1). “ 'MAGA Mike Johnson' wants commission to cut Social Security formed 'immediately' ”, Nov 2, 2023, Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams, at < https://www.commondreams.org/
2). “Election Denial, 'Sexual Anarchy,' Noah’s Ark: All the Mike Johnson Details We Regret to Inform You Of”, Oct 26, 2023, Bess Levin, Vanity Fair, at < https://www.vanityfair.com/
Introductionby dmorista: I understand why many posters and commenters here at The Class Struggle express disdain for the Democrats and do not intend to vote for any of them. I just think it is worth actually taking an hour to vote for many Democrats where there is any chance of a contested election. Then go work on political projects that further what you really care about. As an example of just what awaits us if the Trump Republicans actually win the White House, the House of Representatives, and the Senate let's look at the new Speaker of the House and some of his political positions.
The first article, “ 'MAGA Mike Johnson' wants commission ….”, discusses the agenda of the loathsome new Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, has already publicly proposed an “Expert Commission” that would meet behind closed doors, to propose and try to force through Trillions of Dollars of Cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. We must realize that this is all just part of the Ultra-Right's program to impose a vicious Finance Capital regime. One aspect of this are moves to implement the destruction of the remaining remnants of the New Deal and the protections that maintain a decent life for older and less prosperous people in the U.S.
The second article “Election Denial, 'Sexual Anarchy,' Noah’s Ark: ….” looks at a much wider range of Johnson's extremist reactionary / fascist political history and program. Johnson's leadership in the “Big Lie” about Biden winning and Trump losing the 2020 Presidential election is fairly well known. However some of his other history and agenda are just as extreme but much less well known. For example the Vanity Fair article notes that Johnson: “When Roe v. Wade was overturned last year, he called it 'a great, joyous occasion,' later writing, 'We will get the number of abortions [in Louisiana] to ZERO!!' As an attorney for the Alliance Defense Fund, now known as the Alliance Defending Freedom, he worked on efforts to shut down abortion clinics in the state. In Congress, he cosponsored legislation that would have banned abortions at about six weeks of pregnancy, i.e., a time when many people do not even know they’re pregnant. He’s beloved by the antiabortion organization Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, which has given him an A+ rating.
He even put forward the position that blamed school shootings are caused by Abortion and Biological Science's Theory of Evolution. He said and wrote about the issue at different times, first his claim that abortion causes school shootings: “In 2015, he blamed school shootings on abortion, telling writer Irin Carmon, “When you break up the nuclear family, when you tell a generation of people that life has no value, no meaning, that it’s expendable, then you do wind up with school shooters.”
Later Johnson said that: “In addition to blaming abortion for mass shootings, Johnson has also claimed that the teaching of evolution has played a part. In a 2016 sermon, he told the audience, 'People say, ‘How can a young person go into their schoolhouse and open fire on their classmates?’ Because we’ve taught a whole generation—a couple generations now—of Americans, that there’s no right or wrong, that it’s about survival of the fittest, and [that] you evolve from the primordial slime. Why is that life of any sacred value? Because there’s nobody sacred to whom it’s owed. None of this should surprise us.' ”
He has proposed that Physicians who perform abortions should be sentenced to long terms at hard labor (on bread and water??) and has said that if women were forced to give birth against their wills, that the taxes that could be collected from those “new workers” would solve the funding problems for Social Security and Medicare. He also: “filed a lawsuit for an organization to receive tax subsidies to build a Noah’s Ark–focused theme park in Kentucky.” The effort paid off in tens of millions of dollars spent by Kentucky to subsidize the Creationist Museum in Covington, Kentucky across the Ohio River from Cincinnati.
Concerning the question of Global Warming Johnson: “In 2017, Johnson opined: 'The climate is changing, but the question is, is it being caused by natural cycles over the span of the earth’s history? Or is it changing because we drive SUVs? I don’t believe in the latter. I don’t think that’s the primary driver.' ”. There is plenty more of disturbing extremist positions that this truly evil man espouses and works for, think about it.
'MAGA Mike Johnson' Wants Commission to Cut Social Security Formed 'Immediately'
Social Security Works said that the new House speaker's "NUMBER ONE priority is to cut our earned benefits behind closed doors."
When Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives elected Louisiana Congressman Mike Johnson as speaker last week, critics quickly sounded the alarm about his previous calls to cut trillions of dollars from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—and the GOP leader triggered a fresh wave of fears on Thursday with related comments to a Capitol Hill journalist.
NBC News' Sahil Kapur reported on social media that Johnson "says he pitched a debt commission to Senate Republicans yesterday and 'the idea was met with great enthusiasm.' He says it will be bipartisan and bicameral. He says he wants 'very thoughtful people' in both parties to lead it. He wants this 'immediately.'"
