Today, Explained - Speaker Johnson’s first test

Episode Date: November 16, 2023

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, infamous election denier, moved to the middle to make a budget deal with Democrats. But he promised the real fight is still to come. This episode was produced by Siona Peterous, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by David Herman, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's been a heck of a week for Republicans in the United States Congress. What? An Oklahoma senator challenged the president of the Teamsters to a fight. You want to do it now? I'd love to do it right now. Well, stand your butt up then. You stand your butt up. Oh, hold on.

Oh, stop it. Is that your solution? No, no, sit down. Sit down. No, no, you're a United States senator. The chair of the oversight committee made fun of a Democrat's blue suit. You look like a smurf here, just going around and all that. The former speaker allegedly assaulted one of his colleagues who voted to oust him.

I got elbowed in the back, and it kind of caught me off guard because it was a clean shot to the kidneys. And I turned back, and there was Kevin. And that was just Tuesday. All that madness overshadowed the craziest thing that happened on the Hill this week. The new speaker averted a government shutdown by doing the same thing that got Kevin fired. He worked with Democrats. Why that's not going to get Mike Johnson fired, coming up on Today Explained. Bet MGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas.

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The house will be in order. The clerk may call the roll. Today, yay. Explained, yay. Olivia Beavers covers House Republicans for Politico, which meant this week, with the government shutdown once again looming over the nation, was a bit of a gamble. I was making bets, and when you started seeing Democrats starting to say, hey, we're interested, the Senate and House Democrats were not taking the same tone as the White House, which was basically slamming it as some sort of radical extremist Republican plan initially, then I was like, oh, I think we might have our Christmas

holiday break saved. Christmas was saved by the devoutly Christian new Speaker of the House, Shreveport, Louisiana's Mike Johnson. People are still Googling him, definitely. I've known him for quite a while, I think since I began covering the Hill in 2018. But he kind of did come out of nowhere when we were watching the leadership races happening to replace Kevin McCarthy. Because first you had the number two, and then he was, Steve Scalise wasn't able to get in.

He was blocked. I just shared with my colleagues that I'm withdrawing my name as a candidate for the Speaker-designate. And then you had Jim Jordan, who was sort of the darling of the right, and he was blocked. Look, there's been multiple rounds of votes for speaker before. We all know that. I

just know that we need to get a speaker as soon as possible so we can get to work for the American people. And then you had Tom Emmer, the number three top House Republican, and he was blocked. I said, there's only one person that can do it all the way. You know who that is? Jesus Christ. Jesus came down and said, I want to be speaker. He would do it. So then Mike Johnson is in this very crowded field to run again. A few words of gratitude. I want to thank Leader Jeffries.

I do look forward to working with you on behalf of the American people. I know we see things from very different points of view. And he's someone who has maintained friendships across the Republican conference, but I wouldn't say like he has any particularly close friends. So when he was elected, I remember going up to members that I know quite well saying, who's his best friend? Who is he always hanging out with? I don't, usually this is information I know, but I don't know this. And they go, I don't know either. I've been asking around because that's how the power structure usually is formed. So he has a lot of friendships from the Republican Study Committee, which is basically the largest

Republican group on Capitol Hill. They come up with policy ideas and pitches, and he has friendships from that. And also you might remember his face from sort of pushing back against Democrats' first efforts to impeach Donald Trump in 2019, because he was one of the Republicans that was very much fighting against that. And you might not remember his face from being one of the behind-the-scenes guys trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Following the vote, ABC's Rachel Scott trying to ask the new nominee, Mike Johnson, if he still stands by his vote to overturn the 2020 election results. Johnson's supporters, including Congresswoman Virginia Foxx, telling Rachel to shut up. So we've got an election denier, Speaker of the House. Was this continuing resolution, this CR, his first big test? Or was there something that came before it?

