The New GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson

gwb-trading · Oct 28, 2023

15 Not-Fun Facts About Speaker Mike Johnson
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/house-speaker-mike-johnson-not-fun-facts.html

After an embarrassing 22-day stalemate, House Republicans finally found a guy they can all at least tolerate as Speaker: Mike Johnson. If you’d never heard of the Louisiana representative before this week, you’re not alone. Multiple Senate Republicans said they had no idea who he was: John Cornyn described him as “pretty anonymous,” and Susan Collins admitted she needed to Google him. Hours before his election on Wednesday, learning more about Johnson required some serious digging. At the time, Googling “Mike Johnson” brought up hits for a Bachelorette contestant, a retired NHL star, and the owner of a North Carolina Toyota dealership before the congressman appeared in the search, as the Washington Post reported.

Since then, journalists have been scrambling to learn more about who Speaker Johnson is and where he stands on key issues. The conclusion: Despite his Ned Flanders persona, he’s a pretty troubling dude! Unless, of course, you think the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, would love to see abortion outlawed nationwide, and don’t think same-sex marriage should be legal.

Here are some not very fun facts we’ve learned about the guy Republicans barely know, but decided to make leader of the House and second in line to the presidency.

1. He masterminded Trump’s election coup.
If you’ve learned one unsavory fact about Johnson in recent days, it’s probably that he was a key architect of Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election. As New York’s Jonathan Chait explained, Johnson’s work on this front is actually the “primary source of his leadership claim and the central reason he has managed to unify the party.” After publicly flirting with Trump’s voting-machine conspiracy theories, Johnson honed in on the idea that the widespread use of mail ballots during the pandemic gave the House GOP an opportunity to make Trump president. Chait wrote:

Leaning on his background as a constitutional lawyer, he crafted an argument that several states had improperly changed their voting rules in response to the pandemic, thus nullifying their results and allowing the Republican House to select the winner.

His case, stringing together a series of implausible legal claims, brought together many Republicans who were queasy at Trump’s wild lies with Trump’s strongest supporters. Johnson circulated his case to the party and reminded them that Trump “anxiously awaited” their support. As the New York Times explained in a deeply reported story last year, Johnson’s arguments had a singular influence. About three-quarters of Republicans supporting Trump’s election challenge, the Times noted, “relied on the arguments of a low-profile Louisiana congressman, Representative Mike Johnson, the most important architect of the Electoral College objections.”

But all this went down three years ago, so apparently we’re not allowed to talk about it anymore.

2. He’s the least-experienced House Speaker in 140 years.
After a short stint in the Louisiana state legislature, Johnson was elected to the U.S. House in 2016. He is in only his fourth term and has never served in a senior leadership position or even as a full committee chair prior to his election as Speaker, according to Politico. That makes him the least-experienced person elected to the top position since John G. Carlisle in 1883.

3. He worked for the conservative legal group behind the case that ended Roe v. Wade.
Before entering elected office, Johnson spent eight years working as a senior attorney and national spokesperson for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal group described by the New York Times as the “largest legal force of the religious right.” It is dedicated to outlawing abortion and curtailing the rights of LGBTQ+ people, among other causes. The ADF was behind the case that led to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade and has scored many other victories for the religious right in recent years, as The New Yorker reported:

In the past dozen years, its lawyers had won fourteen Supreme Court victories, including overturning Roe v. Wade; allowing employer-sponsored health insurance to exclude birth control; rolling back limits on government support for religious organizations; protecting the anonymity of donors to advocacy groups; blocking pandemic-related public-health rules; and establishing the right of a baker to refuse to make a cake for a same-sex wedding.

While working with the ADF, Johnson fought to shut down abortion clinics and defended Louisiana laws restricting abortion.

4. He wants to ban abortion nationwide.
Johnson has an A+ rating from the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. He has voted for a federal abortion ban and pushed legislation that would outlaw abortion nationwide. The New Republic reports:

Johnson has also co-sponsored at least three bills hoping to ban abortion at a nationwide level, including the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, the Protecting Pain-Capable Unborn Children From Late-Term Abortions Act, and the Heartbeat Protection Act of 2021, all of which carry criminal penalties of up to five years in prison for physicians who perform abortions.

5. He blamed abortion for school shootings.
Johnson made this bizarre argument during an interview with New York’s Irin Carmon in 2015 when he was still working for the ADF.

“Many women use abortion as a form of birth control, you know, in certain segments of society, and it’s just shocking and sad, but this is where we are,” he said. “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.”

6. He also blamed abortion for Social Security and Medicare cuts.
While serving as chair of the Republican Study Committee from 2019 to 2021, Johnson proposed trillions of dollars in cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. He said these cuts wouldn’t be necessary if forced birth were the law of the land.

“Roe v. Wade gave constitutional cover to the elective killing of unborn children in America,” Johnson said. “You think about the implications of that on the economy; we’re all struggling here to cover the bases of Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and all the rest. If we had all those able-bodied workers in the economy, we wouldn’t be going upside down and toppling over like this.”

7. He blamed mass shootings on the teaching of evolution.
Of course, abortion doesn’t cause mass shootings alone; the process of evolution is also a culprit. In a sermon he delivered at Christian Center of Shreveport in 2016, Johnson claimed the United States was founded as a Christian nation but had gotten off track in recent years with the introduction of things like “no-fault divorce laws,” “legalized abortion,” and the teaching of evolution, per the MeidasTouch PAC.

