The rightwing Louisiana congressman Mike Johnson won a floor vote to be speaker of the House on Wednesday, elevating him to a top position in US politics and capping an unlikely and sudden rise to power.
Johnson was elected to Congress in 2016 and has kept a relatively low profile since then, though he is socially conservative and a solid part of the Trumpist right wing of the party.
Johnson served on Donald Trump’s legal defense team during his first impeachment. He currently serves as vice-chair of the Republican conference, a position to which his party colleagues unanimously re-elected him last year, and as a deputy whip.
He played a key role in assisting Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, the New York Times reported last year. When Texas filed a lawsuit at the US supreme court asking the justices to set aside valid electoral votes from Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Arizona, he organized a friend-of-the-court brief in support and got 125 of his House Republican colleagues to sign on.
The central argument of the brief was that the authority of state legislatures to set federal election rules had been usurped because of emergency rule changes to voting during the pandemic.
Johnson’s arguments gave Republicans a way to continue to object to the election, and endorse the anti-democratic idea of throwing out valid votes, without endorsing Trump’s outlandish claims of fraud.
“It was a fig-leaf intellectual argument,” the congressman Peter Meijer, a Michigan Republican who voted to impeach Trump and then lost his House primary last year, told the New York Times.
Johnson circulated the brief in December 2020, saying Trump was “anxiously awaiting the final list” of members who would sign it, a comment that was perceived by some as a threat. “Are we the party of list-making now?” one Republican told CNN at the time. Johnson later told the New Yorker he regretted how the email was phrased.
Even though a lawyer for House Republicans told Johnson the brief was unconstitutional, he pushed ahead anyway. House Republicans booed a reporter on Tuesday evening who asked about Johnson’s efforts to overturn the election and he dismissed the question.
Given Johnson’s involvement in the amicus brief, it was no surprise that he was also one of the 147 Republicans who voted against certifying the election
Johnson represents a Louisiana district that stretches from the middle of the state to its western border with Texas and then up to its northern border with Arkansas. It is solidly Republican – he easily won re-election there in 2022 and Trump carried the district by nearly 24 points in 2020. He now becomes the highest-ranking politician in the US House from Louisiana ever.
Before coming to Congress he served in the Louisiana legislature from 2015 to 2017 and worked as a lawyer. He worked as a lawyer for the Alliance Defending Freedom, an anti-LGBTQ+ group, and defended Louisiana’s same-sex marriage ban and anti-abortion laws.
Johnson’s father was a firefighter in Shreveport who was badly injured in an accident when he was a boy. Johnson later said the moment was his religious epiphany. When he was in the legislature, he introduced several religious freedom bills and religious groups talked about him “in superhero terms”, according to nola.com.
When he married his wife Kelly in 1999, they agreed to a contract or “covenant” marriage – a conservative Christian idea popular in some states that makes it harder to divorce and requires counseling before doing so.
Johnson and his wife promoted the idea across the country, nola.com reported, and appeared on Good Morning America to discuss the topic. “My own parents are divorced. As anyone who goes through that knows, that was a traumatic thing for our whole family. I’m a big proponent of marriage and fidelity and all the things that go with it, and I’ve seen firsthand the devastation [divorce] can cause,” he said on the show.
In addition to being anti-abortion, Kelly also introduced federal legislation modeled on Florida’s “don’t say gay” bill and has been opposed to gender-affirming care, according to the Washington Post.