No, this is certainly his first big test. And depending on who you ask, he's going to be getting a different scorecard. So Democrats are out there saying, look, we helped carry you across the line. We're glad you are willing to work with us. It's kind of a pretty big win for Democrats because they got what they wanted. So when Mike Johnson first released the plan, I think the first instinct was to be like, we don't like your idea. And then they realized they basically got what they were asking for, which was no cuts, no sort of surprise, what we call policy riders, where

they slip in conservative agenda items that Democrats would never go for. So then they started showing that they were on board. But if you talk to House conservatives, Chip Roy, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Warren Davidson, some of the people who Kevin McCarthy used to struggle with, but none of those three were part of his ouster, they were very much slamming it saying, how dare you continue Pelosi level spending we just kicked out a speaker for for basically doing the same thing Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Green said she will be voting no on this clean continuing resolution Warren Davidson Republican of Ohio also said he'll be voting against it adding quote disappointing is as polite as I can

muster and the Texas congressman Chip Chip Roy, posted on X, quote, my opposition to the clean CR just announced by the speaker to the House. GOP cannot be overstated, end quote. Right. That's what's kind of funny about this situation, right? Mike Johnson's victory here was what lost Kevin McCarthy his job. McCarthy tried to pass what we call we call it a clean CR, basically keeping the funding in line. And he did it with the help of Democrats. And that was the leaping off point for Matt Gaetz to try to trigger ousting him. Because all over America, Republicans think

that when you negotiated that debt limit deal, they took your lunch money. Now, if you do break it down, though, some of the eight, and I was having these discussions with McCarthy allies, some of them will point to other things that they were mad at and reason for them to vote to oust him. It sort of all came to a head with the government funding. McCarthy ended up ousted and Mike Johnson ended up with some mean tweets. What's he saying about why he's signing on to work with the Democrats in this moment? He's arguing that it puts them in a better position for negotiations down the line. So basically, this is essentially kicking the can down the road. He's claiming it gives them more leverage to negotiate on two fronts. One is continuing to fund the appropriation bills.

So they say, like, we're in a better position because we're not in a shutdown. And they are still going to be dealing with a whole separate issue that he did not include in the government funding bill, which is how to address the border, Ukraine and Israel. Okay. And do we know what's going to happen in those further negotiations about, say, Israel, Ukraine, the southern United States border? So there was this leadership press conference, and I tried to ask Mike Johnson about this on Tuesday. Essentially, I was asking if he was committed to passing some sort of supplemental bill that would fund Israel and potentially include Ukraine and border funding by the time of the short-term spending

bill deadline, which is January 19th or February 2nd, depending on what date you want to pick. And he wouldn't answer that question when I was basically running up to him at the end of the press conference asking him off the cameras. I also was trying to ask him if he would accept a Senate supplemental. So if they came back with their own plan tying in border and Ukraine money and whatnot. But I didn't quite get answers about that. But that's where we're trying to suss out where he is. Now, when he passed the Israel funding signature Inflation Reduction Act. So he was throwing some meat to his right wing.

And basically the Senate and the White House said they're not going to support it. So the Senate's going to come up with what it wants and repackage it and send it back. And so the negotiations begin. So he's kind of given us some hints about where he might want to go in the new year when spending relatively quickly comes up again. What do you think we should expect in the new year? Well, I actually think it's more complicated than that, because I think Mike Johnson's trying to figure out what kind of speaker he wants to be. And there's sort of this perspective among House Republicans, which is you can cater to the right, but then you're not going to govern. Or you can govern and you're going to piss off your right. And with the latest CR, he has pissed off his right. You know, we were talking to some of the Republicans and they basically said, we're giving you extra rope right now.

But don't take it for granted. If you are basically going to be like Kevin McCarthy, we might do the same thing to you that we did to him. What do you think this episode here has taught us about Mike Johnson, if anything? I think it's taught us that any GOP leader, no matter what their conservative record is, is probably going to be facing a kind of tarnished reputation at the end of this. There's not a great way to win in the way that McCarthy sort of learned. And it's more about survival and getting your wins where you can, but trying to also prevent your right wing from coming after you at the end of the day. And he's making quite aware that he's overwhelmed.