Johnson then explained why he thinks this led to mass shootings:

“And 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 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.”

8. He fought to make taxpayers fund a Noah’s Ark theme park.
Johnson has close ties to the Evangelical “young-Earth creationist” movement, which holds that Earth is only about 6,000 years old and that early humans coexisted with dinosaurs.

In 2015, Johnson represented the Ark Encounter creationist theme park, which features dinosaurs riding on a life-size Noah’s Ark, in its successful legal battle to secure $18 million in tax subsidies from the state of Kentucky. According to HuffPost, Johnson has described himself as a “dear friend” of Ken Ham, founder of the group Answers in Genesis, which is behind both the Noah’s Ark theme park and the Creation Museum.

“The Ark Encounter is one way to bring people to this recognition of the truth, that what we read in the Bible are actual historical events,” Johnson said in a 2021 interview with Ham.

Johnson has yet to be questioned about his personal views regarding the origins of human life and the age of the planet.

9. He fought to ban same-sex marriage in Louisiana.
While serving as senior counsel for the ADF, Johnson went before the Louisiana Supreme Court in 2004 and 2014 to defend a statewide ban on gay marriage. ABC News reports that around the same time, Johnson also “filed suit against a New Orleans law that provided benefits to same-sex partners of city employees.” A state appellate court upheld the benefits.

While advocating against the New Orleans law, Johnson argued that the path from supporting gay rights to allowing pedophilia is a slippery slope.

“When you tear down the taboos, the doors open up for everything. That’s the danger,” Johnson said. “We are not trying to tie homosexuality to pedophilia, but when you tear down one barrier, others fall … Let’s stop here and draw the line here because then it leads to sexual anarchy.”

10. He led an anti-gay campus movement.
In the early aughts, far-right Christian groups responded to nationwide Day of Silence protests, in which students on college campuses remained silent all day to highlight anti-gay discrimination, by organizing “Day of Truth” counterprotests. This effort, which involved conservatives handing out pamphlets on the evils of homosexuality, was spearheaded by Johnson and the ADF.

“If the other side is going to advance their point of view,” Johnson told the Harvard Crimson in 2005, “it’s only fair for the Christian perspective to present their view, too.”

11. He wrote a lot of homophobic op-eds.
Throughout his time working with the ADF, Johnson wrote multiple editorials that have been unearthed by CNN. In these op-eds, he argued for the criminalization of gay sex and said legalizing same-sex marriage would lead to America’s doom.

In response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which invalidated laws against sodomy, Johnson wrote an editorial in his local Shreveport, Louisiana, paper arguing that “States have many legitimate grounds to proscribe same-sex deviate sexual intercourse.” He also said constitutional bans on discrimination don’t apply to gay people as “all are capable of changing their abnormal lifestyles.”

In other pieces that ran in the same Louisiana paper, Johnson called homosexuality an “inherently unnatural” and “dangerous lifestyle.” He also wrote, “Your race, creed, and sex are what you are, while homosexuality and cross-dressing are things you do. This is a free country, but we don’t give special protections for every person’s bizarre choices.”

12. He introduced a national version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
Americans’ attitudes toward gay marriage have evolved rapidly in the past few decades, and plenty of politicians have made remarks about homosexuality that they now regret. But Johnson didn’t leave his anti-gay stances in the early aughts.

Late last year, Johnson voted against a bill codifying same-sex and interracial marriages (he was joined by all but 39 Republicans).

Around the same time, Johnson introduced a bill that critics described as a federal version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which never got a floor vote. The Stop the Sexualization of Children Act would have blocked the use of federal money to “develop, implement, facilitate, or fund any sexually oriented program, event, or literature” for kids under 10. Sexually oriented was loosely defined: As NPR noted, “The language in the proposed legislation lumps together topics of sexual orientation and gender identity, with sexual content such as pornography and stripping.”

13. He was an advocate for “covenant marriage,” which makes it harder to divorce.
Johnson got his first media exposure in the late ’90s as the face of Louisiana’s marriage-covenant law. While a law student, Johnson helped draft the 1997 Family Research Council–backed law creating an option for couples to sign a “covenant” that requires counseling and several years of separation prior to a divorce. Johnson and his wife, Kelly, opted for a covenant marriage when they wed in 1999.

“My wife and I both come from traditional Christian households,” he told ABC News in 2005. “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.”

The Johnsons are still together and host a podcast called Truth Be Told, in which they “present thoughtful analysis of hot topics and current events from a Christian perspective.”

14. He blamed post-Katrina looting on America turning away from God.
After Hurricane Katrina, Johnson took a break from railing against the evils of homosexuality in his local paper and wrote an op-ed blaming the looting that happened after Hurricane Katrina on atheists, legalized gambling, and then–Lousiana governor Kathleen Blanco’s being “a nurturer rather than a firm, decisive leader.”

“The Bible teaches that man has an inherently sinful nature, capable of all kinds of evil,” Johnson wrote. “What we are seeing is the natural by-product of a culture that increasingly denies God’s existence, makes excuses for immorality, and fosters a sense of entitlement and victim mentality amongst the poor.”

