WASHINGTON (CN) — House Republicans surely breathed a sigh of relief Wednesday as the full chamber voted to elect Louisiana Congressman Mike Johnson as House speaker, filling the lower chamber’s top job after three weeks of infighting and uncertainty.
Nearly every member of the GOP caucus — 220 — voted to put Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, in the speaker’s chair, which has remained vacant since early this month when a group of right-wing lawmakers used a procedural tool to oust former Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
Around 209 House Democrats voted for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
“It is the honor of a lifetime to have been elected the 56th speaker of the House,” Johnson wrote in a statement on X, formerly Twitter. “The urgency of this moment demands bold, decisive action to restore trust, advance our legislative priorities and demonstrate good governance.”
Although Johnson’s ascent puts to bed the GOP’s long leadership crisis — which saw the caucus fail on three separate occasions to coalesce around a speaker candidate — his history as a staunch social conservative raises questions about how he will exercise his newfound authority over the House.
Johnson, elected in 2016 to represent Louisiana’s 4th Congressional District, has long staked out a position as one of the House’s more conservative members.
The lawmaker joined more than 140 of his Republican colleagues in January 2021 in an effort to decertify the results of the 2020 presidential election and hand the White House to former President Donald Trump. Johnson was also the top signatory in a 2020 amicus brief supporting the Texas’s bid to convince the Supreme Court to delay election results in Pennsylvania and three other states.
Johnson wrote in a December 2020 post on X, formerly Twitter that he was “proud … to express our concern with the integrity of the 2020 election and our election system in the future.”
The Louisiana Republican has also sponsored legislation aimed at advancing a suite of hardline policy objectives.
In October 2022, Johnson cosponsored a bill that, if made law, would have prohibited the use of federal funds to “develop, implement, facilitate or fund any sexually oriented program, event or literature” for children under the age of 10. The measure would apply to any organization that receives government funding, such as public schools and libraries.
While the lawmaker defended his legislation as a common-sense effort to shield children from explicit material, the bill’s language would have barred schools and libraries from providing sex education literature or books with LGBTQ subject matter to children. Critics have compared Johnson’s measure to Florida’s derisively named “Don’t Say Gay” bill made law in 2022.
This past February, Johnson attempted to further clamp down on abortion access, unveiling a bill that would make it a crime to transport a minor across state lines for reproductive care without first notifying their parents.
“It is a matter of safety and common sense to ensure parents of minors have the right to know if their child is crossing state lines to receive an abortion,” Johnson said at the time. “We should never allow a state law to be circumvented to benefit those seeking to take advantage of a minor.”
Before he joined Congress in 2017, Johnson was a senior attorney and national media spokesman for Christian legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom. The conservative organization has lobbied against abortion access and same sex marriage and describes itself on its website as “one of the leading Christian law firms committed to protecting religious freedom, free speech, marriage and family, parental rights and the sanctity of life.”
Whether Johnson’s previous policy positions will affect the tenor of his speakership remains to be seen, but the lawmaker has already outlined his plan for House business over the next several months.
In a letter to his Republican colleagues dated Monday, Johnson said that he would support a new stopgap budget measure to keep the government funded into the new year. Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy in September negotiated a similar spending patch with Democrats, which averted a government shutdown and funded federal programs through Nov. 17.
Johnson suggested that he would poll the GOP conference on a new budget stopgap expiring on either Jan. 15 or April 15, and that Congress should use the intervening period to pass a package of appropriations bills to fund the government through the end of 2024.
“This is an ambitious schedule,” Johnson wrote, “but if our speaker can work across the conference to unify our membership and build consensus, we can achieve our necessary objectives.”
Johnson also said that the GOP-led House should immediately pass a resolution sponsored by Texas Congressman Michael McCaul that would condemn Hamas for its attack on Israel, and that it should begin negotiations with the Senate on the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act and a measure reauthorizing the Federal Aviation Administration.
In a speech delivered to Congress after Wednesday’s speaker election, House Minority Leader Jeffries said Democrats would continue to reach across the aisle to keep the government running.
“From the very beginning of this Congress, House Democrats have been governing for the people,” Jeffries said. “We continue to look forward to finding bipartisan common ground whenever and wherever possible.”
However, the minority leader said Democrats would continue to advocate against what he called extremism in Congress and would keep up the fight for LGBTQ rights and reproductive health care freedoms, standing at odds with some of the new Speaker Johnson’s previous policy positions.
“These are blue lines in the sand, and we will work to make sure they are never crossed,” Jeffries said.
New York Democrat Nydia Velazquez called out what she framed as Johnson’s election denialism in a Wednesday post on X, accusing him of being an “anti-abortion fanatic, conspiracy theory peddler, and zealot who wants to destroy Social Security and Medicare.”
“This isn’t Magic Mike, but rather MAGA Mike,” she quipped.
House Republicans, meanwhile, celebrated Johnson’s election. Pennsylvania Representative Scott Perry, leader of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus, congratulated the new speaker. “Let’s get back to work fixing what President Biden and his enablers broke,” Perry said in a statement.
Texas Congressman Tony Gonzales called Johnson a “champion of conservative, family values.”
The House has been without a speaker since early October, when congressional Republicans led an effort to oust former Speaker McCarthy amid complaints that he had reneged on promises made to some of the caucus’s more conservative members.
The GOP has since struggled to find a consensus candidate to replace McCarthy, with members refusing to rally behind House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan or House Majority Whip Tom Emmer.
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