In response to Johnson's remarks—which echoed his first speech as speaker—the Alliance for Retired Americans wrote, "Translation: They're eager to begin gutting Social Security behind closed doors."
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla)—who led the ouster of ex-Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.)—celebrated Johnson's rise as a win for the far-right. He declared last week that "MAGA is ascendant," referring to the "Make America Great Again" campaign slogan of former President Donald Trump, who is the GOP front-runner for 2024.
Critics of the new speaker have similarly framed his election as a display of the far-right's hold on the Republican Party, and are even calling him "MAGA Mike," including in response to his comments Thursday.
"A week into his tenure, MAGA Mike Johnson is ALREADY calling for closed-door cuts to the Social Security and Medicare benefits American workers have earned through decades of hard work," warned Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee.
Social Security Works said that "MAGA Mike Johnson's NUMBER ONE priority is to cut our earned benefits behind closed doors."
"The White House has rightfully called this type of commission a 'death panel' for Social Security and Medicare," the group noted. "HANDS OFF!"
Back in February, long before McCarthy struck a deal with President Joe Biden to suspend the country's debt ceiling, Republicans in Congress and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) were floating the idea of a commission, and White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said that "the American people want more jobs and lower costs, not a death panel for Medicare and Social Security."
As Republican lawmakers have continued to pursue the idea, others have embraced the "death panel" description.
After Johnson's mention of the commission in his speech last week, Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik wrote:
On the whole, Johnson's approach to social safety net programs comes right out of the GOP library of lies about the programs' finances and their effect on the federal budget.
"The reality is, they're headed towards bankruptcy," he said in his July 2022 C-SPAN appearance. "In just a few number of years, Social Security goes belly up. So does Medicare, Medicaid, all of these big-spending programs because we're drowning in debt."
The idea that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are going "bankrupt" is standard Republican hogwash. So is the idea that Social Security will go "belly up" in some number of years—even if Congress sits on its hands, the program will still have enough revenue to cover three-quarters of the benefits due.
"The notion that those programs are drivers of the federal debt is also a bog-standard GOP talking point," Hiltzik added. "A far more significant portion of the federal budget deficit is the lavish tax cut that Johnson's party gifted to corporations and the wealthy in 2017, a $1.5-trillion giveaway from which the U.S. economy received no significant gain."
Most House Republicans and a dozen Democrats on Thursday evening voted to pass a bill that would deliver on Biden's request for $14.3 billion to help Israel wage war on Gaza—which experts are condemning as genocide—and cut Internal Revenue Service (IRS) funding.
Analysts and Democrats in Congress have warned that the IRS cut would hamper the agency's ability to crack down on wealthy tax cheats, bolstered by the Congressional Budget Office finding Wednesday that the measure would reduce federal revenues by $26.8 billion and add $12.5 billion to the deficit over the next decade.
Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.), who opposed the bill and is among the few Democrats demanding a cease-fire in Gaza, said that "the only thing crueler than sending $14 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars for weapons that will result in the deaths of thousands more innocent Palestinian children in Gaza is exploiting that war—exploiting the death of over 1,400 Israeli mothers, fathers, grandparents, children, and hundreds more hostages—to help corporate CEOs and billionaire donors cheat on their taxes."
Election Denial, “Sexual Anarchy,” Noah’s Ark: All the Mike Johnson Details We Regret to Inform You Of
On October 25, after several weeks that saw dysfunction, chaos, humiliation, and anonymous threats to at least one lawmaker’s wife, Republicans finally elected a Speaker of the House to succeed Kevin McCarthy: Mike Johnson, a representative from Louisiana who has the distinction of being the least experienced Speaker in more than a century.
At the time of Johnson’s accession, a lot of Americans likely had no idea who he was; actual Republican senator Susan Collins, for one, told a reporter she didn’t know Johnson but planned to remedy that by googling him. And if you weren’t familiar with Johnson, you might’ve assumed that that was maybe even a good thing—that he was just a quiet Republican who hadn’t gotten wrapped up in the insanity plaguing the GOP over the last seven or so years. He didn’t have the name recognition of, say, Jim Jordan or Matt Gaetz, but perhaps that simply spoke to the fact that he wasn’t leading a series of absurd hearings in an attempt to take down Joe Biden; or bragging about being so devoted to Donald Trump that he answered his phone calls during sex. Maybe, you might have thought, he wasn’t someone you’d have to constantly worry about re: undermining democracy or trying to take away people’s rights.
Unfortunately, that is not the case with Johnson, who may not have been well known prior to being given one of the most powerful jobs in government but is very much someone whose extremist views and actions should keep you up at night.
Herein, a running list of the absolute most WTF things the new Speaker has said and done on everything from the 2020 election to abortion to LGBTQ+ rights and more.