15. He doesn’t believe in the separation of church and state.
This shouldn’t come as a shock considering everything we’ve just learned. ABC News reports that during a podcast recorded in September 2022, Johnson referred to the “so-called separation of church and state” and said, “The founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around.”

“If anybody tries to convince you that your biblical beliefs or your religious viewpoint needs to be separated from public affairs, you should politely remind them to review their history and you should not back down,” he added.

BKR88 · Oct 29, 2023

gwb-trading said:
1. He masterminded Trump’s election coup.
More...

Trump won in a landslide. Anyone without a bias knows this is true.
***I'm neither D nor R. Eliminate the 2-party system.

gwb-trading said:
2. He’s the least-experienced House Speaker in 140 years.
More...

Good. One of the few in congress that's not 100 years old.

gwb-trading said:
3. He worked for the conservative legal group behind the case that ended Roe v. Wade.
More...

Good. Stop the murdering of babies.
Most disgusting thing humanity has done.

gwb-trading said:
4. He wants to ban abortion nationwide.
More...

Good. Stop the murdering of babies.

themickey · Oct 29, 2023

gwb-trading said:
What we are seeing is the natural by-product of a culture that increasingly denies God’s existence, makes excuses for immorality, and fosters a sense of entitlement and victim mentality amongst the poor.”
More...

Sounds like the Jews.
Anyhow Johnson can go ahead and praise not his real name Jesus, may as well praise the man on the moon.

Mercor · Oct 29, 2023

gwb-trading said:
15 Not-Fun Facts About Speaker Mike Johnson
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/house-speaker-mike-johnson-not-fun-facts.html

After an embarrassing 22-day stalemate, House Republicans finally found a guy they can all at least tolerate as Speaker: Mike Johnson. If you’d never heard of the Louisiana representative before this week, you’re not alone. Multiple Senate Republicans said they had no idea who he was: John Cornyn described him as “pretty anonymous,” and Susan Collins admitted she needed to Google him. Hours before his election on Wednesday, learning more about Johnson required some serious digging. At the time, Googling “Mike Johnson” brought up hits for a Bachelorette contestant, a retired NHL star, and the owner of a North Carolina Toyota dealership before the congressman appeared in the search, as the Washington Post reported.

Since then, journalists have been scrambling to learn more about who Speaker Johnson is and where he stands on key issues. The conclusion: Despite his Ned Flanders persona, he’s a pretty troubling dude! Unless, of course, you think the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, would love to see abortion outlawed nationwide, and don’t think same-sex marriage should be legal.

Here are some not very fun facts we’ve learned about the guy Republicans barely know, but decided to make leader of the House and second in line to the presidency.

1. He masterminded Trump’s election coup.
If you’ve learned one unsavory fact about Johnson in recent days, it’s probably that he was a key architect of Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election. As New York’s Jonathan Chait explained, Johnson’s work on this front is actually the “primary source of his leadership claim and the central reason he has managed to unify the party.” After publicly flirting with Trump’s voting-machine conspiracy theories, Johnson honed in on the idea that the widespread use of mail ballots during the pandemic gave the House GOP an opportunity to make Trump president. Chait wrote:

Leaning on his background as a constitutional lawyer, he crafted an argument that several states had improperly changed their voting rules in response to the pandemic, thus nullifying their results and allowing the Republican House to select the winner.

His case, stringing together a series of implausible legal claims, brought together many Republicans who were queasy at Trump’s wild lies with Trump’s strongest supporters. Johnson circulated his case to the party and reminded them that Trump “anxiously awaited” their support. As the New York Times explained in a deeply reported story last year, Johnson’s arguments had a singular influence. About three-quarters of Republicans supporting Trump’s election challenge, the Times noted, “relied on the arguments of a low-profile Louisiana congressman, Representative Mike Johnson, the most important architect of the Electoral College objections.”

But all this went down three years ago, so apparently we’re not allowed to talk about it anymore.

2. He’s the least-experienced House Speaker in 140 years.
After a short stint in the Louisiana state legislature, Johnson was elected to the U.S. House in 2016. He is in only his fourth term and has never served in a senior leadership position or even as a full committee chair prior to his election as Speaker, according to Politico. That makes him the least-experienced person elected to the top position since John G. Carlisle in 1883.

3. He worked for the conservative legal group behind the case that ended Roe v. Wade.
Before entering elected office, Johnson spent eight years working as a senior attorney and national spokesperson for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal group described by the New York Times as the “largest legal force of the religious right.” It is dedicated to outlawing abortion and curtailing the rights of LGBTQ+ people, among other causes. The ADF was behind the case that led to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade and has scored many other victories for the religious right in recent years, as The New Yorker reported:

In the past dozen years, its lawyers had won fourteen Supreme Court victories, including overturning Roe v. Wade; allowing employer-sponsored health insurance to exclude birth control; rolling back limits on government support for religious organizations; protecting the anonymity of donors to advocacy groups; blocking pandemic-related public-health rules; and establishing the right of a baker to refuse to make a cake for a same-sex wedding.

While working with the ADF, Johnson fought to shut down abortion clinics and defended Louisiana laws restricting abortion.