His argument to his members was, this was not a hand I picked. This was the hand I was dealt. And I'm trying to make it work, but this is not really how I would have handled it if I had, you know, had more runway. And when he was talking to reporters, he goes, I can't turn an aircraft carrier around overnight. I'm not a plane expert, but maybe you could. But that's basically the message he's giving publicly and privately, saying, I'm doing my best. And he's trying to figure it out. Olivia Beavers, reader at Politico.com. When we're back on today, explain where Speaker Mike Johnson might want to point the aircraft carrier. barrier. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a

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This deal is exclusive to listeners and available just in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions do apply. Today explained Sean Ramos' room. We wanted to find out more about Speaker Mike Johnson, but we didn't want to listen to all 69 episodes of his podcast, Truth Be Told, with Mike and Kelly Johnson, because, quite frankly, it sounds really bad, Niana. Mike Johnson, what a job, it sounds really bad. Mike and Kelly Johnson have been leading together on faith, family and freedom for nearly a quarter of a century. Few couples are trusted more. So he reached out to Spencer McNaughton instead. He teaches journalism at NYU with a focus on LGBTQ issues,

but he also produces and writes stuff, most recently a big piece for Rolling Stone about Mike Johnson. But it came to be about Mike in a sort of roundabout way. So it kind of happened by accident. I had been investigating a group, Alliance Defending Freedom, for about four months for Rolling Stone. And then a few weeks before we were set to publish, or a few days actually before we were set to publish, you know, Mike Johnson got elected to the House. And we found out that he actually worked for the ADF for nearly 10 years, nearly a decade in the early 2000s. And we realized immediately, you know, this had to be an integral part of the story because, you know, all of a sudden,

you have somebody who worked at this group that's designated an anti-LGBTQ hate organization by the Southern Poverty Law Center for nearly a decade, and now he's second in line to the president. Our listening audience now knows that Mike Johnson is a big election denier. We know that he's now second in line to the president. Our listening audience now knows that Mike Johnson is a big election denier. We know that he's now second in line to the presidency. What else is worth knowing about Mike Johnson? I think the number one thing for me that is worth knowing is how

extreme his views are on the LGBTQ community, right? While he was working at Alliance Defending Freedom in the early 2000s, he penned op-eds in local Louisiana newspapers that described homosexuality as sinful and destructive. He warned that if we legalize same-sex marriage, we're opening up a Pandora's box that will eventually allow pedophiles to marry people and will even allow humans to marry pets. And you know, this hasn't stopped either. After he left the Alliance Defending Freedom, he introduced a sweeping federal law that's essentially the don't say gay law that we remember DeSantis passed in Florida into law, where teachers in schools cannot teach anything related to sexual orientation or gender identity

in the classroom. And we're not talking about the ABCs of anal, okay? We're talking about books that might include two dads. Anything that's outside of the realm of heteronormativity, he wanted to ban at a national level. In addition to that, he has a long history of coming after women's reproductive rights. He's advocated and voiced support for legislation at the state level and at the national level that would, you know, rule back women's rights or, you know, at this moment in time, now that he's House Speaker, intensify, you know, the anti-abortion policies that are, you know,

now pervasive in the United States. Tell me more about this group that a lot of people might be hearing about for the first time, the ADF, the Alliance Defending Freedom. Exactly. They present themselves as a benevolent Christian legal organization. You know, they say that their mission is to protect religious freedom, right? And to protect the faith and the Christianity, this sort of thing. Together, we work to build a future in which the law affirms and protects religious freedom, free speech, the sanctity of life,

marriage, and the family. And sure, there are a few bills that do that, but really they're a monstrous legal juggernaut that's existed since 1994 that has rolled back LGBTQ rights, women's rights since its inception. Hi, I'm Erin Hawley, and I am so excited to talk to you today about the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. The decision today is a huge win for life and for the Constitution. The decision finally overruled- What people may or may not know is that this year, there's been over 501 anti-LGBTQ bills introduced in state legislatures, and 70 have passed into law. For the record, that's record shattering, right? That is more than any other year by far,

