Hapless Republicans Congratulate Themselves for Doing Bare Minimum of Choosing a Speaker: ‘Tremendous Success’
It took three weeks and four nominees, but House Republicans finally got behind a candidate who could win a majority of votes.
Huzzah.
On Wednesday, the House elected Rep. [checks notes] Mike Johnson (R-LA) as the next speaker, capping off a drama that, were it a movie, it would be so bad, it’s actually good. All it lacked was sharks falling from the sky.
After the vote, House Republicans gathered on the steps of the Capitol, where they fêted themselves for doing literally the first thing that needs to happen before the House can do anything, which is choosing a speaker.
They clapped. They hooted. They hollered. They spun the last three clownish weeks as the opposite of the unmitigated dumpster fire inside a circus tent that they were.
The new speaker stood at the lectern and even claimed the experience has yielded “more strength, more perseverance, and a lot of hope.”
But the most absurd lines were delivered by Rep. Tom Emmer (R-MN), who withdrew his nomination this week after it was clear he could not get the votes. What we saw on Capitol Hill wasn’t “total chaos,” he said, but a “tremendous achievement”:
From an outside point of view, these last few weeks probably looked like total chaos, confusion. No end in sight. But from my perspective, this is one of the greatest experiences in the recent history of our republic.
While speaker’s races for the last 100 years have been conducted behind closed doors, filled with political promises and tyrannical threats against anyone who would not fall in line, the speaker’s races under our House Republican majority have been open, honest, transparent, and a true display of what democracy looks like in action. It took a while for us to get here. Our conference has shown that we achieved tremendous success when we work together as a team.
Hey, who are you gonna believe? Tom Emmer? Or your own lying eyes?
Johnson’s ascendance to the speakership is truly remarkable considering he was heretofore an obscure backbencher who only arrived in Congress in 2017. He also happens to be a right-wing freak – well above your replacement-level congressional Republican. But his mild demeanor and low profile meant he didn’t have the kind of baggage associated with failed nominee and performative loudmouth Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), whose allies conducted the very kind of intimidation campaign that Emmer falsely insisted was absent from the speakership.
Johnson is also very MAGA. Like most Republicans in the House, he voted against certifying the 2020 presidential election results. And the reality is, this was the unspoken prerequisite for becoming the next speaker of the House. We know this because of the four candidates nominated over the last few weeks, it was only Emmer whom Donald Trump trashed.
Why? Because Emmer was the only one of the four who voted to certify Trump’s 2020 election loss. That makes him a “RINO,” as Trump called him on social media. And so, Emmer’s candidacy was doomed from the start.
It speaks volumes about the state of the Republican Party that in order to get ahead, one must indulge Trump’s delusions, even when it means trying to overthrow the republic that Emmer waxed poetic about.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