4. He wants to ban abortion nationwide.
Johnson has an A+ rating from the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. He has voted for a federal abortion ban and pushed legislation that would outlaw abortion nationwide. The New Republic reports:

Johnson has also co-sponsored at least three bills hoping to ban abortion at a nationwide level, including the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, the Protecting Pain-Capable Unborn Children From Late-Term Abortions Act, and the Heartbeat Protection Act of 2021, all of which carry criminal penalties of up to five years in prison for physicians who perform abortions.

5. He blamed abortion for school shootings.
Johnson made this bizarre argument during an interview with New York’s Irin Carmon in 2015 when he was still working for the ADF.

“Many women use abortion as a form of birth control, you know, in certain segments of society, and it’s just shocking and sad, but this is where we are,” he said. “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.”

6. He also blamed abortion for Social Security and Medicare cuts.
While serving as chair of the Republican Study Committee from 2019 to 2021, Johnson proposed trillions of dollars in cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. He said these cuts wouldn’t be necessary if forced birth were the law of the land.

“Roe v. Wade gave constitutional cover to the elective killing of unborn children in America,” Johnson said. “You think about the implications of that on the economy; we’re all struggling here to cover the bases of Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and all the rest. If we had all those able-bodied workers in the economy, we wouldn’t be going upside down and toppling over like this.”

7. He blamed mass shootings on the teaching of evolution.
Of course, abortion doesn’t cause mass shootings alone; the process of evolution is also a culprit. In a sermon he delivered at Christian Center of Shreveport in 2016, Johnson claimed the United States was founded as a Christian nation but had gotten off track in recent years with the introduction of things like “no-fault divorce laws,” “legalized abortion,” and the teaching of evolution, per the MeidasTouch PAC.

Johnson then explained why he thinks this led to mass shootings:

“And 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 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.”

8. He fought to make taxpayers fund a Noah’s Ark theme park.
Johnson has close ties to the Evangelical “young-Earth creationist” movement, which holds that Earth is only about 6,000 years old and that early humans coexisted with dinosaurs.

In 2015, Johnson represented the Ark Encounter creationist theme park, which features dinosaurs riding on a life-size Noah’s Ark, in its successful legal battle to secure $18 million in tax subsidies from the state of Kentucky. According to HuffPost, Johnson has described himself as a “dear friend” of Ken Ham, founder of the group Answers in Genesis, which is behind both the Noah’s Ark theme park and the Creation Museum.

“The Ark Encounter is one way to bring people to this recognition of the truth, that what we read in the Bible are actual historical events,” Johnson said in a 2021 interview with Ham.

Johnson has yet to be questioned about his personal views regarding the origins of human life and the age of the planet.

9. He fought to ban same-sex marriage in Louisiana.
While serving as senior counsel for the ADF, Johnson went before the Louisiana Supreme Court in 2004 and 2014 to defend a statewide ban on gay marriage. ABC News reports that around the same time, Johnson also “filed suit against a New Orleans law that provided benefits to same-sex partners of city employees.” A state appellate court upheld the benefits.

While advocating against the New Orleans law, Johnson argued that the path from supporting gay rights to allowing pedophilia is a slippery slope.

“When you tear down the taboos, the doors open up for everything. That’s the danger,” Johnson said. “We are not trying to tie homosexuality to pedophilia, but when you tear down one barrier, others fall … Let’s stop here and draw the line here because then it leads to sexual anarchy.”

10. He led an anti-gay campus movement.
In the early aughts, far-right Christian groups responded to nationwide Day of Silence protests, in which students on college campuses remained silent all day to highlight anti-gay discrimination, by organizing “Day of Truth” counterprotests. This effort, which involved conservatives handing out pamphlets on the evils of homosexuality, was spearheaded by Johnson and the ADF.

“If the other side is going to advance their point of view,” Johnson told the Harvard Crimson in 2005, “it’s only fair for the Christian perspective to present their view, too.”

11. He wrote a lot of homophobic op-eds.
Throughout his time working with the ADF, Johnson wrote multiple editorials that have been unearthed by CNN. In these op-eds, he argued for the criminalization of gay sex and said legalizing same-sex marriage would lead to America’s doom.

In response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which invalidated laws against sodomy, Johnson wrote an editorial in his local Shreveport, Louisiana, paper arguing that “States have many legitimate grounds to proscribe same-sex deviate sexual intercourse.” He also said constitutional bans on discrimination don’t apply to gay people as “all are capable of changing their abnormal lifestyles.”

In other pieces that ran in the same Louisiana paper, Johnson called homosexuality an “inherently unnatural” and “dangerous lifestyle.” He also wrote, “Your race, creed, and sex are what you are, while homosexuality and cross-dressing are things you do. This is a free country, but we don’t give special protections for every person’s bizarre choices.”

12. He introduced a national version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
Americans’ attitudes toward gay marriage have evolved rapidly in the past few decades, and plenty of politicians have made remarks about homosexuality that they now regret. But Johnson didn’t leave his anti-gay stances in the early aughts.

Late last year, Johnson voted against a bill codifying same-sex and interracial marriages (he was joined by all but 39 Republicans).

Around the same time, Johnson introduced a bill that critics described as a federal version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which never got a floor vote. The Stop the Sexualization of Children Act would have blocked the use of federal money to “develop, implement, facilitate, or fund any sexually oriented program, event, or literature” for kids under 10. Sexually oriented was loosely defined: As NPR noted, “The language in the proposed legislation lumps together topics of sexual orientation and gender identity, with sexual content such as pornography and stripping.”