unprecedented, right? The ADF has their lawyers parachute into these states, into the courthouses to testify or voice support for these bills. These are bills that are don't say gay laws. These are bills that are, you know, banning, you know, what's known as life-saving health care for trans kids, you know? And the majority of these bills come after queer children. Should a school-aged girl or a grown woman be forced to give up her privacy in a locker room because a biological man identifying as a woman wants to change there? Not to mention, they're not just powerful state legislatures. They're also really powerful at the Supreme Court, right? They have 15 wins at the

Supreme Court. What are some of their greatest hits at the Supreme Court? You know, since 2011, they've won 15 cases. Some of the cases have focused on abortion, and the group helped draft and defend legislation that helped overturn Roe v. Wade. You know, a lot of others focus on rolling back LGBTQ rights. We won the 303 creative case on behalf of Lori Smith. With God's help, this is our 15th victory at the United States Supreme Court, and it stands for a very important principle that we're working for. The group ADF right now is trying to get the Supreme Court to take a case where they're representing a Christian therapist,

challenging a law that disciplines healthcare providers for practicing conversion therapy. So this group is getting these cases almost all the way to the Supreme Court. Who exactly is the ADF? I mean, who are the actual people that comprise this group? And then help us understand how Mike Johnson fits in. The ADF was founded in 1994 by a group of conservative, you know, white evangelical men. And they really wanted to be an answer to the American Civil Liberties Union. They wanted to say, we're defending religious liberty. We're defending religious freedom, right? The first CEO was Alan Sears. It's so hard for many people to remember what it was like in the late 1980s, the early 1990s, when essentially there was only a tiny handful of Christian attorneys engaged in standing against organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood, and the countless

initial allied groups that wanted to reshape this nation, that wanted to abolish the sanctity of human life. I think it's really important to note that he authored a book called The Homosexual Agenda, Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Freedom Today, where he talks about how homosexuality is the biggest threat to religious freedom and evangelism. And he says it will silence Christians. They started out extremely homophobic, and they've continued on that way, right? They're now comprised of allied attorneys who go around to state legislatures, to the Supreme Court, and even internationally to, you know, litigate in favor of laws and bills that would roll back women's rights, LGBTQ rights, and really undermine American democracy.

And how does Mike Johnson fit into the puzzle? Yeah, so Mike Johnson, he worked there for nearly 10 years. He was a spokesperson and a lawyer at ADF. You know, he penned a bunch of op-eds while he was there. He wrote amicus briefs that would illegalize gay sex, so sodomy laws. He wrote in favor of those. He vehemently opposed the legalization of gay marriage. He was one of the main players at ADF for nearly a decade. And I think it's important to note now, you know, Mike Johnson may be the most notorious government employee who also has ties to the ADF. But one thing I wrote about in my reporting is that there's over 100 current or former

members of the U.S. government who worked at ADF at one point. And that's kind of their game plan, right? Like, they want to instill biblical values into government at every single level. Has anyone asked Speaker Johnson about his connections to this group since he became Speaker? So, you know, a lot of people have asked, right? And maybe unsurprisingly,

he spoke with Sean Hannity on Fox News shortly after he got elected as House Speaker, right? And he says he, quote, doesn't even remember all of his anti-LGBTQ policies, comments, supports. I don't even remember some of them.-LGBTQ policies, comments, supports. I don't even remember some of them. I was a litigator that was called upon to defend the state marriage amendments, if you remember back in the day.

