After 22 days without a Legislature, the United States once again has a Congress capable of functioning. The Republican Party has managed to overcome its fragmentation and agree on the appointment for the presidency of the House of Representatives of Mike Johnsonabout un trump standbut without the verbal aggressiveness of the former president or another of the candidates for office, Jim Jordan, who was resoundingly defeated last week by failing to obtain the votes of his party colleagues.
With his rise to office, Johnson – who believes that the Universe is 6,000 years old, God created it in 6 days, and opposes aid to Ukraine, gay marriage and abortion – becomes the second person in the president’s line of succession of the United States, after the vice president, Kamala Harris.
Unlike most of the protagonists in this crisis – Jordan himself, the ousted President Kevin McCarthy, and other candidates, such as Steve Scalise – Johnson is not a personality of national projection. He has been in the House for seven years, which is a relatively short time, and he has never played a prominent role. Perhaps that is the reason why the totally fragmented Republican Party has unanimously supported him: Johnson has never insulted anyone. In addition, he has the most important endorsement of the Republican: the support of Donald Trump.
On Tuesday, a message from the former president on his social network Truth Social was enough to sink, without any vote, the candidacy of the centrist Tom Emmer. Trump called Emmer, among other things, a “globalist”, although it would have been enough for him to have said that he did not support him for the candidacy to be liquidated. Such is the power of the former president among Republicans.
Johnson is different. He not only voted against the ratification of the results of the 2020 presidential election, which Donald Trump lost, but he was also the mastermind of a painful lawsuit by the state of Texas to suspend the counting of votes… in Pennsylvania. The Justice Department refused to accept the case, which in a federal state like the United States raised enormous constitutional doubts.