13. He was an advocate for “covenant marriage,” which makes it harder to divorce.
Johnson got his first media exposure in the late ’90s as the face of Louisiana’s marriage-covenant law. While a law student, Johnson helped draft the 1997 Family Research Council–backed law creating an option for couples to sign a “covenant” that requires counseling and several years of separation prior to a divorce. Johnson and his wife, Kelly, opted for a covenant marriage when they wed in 1999.

“My wife and I both come from traditional Christian households,” he told ABC News in 2005. “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.”

The Johnsons are still together and host a podcast called Truth Be Told, in which they “present thoughtful analysis of hot topics and current events from a Christian perspective.”

14. He blamed post-Katrina looting on America turning away from God.
After Hurricane Katrina, Johnson took a break from railing against the evils of homosexuality in his local paper and wrote an op-ed blaming the looting that happened after Hurricane Katrina on atheists, legalized gambling, and then–Lousiana governor Kathleen Blanco’s being “a nurturer rather than a firm, decisive leader.”

“The Bible teaches that man has an inherently sinful nature, capable of all kinds of evil,” Johnson wrote. “What we are seeing is the natural by-product of a culture that increasingly denies God’s existence, makes excuses for immorality, and fosters a sense of entitlement and victim mentality amongst the poor.”

15. He doesn’t believe in the separation of church and state.
This shouldn’t come as a shock considering everything we’ve just learned. ABC News reports that during a podcast recorded in September 2022, Johnson referred to the “so-called separation of church and state” and said, “The founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around.”

“If anybody tries to convince you that your biblical beliefs or your religious viewpoint needs to be separated from public affairs, you should politely remind them to review their history and you should not back down,” he added.
More...

We now need to put up with another daily negative post
Did you add Speaker Johnson to your daily re-post list.
You did Gaetz for several years. Now you have your daily DeSantis post. Lets include Johnson.
It will be a daily article, never a positive article, always negative somewhat personal attack against character...You are part of the Leftist media machine

gwb-trading · Oct 29, 2023

Mike Johnson's wife is a wack-a-doodle as well...

Mike Johnson's Wife Runs Counseling Service That Compares Being Gay To Bestiality, Incest
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mike...-bestiality-incest_n_653abfb6e4b00110fef0462e

Bugenhagen · Oct 29, 2023

Mercor said:
are part of the Leftist media machine
More...

Oh he really is not. He is a very odd man who has for years in addition to ET, published various personal blogs. One can only conjecture he believes he has a larger audience than he does. You boring older guys need to do more actual stuff. Wear goggles mind.

gwb-trading · Oct 31, 2023

So what is Mike Johnson going to do about disciplining House members including those in his own party? At minimum Johnson should expel Santos if he has any backbone seeing that it is GOP members from his own state demanding that Santos be sent packing. However I think we are quickly going to find out that Johnson has no backbone.

Santos, Tlaib, Greene: House looks to police its own members
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/...greene-house-looks-to-police-its-own-members/

Newly minted Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is facing a three-pronged test in his first full week as the House’s top lawmaker as members of both parties look to take disciplinary action against their political opponents.

The three resolutions up for a vote this week — on expelling Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) and censuring Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — will put a spotlight on Johnson’s ability to manage the fractious GOP conference and steer the entire chamber after a blistering three-week fight that ended with him clinching the gavel.

Johnson’s predicament is not one of his own making. Lawmakers moved to force votes on the expulsion and censure resolutions last week, giving leadership no choice but to act on the measures within two legislative days.

That timetable could come to a head as early as Wednesday, when the House reconvenes, putting Johnson on the spot as he decides how to proceed with the trio of resolutions.

Santos is facing a vote on his expulsion days after he was arraigned on 10 federal charges of fraudulently inflating his campaign finance reports and charging his donors’ credit cards without authorization, bringing his total number of charges to 23. He has pleaded not guilty.

Greene moved to censure Tlaib, the first woman of Palestinian descent to serve in Congress, accusing her of “antisemitic activity” and “sympathizing with terrorist organizations.” And in a tit-for-tat move, Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) filed a resolution to censure Greene that lists roughly 40 controversial comments the firebrand congresswoman has made in the past.

Johnson has three options for each resolution. He can bring the measures themselves up for a vote — majority support is needed to adopt the censure resolutions, and a two-thirds vote is needed for the expulsion measure — or he could move to send the measures to committee or table them, effectively killing the resolutions.

The Speaker has not revealed his plans.

“We’ve got a lot of discussions this week, we’ll see what happens,” Johnson told reporters Monday when asked if he will allow the disciplinary measures to come to the floor for a vote, and if he is trying to talk any lawmakers off the ledge with their resolutions.

Another attempt at expelling Santos
By far the most consequential of the three measures is a resolution to expel Santos, the freshman lawmaker who is facing mounting legal trouble. He is set to go to trial in September 2024.

A group of New York Republicans moved to force a vote on Santos’s ouster last week, setting the stage for the chamber to weigh in on his expulsion for the second time this year.

In May, former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) motioned to refer a Democratic-led Santos expulsion resolution to the Ethics Committee, which was successful. The outcome, however, was largely regarded as useless because the panel had been investigating the congressman for months.

Johnson is faced with the same decision.