Again, even though last year he wrote legislation that would create a federal don't-say-gay law, right? In June, on a podcast, he referred to trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney as real sick stuff. Some marketing genius at Anheuser-Busch decided to team up with Dylan Mulvaney, as real sick stuff. Some marketing genius at Anheuser-Busch decided to team up with Dylan Mulvaney, who's this transgender advocate who parades around as a woman and makes videos to appeal to young teen girls. It's just, it's really sick stuff. However, in fairness to him, when asked about the legalization of gay marriage and how he feels about that, he did say he respects the rule of

law. Anybody that knows me will tell you this is true. I am a rule of law guy. I made a career defending the rule of law. I respect the rule of law. Okay, so it's really easy to be a fringe figure when you're literally on the fringe. But as we saw this week, Mike Johnson is having to work with Democrats. He's having to work with the White House. He's having to work with moderate Republicans to keep the government open, to keep the government functioning. Do you think that might mean that his ADF days are behind him? Absolutely not. If you think about where we're at politically in American society right now, you know, Trump appointed three justices to the Supreme Court who all voted to overturn Roe v. Wade.

And that reflects Mike Johnson's political views, right? He's against women having reproductive rights. He's in favor of anti-LGBTQ policies and laws, not only at the state level, but also at the federal level, right? He introduced this Don't Say Gay bill that's called the Stop Children from Sexualization Act. Just to clarify, it's called the Stop the Sexualization of Children Act. But I think what's really important to note here, and that's one of the reasons that I write about this stuff and feel really passionate about it, is that these bills are, in large

majority, attacking queer children. These don't-say-gay laws, these laws taking away trans kids' health care. So I think it's really dangerous, and no, I don't say gay laws. These laws taking away trans kids' health care. So I think it's really dangerous. And no, I don't imagine he will become any less extreme, any less fringe. If anything, it'll be the opposite, especially as, you know, Trump likely becomes the candidate and his rhetoric gets more and more back into the mix as we get closer to, you know, November of 2024. You know, when you have somebody like Mike Johnson with those fringe beliefs second in line to the president, you have Fox News, right wing media celebrating this person. It shifts American perception. There's a normalization in terms of, you know, what's

acceptable to believe when it comes to LGBTQ rights. And that's really dangerous, especially as we approach the 2024 presidential election. Spencer McNaughton is a producer, a professor, and a journalist. You can find the piece he wrote about Mike Johnson and the ADF at Rollingstone.com. It's called Inside the Alliance Defending Freedom, the anti-LGBTQ org where Mike Johnson spent almost a decade. Our program today was produced by Siona Petros, edited by Amina Alsadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and mixed by David Herman. We reached out to the ADF for comment, but we did not hear back. But we did hear this ADF radio spot about Mike Johnson's ADF origin story. And we figured we'd just play the whole thing for you.

It was unearthed by the investigative watchdog group Documented. And it is real. All it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing. Honey? Mike Johnson, you scared the daylights out of me. Sorry, babe. I thought you heard me come in. I wasn't expecting you home yet. Why are you home so early?

I've had warmer welcomes in my life. I'm sorry, honey. What's wrong? Did you lose a case? No, I lost my job. What? Mike, you just started at the firm. Did you lose a case? No, I lost my job. What? Mike, you just started at the firm.

How could you get fired? I had to make a choice. About what? Whether to keep representing that coalition that's trying to keep that strip club from coming into town, or keep the job that brought us back here. They made you choose? Oh, Mike. I'm so sorry, babe.

I know this was our dream, to come back home and raise our kids in the same safe little town we grew up in. I messed it up. You did the right thing. This won't be the same safe little town anyway if people like you don't do something to protect it. I'm proud of you, Mike. I love you and the kids so much. I know.

Mike Johnson, a compassionate young lawyer, put his family's future in God's hands, and the Alliance Defense Fund proudly welcomed him to our team. Today, Mike is helping others who face moral dilemmas and is firmly backed by the legal resources that ADF provides our allied attorneys. Find out what ADF is doing in your community. Request our free weekly alert by calling 1-877-TELL-ADF or visit our website at telladf.org. I'm Alan Sears, president of ADF, the voice for freedom.