New “Speaker of the House” Mike Johnson is a far right extremist – and he won’t be able to hide from his record

The difficulty in doing battle with Speaker Kevin McCarthy was that it was hard to get things to stick to him. He was corrupt to the core, but he came off as folksy and harmless in TV interviews in the eyes of voters who didn’t know any better. And while McCarthy has always emboldened far right extremism, he’s managed to keep his own personal legislative record free from it. So it’s been difficult to portray him as a jackass or an extremist, even though he’s both.

This brings us to new Speaker Mike Johnson. House Republicans chose him specifically because he’s a nobody with no existing scandals hanging over him (as opposed to someone like Jim Jordan, who’s been a scandal a minute for years). But even though most of the public has no idea who Mike Johnson even is, his track record speaks for itself – very loudly.

Mike Johnson has consistently taken the most extreme anti-abortion positions imaginable. He’s even argued that abortion at any week is “murder.” Johnson is on record as wanting to cut Social Security and kill the Affordable Care Act. Johnson opposes gay marriage. Mike Johnson is also a 2020 election denier who helped lead the charge in trying to convince the House not to certify President Biden’s victory.

Mike Johnson is basically just Jim Jordan without the personal scandals hanging over him. But you know how these things go. Far right politicians nearly always end up having loads of personal scandals and/or corruption scandals, because far right political stances are typically just cover for corrupt behavior. Whatever scandals Johnson has been hiding in his basement, the media will dig those scandals up now that he’s Speaker of the House.

But even before we get to Johnson’s inevitable personal scandals and corruption scandals, he’s already given us a treasure trove of far right extremist stances and loony election-denying behavior to use against him. Our messaging should be that Mike Johnson is a far right extremist, and that his rise to Speaker is proof that the entire Republican House is extremist in nature – including the House Republicans running in moderate toss-up districts in 2024.

In that sense Mike Johnson is something of a gift to us – we just have to put it to good use against the specific House Republicans who can be defeated in 2024. If we flip those toss-up seats, the Democrats will take the majority in 2024, and Hakeem Jeffries will become Speaker.