Asked Monday what his plans are for the resolution, Johnson replied, “We’ll see.” But during an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity last week, the new Speaker suggested he would move to avoid a vote on the resolution.

“George Santos is due due process, right,” he said. “My understanding is I think he’s appearing in a federal court tomorrow. And we have to allow due process to play itself out. That’s what our system of justice is for. He’s not convicted, he’s charged. And so if we’re gonna expel people from Congress just because they’re charged with a crime, then — you know, or accused — that’s a problem.”

Santos’s continued service in the House represents a double-edged sword of sorts for Johnson, as it did for McCarthy when he was Speaker.

On one hand, the embattled congressman has been a constant thorn in the side of leadership, with top lawmakers having to respond to every twist of Santos’s legal saga. But on the other hand, Santos has provided the House GOP conference with a reliable vote in their slim majority, and he has helped the group deliver key legislative wins throughout this Congress.

House Republicans currently have a four-seat majority in the chamber; if Santos is expelled, that would shrink to a three-person edge.

“Here’s the reality, Sean, we have a four-seat majority in the House,” Johnson said. “It is possible that that number may be reduced even more in the coming weeks and months. And so we’ll have what may be the most razor-thin majority in the history of the Congress. We have no margin for error.”

Even if Johnson does move to table or refer the Santos resolution to a committee — which would shield lawmakers from having to weigh in on the matter directly — the effort could be defeated.

The bloc of New York Republicans suggested they would vote against delaying a vote on the resolution, a sign that the GOP conference will not remain united as it did in May. With Democrats expected to vote against any stall tactics, the GOP support could be enough to defeat them.

“I don’t think a motion to table, if there is one, will be successful,” Rep. Nick LaLota (R-N.Y.), a co-sponsor of the resolution, told reporters last week.

“I think that there is an opportunity for it to pass,” Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, the lead sponsor, said of the resolution during an interview on NewsNation’s “The Hill” on Monday.

Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) said the recent guilty plea from Nancy Marks, Santos’s former campaign treasurer, could move some of his colleagues. Marks pleaded guilty to conspiring with the then-candidate to fraudulently inflate his campaign finance reports.

Lawler said Marks’s guilty plea has confirmed “significant details,” later saying “you have now a conviction in this case that very clearly lays out what he did and how he did it.”

Tit-for-tat censures
Johnson will also have to make a decision on measures to censure Tlaib and Greene — which is fueling a tit-for-tat atmosphere on Capitol Hill.

Greene first moved to force a vote on her resolution to censure Tlaib last week, which includes comments Tlaib made after the surprise attack by Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group, on Israel earlier this month.

The resolution also accuses Tlaib of “leading an insurrection at the United States Capitol Complex” after a protest in a Capitol office building last month in support of an Israel-Hamas cease-fire that was organized by Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow. Tlaib, however, was not present at the protest, according to a source familiar with the matter, but she did participate in a separate rally that called for a cease-fire.

The Tlaib vote could be a tricky one for House Democrats who have criticized Tlaib for some of her comments about the Israel-Hamas conflict. They haven’t said how they intend to vote. But the wording of the resolution and the animosity many of them have toward Greene may also factor into their decisions.

Tlaib said the measure was an “unhinged resolution” and “deeply Islamophobic and attacks peaceful Jewish anti-war advocates.”

Shortly after Greene filed her resolution, Balint moved to force a vote on censuring the Georgia Republican, fast-tracking her measure that includes controversial remarks Greene made in the past — some even before coming to Congress — with the most recent being her presentation at a House hearing that included nude images of Hunter Biden.

Balint suggested that she was forcing a vote on her resolution penalizing Greene as a response to the Georgia Republican’s move on the Tlaib measure — while, at the same time, knocking Johnson.

“The fact that on the very first day of his leadership, he lets Marjorie Taylor Greene bring to the floor a resolution that is riddled with lies and falsehoods on my colleague, it won’t stand,” she told reporters. “This woman, Marjorie Taylor Greene, it seems to be her only purpose is to sic Americans after other Americans, to fan more hatred, to fan more dissension and fear-mongering, and we have got to have a bottom here.”

Frederick Foresight · Oct 31, 2023

gwb-trading said:
15 Not-Fun Facts About Speaker Mike Johnson
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/house-speaker-mike-johnson-not-fun-facts.html

After an embarrassing 22-day stalemate, House Republicans finally found a guy they can all at least tolerate as Speaker: Mike Johnson. If you’d never heard of the Louisiana representative before this week, you’re not alone. Multiple Senate Republicans said they had no idea who he was: John Cornyn described him as “pretty anonymous,” and Susan Collins admitted she needed to Google him. Hours before his election on Wednesday, learning more about Johnson required some serious digging. At the time, Googling “Mike Johnson” brought up hits for a Bachelorette contestant, a retired NHL star, and the owner of a North Carolina Toyota dealership before the congressman appeared in the search, as the Washington Post reported.

Since then, journalists have been scrambling to learn more about who Speaker Johnson is and where he stands on key issues. The conclusion: Despite his Ned Flanders persona, he’s a pretty troubling dude! Unless, of course, you think the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, would love to see abortion outlawed nationwide, and don’t think same-sex marriage should be legal.

Here are some not very fun facts we’ve learned about the guy Republicans barely know, but decided to make leader of the House and second in line to the presidency.

