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“MAGA Mike” received. Which implies, alas, so did Rep. Matt Gaetz.
For Gaetz, the smarmy Trump Mini-Me from Florida, and his fellow Republican nihilists — those Rep. Kevin McCarthy dubbed “the Loopy 8s” after they compelled his firing as Home speaker three weeks in the past and left Congress in chaos — the Home’s shock election of right-wing Rep. Mike Johnson, a previously obscure Louisianian (regardless of his big role working to overturn former President Donald Trump’s defeat), amounted to candy, candy vindication.
Right here was Gaetz, chortling on like-minded Steve Bannon’s “Warfare Room” podcast Wednesday morning, in anticipation of Johnson’s election: “For those who don’t suppose that shifting from Kevin McCarthy to MAGA Mike Johnson exhibits the ascendance of this motion and the place the ability within the Republican Celebration actually lies, then you definately’re not paying consideration.”
Gaetz isn’t improper about that.
McCarthy in his nine-month reign mostly pandered to the tradition warriors and election deniers in his Home Republican majority, ever afraid of the coup that finally came after he twice diverged from the extremist path to really govern — compromising with the Senate and White Home first to keep away from a debt default after which a authorities shutdown. However to the right-wingers, the shape-shifting McCarthy was all the time a poser. (Once more, they weren’t improper.)
At instances over the past 22 days, as Republicans proved too riven to select a brand new chief, Gaetz and his far-right cohorts had motive to fret that their coup would lead to little change at finest, and, at worst, that it’d backfire.
The Home rejected the best’s favourite to switch McCarthy, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan. Two different Republican nominees, Majority Chief Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota, had been within the McCarthy mildew; their candidacies fizzled for lack of assist (and, in Emmer’s case, from Trump’s drive-by shooting). The humiliating deadlock gave rise to speak of some bipartisan association to run the Home — MAGA’s worst nightmare.
Gaetz may in all probability hear what his Home Republican enemies, and there are numerous, would say: “Are you content now?”
He’s after all very blissful now that an exhausted and totally embarrassed Republican caucus united to decide on Johnson, solely in his fourth Home time period, to be speaker and second in line to the presidency. Gaetz and Johnson differ big-time in type: Gaetz is in-your-face, Johnson so amiable and nonconfrontational that he’s “buddy to many and an enemy to none,” as Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York advised the Home in nominating Johnson. Therefore his unlikely elevation.
However in substance, Johnson is little totally different from Gaetz and his ilk. Johnson has described his relationship with Jordan, mentor to the far proper, as “like Batman and Robin.” However Johnson’s politics are extra infused with the conservative religiosity he demonstrated in his remarks accepting the speakership. He advised the Home of his absent spouse, “She’s spent the final couple of weeks on her knees in prayer to the Lord. And, um, she’s a bit worn out.”
Johnson’s opposition to abortion — he favors a nationwide ban — and to same-sex marriage and LGBTQ+ rights and protections is effectively documented in his pre-Congress work as an legal professional for the socially conservative Alliance Defending Freedom. After the Dobbs resolution overturned the constitutional proper to an abortion, Johnson suggested that now girls would produce extra “able-bodied staff,” whose payroll tax contributions would assist save Medicare and Social Safety.
CNN reported on editorials Johnson wrote in his hometown Shreveport, La., paper, by which he known as homosexuality “inherently unnatural” and a “harmful life-style” that in the end may finish “the whole democratic system.” He claimed in 2004, “Specialists undertaking that gay marriage is the darkish harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that would doom even the strongest republic.”
Then there’s his behind-the-scenes authorized work after the 2020 presidential election to problem electoral votes in pro-Biden states. The New York Instances, after an investigation of Republicans’ postelection machinations, called Johnson “an important architect of the Electoral Faculty objections.” He enlisted most of his fellow Home Republicans in assist of a short to the Supreme Courtroom, but the justices declined to take the underlying case.
Late Monday night time after his nomination as speaker, Johnson joined different Republicans surrounding him in laughing at a reporter who’d had the temerity to ask about his “effort to overturn the 2020 election outcomes.” At his facet, Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina yelled “Shut up! Shut up!” Johnson, ever smiling, turned to a different reporter for a query.
He’s certainly the “smiling seditionist,” as longtime Republican strategist Mike Murphy posted on X. However he’s acquired loads of firm within the Home he now leads. Within the run-up to the Home vote on Johnson, Democratic Rep. Pete Aguilar of California famous Johnson’s position in making an attempt to overturn a free and truthful election. A Republican yelled out, “Rattling proper!”
So, sure, Gaetz is celebrating; his dethroning of McCarthy led to the seating of a fellow MAGAt. However Democrats are feeling celebratory, too.
Within the 2022 midterm elections, two points — abortion rights and democracy safety — mobilized many citizens to elect extra Democrats and much fewer Republicans than each events anticipated. Democrats are relying on the identical points to work for them in 2024.
And with Johnson on the improper facet of each so far as most Individuals are involved, search for Democrats to make MAGA Mike an albatross round Home Republicans in swing districts. As one known as out to a susceptible Republican after he voted for Johnson, “Bye-bye!”
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