms told us anything, it is that swing state voters, including many independents and traditional Republicans, will cast their votes against MAGA extremists. It’s why high profile, Trump-endorsed election deniers, from Kari Lake to Herschel Walker, Tudor Dixon to Blake Masters, lost so badly in purple states. It’s why Democrats grew their margin in the Senate by one and seized key governorships in purple states—all in a midterm cycle that was supposed to be a red wave.

If Democrats succeed in portraying Johnson as the coup-organizing, election-denying, anti-abortion extremist that he plainly is, House Republicans in 18 districts that Biden won in 2020 will spend all of 2024 trying to distance themselves from Johnson. This of course will be tough to square with the fact that they personally voted for such a MAGA Christo-nationalist nightmare. 

Johnson won’t be as easy to vilify as, say, Jim Jordan would have been. After all, he is relatively unknown. But while the new Speaker spends his first few weeks learning the ropes, hiring staff, and trying not to cause a government shutdown that Republicans would get blamed for, Democrats will have ample opportunity to reveal his extremism to America. And that process has already begun.

Relitigating the 2020 election

Republicans were hoping in 2022 that Trump would stay quiet and not force candidates to adopt his absurd claims around the 2020 election. But to gain his endorsement and support, candidates not only had to kiss his ring, they had to act like true believers of the Big Lie. 

As discussed above, voters really didn’t like that, especially independents and traditional Republicans. So GOP strategists have been hoping fervently that, by 2024, we wouldn’t still be talking about the 2020 election.

Welp. That of course is hard to do when Trump is on the ticket and still claiming he won in 2020 by a landslide. It’s even harder to do when Trump is facing a federal trial in March of 2024 over his illegal efforts to hang on to power. And now, it’s even worse for the GOP narrative because the most powerful elected official in the GOP is himself a staunch election denier and even a key operative in the efforts to overturn the results of the election.

As the New York Times noted, Johnson was no mere bystander on January 6. He played a leading role in signing on House Republicans to an outrageous legal brief seeking to overturn the 2020 election. Then he became a chief architect of Trump’s efforts to object to the certification of the vote on January 6. 

No wonder Trump adores him and has praised his election.

The face of the House GOP is now that of an election denier and coup organizer. In an election where a single percentage point shift can cause seismic losses across the battleground districts, Johnson’s role in the coup attempt and his conspiracy-laden beliefs about the 2020 election will likely come up repeatedly as a key issue for voters. 

Here’s one that’s already making the airwaves. In an on-air update on November 17, 2020, Johnson said this:

You know the allegations about these voting machines, some of them being rigged with this software by Dominion, there's a lot of merit to that... They know that in Georgia it really was rigged.

In Georgia, of course, lawyers are now busy pleading guilty to felonies for spreading those false claims. Johnson will have a lot of explaining to do to those all-important swing voters.

Abortion, front and center

If there is one other issue that Republicans hate to talk about besides the 2020 election, it is abortion. The party does not have a unified position on this after the fall of Roe v. Wade, and now they have a Speaker of the House who was working for the very group, the ADF, that helped end it.

Abortion is a big loser for the GOP, even in the reddest of states. It is also a big motivator for Democratic voters and helps explain the growing gender gap in party support. If Trump and the House GOP want to win elections, for example, they need to win over suburban women. But abortion is a line in the sand for many of these voters, particularly among independents. And when Johnson’s record on this is seared into every television and computer screen across middle America, winning that constituency’s trust and votes is going to prove far more difficult for the GOP.

For example, as Politico reports, Johnson is the co-sponsor of a so-called “fetal heartbeat” bill that seeks to ban abortions nationally after around six weeks. That’s the same bill Gov. DeSantis signed in Florida that is helping to tank his approval rating. The six-week ban is just the beginning: Johnson is a co-sponsor of two other national abortion bans. And during congressional hearings, he has even argued that banning abortions would shore up Medicare and Social Security by funneling more “able-bodied workers into the economy.” 