1. He masterminded Trump’s election coup.
If you’ve learned one unsavory fact about Johnson in recent days, it’s probably that he was a key architect of Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election. As New York’s Jonathan Chait explained, Johnson’s work on this front is actually the “primary source of his leadership claim and the central reason he has managed to unify the party.” After publicly flirting with Trump’s voting-machine conspiracy theories, Johnson honed in on the idea that the widespread use of mail ballots during the pandemic gave the House GOP an opportunity to make Trump president. Chait wrote:

Leaning on his background as a constitutional lawyer, he crafted an argument that several states had improperly changed their voting rules in response to the pandemic, thus nullifying their results and allowing the Republican House to select the winner.

His case, stringing together a series of implausible legal claims, brought together many Republicans who were queasy at Trump’s wild lies with Trump’s strongest supporters. Johnson circulated his case to the party and reminded them that Trump “anxiously awaited” their support. As the New York Times explained in a deeply reported story last year, Johnson’s arguments had a singular influence. About three-quarters of Republicans supporting Trump’s election challenge, the Times noted, “relied on the arguments of a low-profile Louisiana congressman, Representative Mike Johnson, the most important architect of the Electoral College objections.”

But all this went down three years ago, so apparently we’re not allowed to talk about it anymore.

2. He’s the least-experienced House Speaker in 140 years.
After a short stint in the Louisiana state legislature, Johnson was elected to the U.S. House in 2016. He is in only his fourth term and has never served in a senior leadership position or even as a full committee chair prior to his election as Speaker, according to Politico. That makes him the least-experienced person elected to the top position since John G. Carlisle in 1883.

3. He worked for the conservative legal group behind the case that ended Roe v. Wade.
Before entering elected office, Johnson spent eight years working as a senior attorney and national spokesperson for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal group described by the New York Times as the “largest legal force of the religious right.” It is dedicated to outlawing abortion and curtailing the rights of LGBTQ+ people, among other causes. The ADF was behind the case that led to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade and has scored many other victories for the religious right in recent years, as The New Yorker reported:

In the past dozen years, its lawyers had won fourteen Supreme Court victories, including overturning Roe v. Wade; allowing employer-sponsored health insurance to exclude birth control; rolling back limits on government support for religious organizations; protecting the anonymity of donors to advocacy groups; blocking pandemic-related public-health rules; and establishing the right of a baker to refuse to make a cake for a same-sex wedding.

While working with the ADF, Johnson fought to shut down abortion clinics and defended Louisiana laws restricting abortion.

4. He wants to ban abortion nationwide.
Johnson has an A+ rating from the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. He has voted for a federal abortion ban and pushed legislation that would outlaw abortion nationwide. The New Republic reports:

Johnson has also co-sponsored at least three bills hoping to ban abortion at a nationwide level, including the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, the Protecting Pain-Capable Unborn Children From Late-Term Abortions Act, and the Heartbeat Protection Act of 2021, all of which carry criminal penalties of up to five years in prison for physicians who perform abortions.

5. He blamed abortion for school shootings.
Johnson made this bizarre argument during an interview with New York’s Irin Carmon in 2015 when he was still working for the ADF.

“Many women use abortion as a form of birth control, you know, in certain segments of society, and it’s just shocking and sad, but this is where we are,” he said. “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.”

6. He also blamed abortion for Social Security and Medicare cuts.
While serving as chair of the Republican Study Committee from 2019 to 2021, Johnson proposed trillions of dollars in cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. He said these cuts wouldn’t be necessary if forced birth were the law of the land.

“Roe v. Wade gave constitutional cover to the elective killing of unborn children in America,” Johnson said. “You think about the implications of that on the economy; we’re all struggling here to cover the bases of Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and all the rest. If we had all those able-bodied workers in the economy, we wouldn’t be going upside down and toppling over like this.”

7. He blamed mass shootings on the teaching of evolution.
Of course, abortion doesn’t cause mass shootings alone; the process of evolution is also a culprit. In a sermon he delivered at Christian Center of Shreveport in 2016, Johnson claimed the United States was founded as a Christian nation but had gotten off track in recent years with the introduction of things like “no-fault divorce laws,” “legalized abortion,” and the teaching of evolution, per the MeidasTouch PAC.

Johnson then explained why he thinks this led to mass shootings:

“And 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 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.”

8. He fought to make taxpayers fund a Noah’s Ark theme park.
Johnson has close ties to the Evangelical “young-Earth creationist” movement, which holds that Earth is only about 6,000 years old and that early humans coexisted with dinosaurs.

In 2015, Johnson represented the Ark Encounter creationist theme park, which features dinosaurs riding on a life-size Noah’s Ark, in its successful legal battle to secure $18 million in tax subsidies from the state of Kentucky. According to HuffPost, Johnson has described himself as a “dear friend” of Ken Ham, founder of the group Answers in Genesis, which is behind both the Noah’s Ark theme park and the Creation Museum.

“The Ark Encounter is one way to bring people to this recognition of the truth, that what we read in the Bible are actual historical events,” Johnson said in a 2021 interview with Ham.

Johnson has yet to be questioned about his personal views regarding the origins of human life and the age of the planet.