Abortion
Johnson is proudly antiabortion. When Roe v. Wade was overturned last year, he called it “a great, joyous occasion,” later writing, “We will get the number of abortions [in Louisiana] to ZERO!!” As an attorney for the Alliance Defense Fund, now known as the Alliance Defending Freedom, he worked on efforts to shut down abortion clinics in the state. In Congress, he cosponsored legislation that would have banned abortions at about six weeks of pregnancy, i.e., a time when many people do not even know they’re pregnant. He’s beloved by the antiabortion organization Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, which has given him an A+ rating. In 2015, he blamed school shootings on abortion, telling writer Irin Carmon, “When you break up the nuclear family, when you tell a generation of people that life has no value, no meaning, that it’s expendable, then you do wind up with school shooters.”
In some real Handmaid’s Tale shit, he declared during a House hearing that if women were forced to have more children, a.k.a. “able-bodied” workers, there would be more funding for Social Security and Medicare:
By Rebecca Ford
In his work as an attorney for the Alliance Defense Fund, Johnson also argued in court that same-sex couples should not receive domestic partnership benefits, and officially opposed the Supreme Court’s decision to decriminalize gay sex between consenting adults. In the Louisiana House of Representatives, he proposed a bill that critics say would have made it easier to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people. (In response, he claimed he was not a “bigot,” adding: “I know that I brought this bill for the right reason.”) Meanwhile, in Congress, he introduced a national bill seemingly modeled after Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law; voted against the 2022 bipartisan bill to codify gay marriage; and last year cosponsored a bill making it a crime to provide gender-affirming care to anyone under 18, despite the American Academy of Pediatrics backing such care.
“I would be hard-pressed to think of a worse member to be elected Speaker of the House,” Allen Morris, policy director for the National LGBTQ Task Force, told The 19th.
Separation of church and state
If you guessed that Johnson doesn’t believe in it, you guessed right. In April—as in, just a few months before he was elected Speaker—the congressman railed against what he referred to as the “so-called separation of church and state,” saying, “The founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around.”
In 2018, Johnson argued for prayer in public schools.
Evolution
In addition to blaming abortion for mass shootings, Johnson has also claimed that the teaching of evolution has played a part. In a 2016 sermon, he told the audience, “People say, ‘How can a young person go into their schoolhouse and open fire on their classmates?’ Because we’ve taught a whole generation—a couple generations now—of Americans, that there’s no right or wrong, that it’s about survival of the fittest, and [that] you evolve from the primordial slime. Why is that life of any sacred value? Because there’s nobody sacred to whom it’s owed. None of this should surprise us.”
In related news, a year prior, Johnson filed a lawsuit for an organization to receive tax subsidies to build a Noah’s Ark–focused theme park in Kentucky. “When the Ark Project sails, everybody will benefit,” he wrote in an op-ed, “even those who are stubbornly trying to sink it.” The Ark Encounter is operated by a fundamentalist Christian group that believes in creationism.
Climate
Where does Johnson, not exactly a man of science, land on global warming? Well, per The New York Times:
Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana, the newly elected House Speaker, has questioned climate science, opposed clean energy, and received more campaign contributions from oil and gas companies than from any other industry last year. Even as other Republican lawmakers increasingly accept the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is dangerously heating the planet, the unanimous election of Mr. Johnson on Wednesday suggests that his views may not be out of step with the rest of his party.
A former constitutional lawyer, he does not sit on committees that decide the fate of major energy issues. But he has consistently voted against dozens of climate bills and amendments, opposing legislation that would require companies to disclose their risks from climate change and bills that would reduce leaks of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from oil and gas wells. He has voted for measures that would cut funding to the Environmental Protection Agency.
By Rebecca Ford
In 2017, Johnson opined: “The climate is changing, but the question is, is it being caused by natural cycles over the span of the earth’s history? Or is it changing because we drive SUVs? I don’t believe in the latter. I don’t think that’s the primary driver.”
The 2020 election
By now you’ve likely heard that Johnson spent a significant amount of time and energy trying to overturn the 2020 election—an effort that included leading the amicus brief signed by more than 100 GOP lawmakers that asked the Supreme Court to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Johnson also objected to the certification of Biden’s win on January 6; his arguments for doing so were adopted by a significant number of Republicans, leading the Times to call him “the most important architect of the Electoral College objections.” One day prior, per Politico, he told colleagues, “This is a very weighty decision. All of us have prayed for God’s discernment. I know I’ve prayed for each of you individually,” before pressing them to oppose the Electoral College results. Oh, and he was a Dominion truther:
Elsewhere!
Could Mike Johnson, the New House Speaker, Undermine the 2024 Election?
North Carolina Republicans Approve House Map That Flips at Least Three Seats
Georgia’s congressional map violates Voting Rights Act, court finds
Donald Trump’s 2020 Cronies Appear to Be Ditching Him One by One
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“Get the right cases to the Supreme Court”: inside Charles Koch’s network
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