Everyone’s been joking around a lot about this Mike Johnson guy, the newly elected Speaker of the House is largely unknown has a ludicrously generic name and this sort of Ned Flanders esque persona when he was elected to the speakership, but the collective response, even among his colleagues was

sorry, who Susan Collins said she’d have to google him. Mitch McConnell has never even met him, which I guess all combined to make him seem inoffensive enough to be elevated to second in line for the presidency. Sure.

Anyway, after weeks of chaos, we have a speaker of the house. This should be a positive development right for the whole, maintaining a functional government thing.

Except is very, very much not. I cannot believe I am longing for the halcyon days of Kevin McCarthy. But here we are.

Let’s start with the fact that Mike Johnson was one of the primary architects of the 2020 insurrection, he not only voted against certifying the election, but actively did his damnedest to reinstall the loser in office. That is a big deal, considering that there is a significant likelihood that the coming election will end up being decided by a narrow margin. And we now have a speaker of the House of Representatives who is just fully willing to disregard constitutional law in service of a cult leader.

Now that would be bad enough, but we are also dealing with a man whose religious views run almost cartoonishly extreme. He’s fervently anti LGBTQ rights. Having said in the past that being gay is a quote, dangerous lifestyle and advocating for laws to prevent deviant forms of sexual intercourse. Oh, and if you’re wondering about his views on a woman’s right to exercise control over her own body,

you’re gonna be shocked about this one. Here’s what he told New York Magazine in 2015, quote,

many women use abortion as a form of birth control, you know, and certain segments of society. And it’s just shocking and sad. 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.

Wow. That has a direct line he’s drawing between abortions, and school shooters.

The innocuous facade is just that a facade, hiding the reality that we have a religious extremist and insurrectionist now positioned again as second in line to the presidency of the United States. The Republicans are putting the pieces in place to end the American experiment. This is just one more of them. And they managed to slip it right by us.