9. He fought to ban same-sex marriage in Louisiana.
While serving as senior counsel for the ADF, Johnson went before the Louisiana Supreme Court in 2004 and 2014 to defend a statewide ban on gay marriage. ABC News reports that around the same time, Johnson also “filed suit against a New Orleans law that provided benefits to same-sex partners of city employees.” A state appellate court upheld the benefits.

While advocating against the New Orleans law, Johnson argued that the path from supporting gay rights to allowing pedophilia is a slippery slope.

“When you tear down the taboos, the doors open up for everything. That’s the danger,” Johnson said. “We are not trying to tie homosexuality to pedophilia, but when you tear down one barrier, others fall … Let’s stop here and draw the line here because then it leads to sexual anarchy.”

10. He led an anti-gay campus movement.
In the early aughts, far-right Christian groups responded to nationwide Day of Silence protests, in which students on college campuses remained silent all day to highlight anti-gay discrimination, by organizing “Day of Truth” counterprotests. This effort, which involved conservatives handing out pamphlets on the evils of homosexuality, was spearheaded by Johnson and the ADF.

“If the other side is going to advance their point of view,” Johnson told the Harvard Crimson in 2005, “it’s only fair for the Christian perspective to present their view, too.”

11. He wrote a lot of homophobic op-eds.
Throughout his time working with the ADF, Johnson wrote multiple editorials that have been unearthed by CNN. In these op-eds, he argued for the criminalization of gay sex and said legalizing same-sex marriage would lead to America’s doom.

In response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which invalidated laws against sodomy, Johnson wrote an editorial in his local Shreveport, Louisiana, paper arguing that “States have many legitimate grounds to proscribe same-sex deviate sexual intercourse.” He also said constitutional bans on discrimination don’t apply to gay people as “all are capable of changing their abnormal lifestyles.”

In other pieces that ran in the same Louisiana paper, Johnson called homosexuality an “inherently unnatural” and “dangerous lifestyle.” He also wrote, “Your race, creed, and sex are what you are, while homosexuality and cross-dressing are things you do. This is a free country, but we don’t give special protections for every person’s bizarre choices.”

12. He introduced a national version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
Americans’ attitudes toward gay marriage have evolved rapidly in the past few decades, and plenty of politicians have made remarks about homosexuality that they now regret. But Johnson didn’t leave his anti-gay stances in the early aughts.

Late last year, Johnson voted against a bill codifying same-sex and interracial marriages (he was joined by all but 39 Republicans).

Around the same time, Johnson introduced a bill that critics described as a federal version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which never got a floor vote. The Stop the Sexualization of Children Act would have blocked the use of federal money to “develop, implement, facilitate, or fund any sexually oriented program, event, or literature” for kids under 10. Sexually oriented was loosely defined: As NPR noted, “The language in the proposed legislation lumps together topics of sexual orientation and gender identity, with sexual content such as pornography and stripping.”

13. He was an advocate for “covenant marriage,” which makes it harder to divorce.
Johnson got his first media exposure in the late ’90s as the face of Louisiana’s marriage-covenant law. While a law student, Johnson helped draft the 1997 Family Research Council–backed law creating an option for couples to sign a “covenant” that requires counseling and several years of separation prior to a divorce. Johnson and his wife, Kelly, opted for a covenant marriage when they wed in 1999.

“My wife and I both come from traditional Christian households,” he told ABC News in 2005. “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.”

The Johnsons are still together and host a podcast called Truth Be Told, in which they “present thoughtful analysis of hot topics and current events from a Christian perspective.”

14. He blamed post-Katrina looting on America turning away from God.
After Hurricane Katrina, Johnson took a break from railing against the evils of homosexuality in his local paper and wrote an op-ed blaming the looting that happened after Hurricane Katrina on atheists, legalized gambling, and then–Lousiana governor Kathleen Blanco’s being “a nurturer rather than a firm, decisive leader.”

“The Bible teaches that man has an inherently sinful nature, capable of all kinds of evil,” Johnson wrote. “What we are seeing is the natural by-product of a culture that increasingly denies God’s existence, makes excuses for immorality, and fosters a sense of entitlement and victim mentality amongst the poor.”

15. He doesn’t believe in the separation of church and state.
This shouldn’t come as a shock considering everything we’ve just learned. ABC News reports that during a podcast recorded in September 2022, Johnson referred to the “so-called separation of church and state” and said, “The founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around.”

“If anybody tries to convince you that your biblical beliefs or your religious viewpoint needs to be separated from public affairs, you should politely remind them to review their history and you should not back down,” he added.
More...

The guy's a loon. A dangerous one.

gwb-trading · Oct 31, 2023

Let's take a look at the big money corporate backers of Mike Johnson. You can either buy more from them or boycott them. Your choice.

Speaker Mike Johnson's corporate backers
https://popular.info/p/speaker-mike-johnsons-corporate-backers

murray t turtle · Oct 31, 2023

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gwb-trading said:
Let's take a look at the big money corporate backers of Mike Johnson. You can either buy more from them or boycott them. Your choice.

Speaker Mike Johnson's corporate backers
https://popular.info/p/speaker-mike-johnsons-corporate-backers
More...

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WITH all due respect, looks like you got a problem with his God/Bible .
Really GWB, you cant figure out why a disrespect for human life in the womb could spill over in to other areas?? Another clue was when they took out the 10 commandments out of school, who would have figured crime goes UP ??
Some people cant find God. for the same reason a thief cant find a policemanThanks