THE OPPO RESEARCH ON "SPEAKER" JOHNSON ARRIVES

This is going to be the last thing I put up today. This day has only been good for the three hours I got to spend writing about life in the hellscape of the Anzio beachhead in 1944, surrounded by German artillery in the hills.

But the oppo research on Mike Johnson is important enough to put it up as quickly as possible. There will undoubtedly be more tomorrow, since what you’re going to read here demonstrates what a rich pile of Fundamentalist shit he is.

Here we go:

The newly elected Speaker of the House once worked as an attorney for a far-right Christian legal group whose work you are almost certainly familiar with. The Alliance Defending Freedom — where Johnson was once an attorney and a spokesperson — is the group behind many of the most recent legal attacks on reproductive rights and the LGBTQ community.

Most recently, the group represented the plaintiff in 303 Creative v. Elenis, in which the Supreme Court sided with the plaintiff arguing the First Amendment allows businesses to discriminate for religious reasons if the business offers “expressive” services. ADF was also part of the team defending Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban before the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case where the Supreme Court ultimately overturned Roe v. Wade.

But back in the mid-2000s when Johnson was a member of the ADF team, then called the Alliance Defense Fund, the group was active in a case that reached the high court focused on overturning the criminalization of gay sex, Lawrence v. Texas. While the ADF filed an amicus brief in the case that bolstered arguments for keeping homosexual activity illegal, Johnson personally wrote several editorials supporting ADF’s ideology.

CNN’s KFILE Team dug up some of Johnson’s old op-eds, including one from July 2003 in which the now-speaker argued that same-sex intercourse was a public health concern, among other things. Per CNN:

In editorials that ran in his local Shreveport, Louisiana, paper, The Times, Johnson called homosexuality a “inherently unnatural” and “dangerous lifestyle” that would lead to legalized pedophilia and possibly even destroy “the entire democratic system.”

And, in another editorial, he wrote, “Your race, creed, and sex are what you are, while homosexuality and cross-dressing are things you do,” he wrote. “This is a free country, but we don’t give special protections for every person’s bizarre choices.”

CNN is just one of many among news outlets and advocacy groups surfacing old clips and statements today upon Johnson’s election that highlight his extremism. Not only is Johnson a full-throated election denier who voted against certifying the election, he was the man who crafted and elevated a legal “theory” about pandemic mail-in voting that House Republicans pointed to as rationale for why the election was fraudulent and the results shouldn’t be certified.

His record on abortion is equally as extreme: He’s one of many House Republicans willing to fully embrace a national ban on the procedure. House Judiciary Democrats surfaced and circulated this clip on Twitter today to highlight his … unhinged positioning:

Hee he is speaking about how if only more women brought more “able bodied workers” into the world, Republicans wouldn’t have to slash Social Security and Medicare:

Johnson on abortion

Democrats are already happily pinning the new speaker’s abortion absolutism on the backs of the entire party as a messaging strategy against vulnerable Republicans heading into 2024.

As DCCC Chair Suzan DelBene (D-WA said, “there are no moderates left on the Republican side.” (they’re stealing my lines!)

More to come (sigh)…

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