This all fits neatly within Johnson’s Christi-nationalist world, where he seeks further subjugation of women through ending no-fault divorce, has supported some of the most virulent anti-LGBTQ laws in the country, and opposes all gender affirming care for trans youth. But these positions don’t sit well at all with critical swing voters.

Much as he’d love to not talk about these positions, Johnson will be under pressure from the right to continue to press culture war issues such as abortion bans, book bans, and medical care bans and to attach them to basic government funding bills. It remains to be seen whether he decides to champion these causes now that he has to govern.

Whichever way he tries to steer the party, the GOP has handed Democrats a potent weapon for 2024. As with election denialism, the face of the House GOP is now an extremist anti-abortion activist. Expect this to come up repeatedly from now through 2024 as Democrats go on the attack.

A budget, an aid package, and a functioning government

It’s important to note the context of how we got to a Speaker Mike Johnson. Kevin McCarthy lost his speakership because he dared to work with Democrats to pass a continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government while appropriations bills are still being hammered out in the House. In other words, for even temporarily agreeing to keep the government open, McCarthy lost his job.

Johnson comes into the role with a hard deadline of November 17 to fund the government or face a similar crisis and shutdown. He has floated ideas of a CR that will keep the government open until mid-January or even mid-April while his conference tries to craft budget bills. Perhaps the GOP is simply too tired to fight about this, and in his honeymoon period Johnson could have their support for whatever he needs to do to get the party out of the mess it’s in.

But there’s another looming question that he can’t kick down the road: a $106 billion aid package, requested by the White House, for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and the border. Johnson, along with his fellow, far-right Putin enablers, has opposed further assistance to Ukraine. Will Johnson hold up the aid requested in order to deny Ukraine funds? The majority of Americans want Ukranian aid to continue, but Johnson’s election puts that in jeopardy.

This could set up another schism within the GOP, because the Senate GOP leadership strongly supports further Ukrainian aid. Johnson will be going into these negotiations with little experience and no long-standing relationships with the negotiating parties. It’s an unenviable spot. And a new Speaker who can’t even agree upon and move forward a basic aid package for our allies would begin his tenure poorly, even as MAGA and the Kremlin cheer.

Oh, and that election next year…

One final point of discussion is the general election. With such a thin majority to defend, the GOP cannot afford to lose more than four seats, three if Rep. George Santos (R-NY) resigns or is booted before then. And with 18 of its members sitting in districts that Joe Biden won, Johnson faces long odds already. His inexperience will make that fight all the more painful.

A key qualification for any Speaker is fundraising prowess. On this, Johnson scores poorly. In his six plus years, he’s only raised about $600,000 dollars for his leadership PAC. More importantly, he lacks personal relationships with major donors, who may be reluctant to open their wallets to an extremist, no matter how smooth-talking. For all his faults, his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, was a formidable fundraiser. And the House GOP is already significantly behind the Democrats in fundraising for next year. 

To close the gap, McCarthy’s fundraising guru, Jeff Miller, is going to go work for Johnson as a “volunteer.” But there already is a bit of a scramble going on. “Please stay tuned as we work on compling [sic] new opportunities for the Speaker moving forward,” said an email from Fundraising Inc., minutes after Johnson won the election. The note also provided contact information for those looking to host an event.

Another important consideration is recruitment. It takes years to cultivate new candidates for office, and McCarthy and his leadership team held and maintained all those relationships, too. The new Speaker is unlikely going to have the time, staff and resources to invest in these recruits, given his learning curve and the demands on his bandwidth that the budget and issues like the aid package will consume in the coming weeks or even months. 

These are but two examples of what happens when there is a leadership vacuum in a big, national party. The principals and their understudies have all been knocked out, and only ambitious but very green members remain, including the new Speaker. 

We’ve already seen the incompetence of the House Freedom Caucus as it tried to run oversight hearings. They were unprepared and fumbled even the most basic of inquiries and witness appearances. My bet is we are about to see the consequences of woeful inexperience when it comes to organizing for a national election.

The GOP may have cheered the end of its current chaos, but by no means has the dysfunction ended. As the above discussion demonstrates, the lack of a Speaker was only the beginning of their problems.