Thursday, October 26, 2023

Meet "MAGA Mike"

 



The accession of Christofascist Rep. Mike "MAGA Mike" Johnson (Sedition-LA) to Speaker of the House, second in line to the Presidency, means there will be a puppet willing to do the bidding of the Malignant Loser heading into the 2024 election.  Johnson, also dubbed "Gym Jordan with a jacket and a smile," is an ultra- MAGAt who denies the legitimacy of President Biden's election, and was a key participant in the effort to block certification of the 2020 election.  But, wait, there's more:

...Johnson spent years making a name for himself at Alliance Defending Freedom, which was founded in 1993 and designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the national organization that monitors the activities of domestic hate groups and right-wing extremists. 

Lambda Legal, a national civil rights organization focused on LGBTQ+ communities, has previously referred to Alliance Defending Freedom as ”arguably the most extreme anti-LGBT legal organization in the United States.”  [snip]

The Louisiana Republican claimed in 2007 that most people simply don’t understand Roe v. Wade — the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision guaranteeing a woman’s right to have an abortion that was struck down in 2022 — and argued that if they did, they would not like it. Only one-third of Americans supported Roe v. Wade being overturned, according to polling.

“The abortion industry has waged a decadeslong deception campaign to suppress the truth about abortion,” Johnson told CBNNews, a branch of the conservative Christian Broadcasting Network founded by the late televangelist Pat Robertson. “If Americans knew the truth about Roe, they wouldn’t be as supportive.”...

Back to his seditious activities following the 2020 election:

... Johnson, now serving his fourth term in Congress, was the moving force behind a Supreme Court brief that helped lay the shoddy intellectual groundwork for Jan. 6, 2021. In December 2020, he rallied fellow Republican lawmakers to support Texas’s brazen bid to overturn the election results. In a lawsuit that fizzled almost as soon as it was filed, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sought to have the Supreme Court intervene in the election by blocking the certification of electoral college votes in four swing states — Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin — where voting rules had been changed in the course of the election and voters, not coincidentally, had favored Joe Biden. The justices swiftly rejected the case, tartly noting that, “Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections.”

But not before Johnson rallied the GOP troops to sign on to a friend-of-the-court brief backing the Texas lawsuit — and took pains to emphasize that Trump was keeping score. “He said he will be anxiously awaiting the final list to review,” Johnson wrote on what was then Twitter. [snip]

The Johnson brief was a full-throated endorsement of the “independent state legislature” theory, ultimately rejected by the Supreme Court in 2023’s Moore v. Harper. The brief asserted that under the terms of the Constitution, only state legislatures — without any review by state courts or involvement of other state parties — have power to set rules for choosing presidential electors. “The clear authority of those state legislatures to determine the rules for appointing electors was usurped at various times by governors, secretaries of state, election officials, state courts, federal courts, and private parties,” the brief argued...

No wonder he had the enthusiastic backing of the head of the coup plot himself, the felonious, twice- impeached, multi- indicted Malignant Loser:

... “My strong SUGGESTION is to go with the leading candidate, Mike Johnson, & GET IT DONE, FAST!” Trump advised on his social media site Tuesday.  

And the MAGAt lemmings did just that.

BONUSDana Milbank takes us through the sausage- making process that got us to this wiener

BONUS II:  Of course, MAGA Mike also wants to get rid of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

BONUS IIIIt just gets creepier and worse.

(Photo:  The lean and hungry "MAGA Mike" Johnson / Win McNamee, Getty Images)