Don’t expect a GOP heel-turn on the issue of abortion any time soon – at least not while Mike Johnson is one of the highest-ranking Republicans in Washington.
While the party has suffered repeated defeats on the issue of reproductive rights in the past two years, the right has shown no signs of abandoning its support for sharp restrictions on the availability of abortion procedures in the US. In some cases, many still support a total ban on the practice.
That radical belief is shared by only a fraction of the US population — 37 per cent, according to a Pew poll last year — but one of the most radical opponents of abortion rights in the Republican Party is now the head of its caucus in the lower chamber of Congress. A new deep dive into his political past from CNN’s KFile has revealed that Mr Johnson recently referred to the practice as an “American holocaust”.
The comments reported by CNN were made last year on a DC-based radio show. In the same interview, he accused Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest provider of reproductive health services, of viewing Black Americans as “prey”.
“It is truly an American holocaust,” said the speaker. “The reality is that Planned Parenthood and all these big abortion (providers), they set up their clinics in inner cities. They regard these people as easy prey. I mean, it’s true.”
In other snippets of published audio, the House speaker is heard describing humanity as “inherently evil” and arguing that the government’s base purpose is to “restrain” man. These comments were made on a radio show in 2010 where Mr Johnson and the host both staunchly advocated for a government that catered largely to a right-wing Christian mindset.
He insinuated that nonbelievers were immoral in the same breath.
“We have to acknowledge collectively that man is inherently evil and needs to be restrained. That’s – see, that’s the problem with the radical left. They don’t acknowledge a God.”
Mr Johnson was swept into the speaker’s office after the downfall of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy at the hands of a rebellion led by Matt Gaetz and a group of Republican House members who were upset with his handling of the budget process as well as other issues with his leadership. His ascent to the highest role in the House came after several other more prominent Republicans tried and failed to secure enough votes from their colleagues for the job.
As speaker, Mr Johnson’s first major act has been to once again pass a funding measure to avert a shutdown without the support of his party’s conservative wing. He will now face a test to retain their trust in the coming months as the GOP caucus debates the budget measures it will send to the Senate.
His past comments unearthed by KFile also touched on LGBT+ issues. Specifically, in 2022 he appeared to endorse calls for the Supreme Court to re-examine past court cases, which could include the 2015 decision in Obergefell v Hodges to establish same-sex marriage as a protected right. Mr Johnson went far further in 2005, when he argued in favour of Texas’s law banning sex between gay men, and in 2009 said that Americans should be allowed to discriminate against gay people.
“There are laws on the books that prohibit discrimination against people for their immutable characteristics, their race and creed and that kind of thing,” he said in the 2009 audio found by CNN. “There’s a difference, and the law has recognized a difference, between that and homosexual behavior. As something that you do, not an immutable characteristic of what you are.”
His comments are, if nothing else, a clear illustration of just how much ground the right has been forced to give in America’s culture wars as the conversation around what rights should or should not be protected by the Constitution evolves.
In a statement to CNN, his office was forced to walk back his comments from just last year. A spokesperson told the news network that Mr Johnson now believes cases like Obergefell to be “settled law”.
Late last year, Democratic majorities in the US House and Senate rallied to pass the Respect for Marriage Act, a landmark piece of legislation that enshrines in federal law the requirement for states to recognise same-sex marriages. It also overturned the similarly-named Defense of Marriage Act, which banned the federal government from recognising same-sex marriages.
