Newly elected Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, right, is handed the gavel of the Speaker by House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, left, after Johnson was elected at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Oct. 25.ELIZABETH FRANTZ/Reuters
The bullpen was nearly empty after so many relievers were summoned to the mound. The ranks of backstage understudies were almost depleted after a string of leading actors was sidelined. The druggist’s shelf of alternative treatments was all but bare after amoxicillin, nitrofurantoin and doxycycline were prescribed and found ineffective.
The analyst strains to summon a figure of speech – a way of describing, an image, anything really – that sufficiently captures the thesaurus-emptying tragicomedy of upheaval, chaos, bedlam and dysfunction that marked the U.S. House of Representatives as it struggled for three weeks to choose a Speaker. Perhaps in the future the metaphor will work the other way around, with empty bullpens, limited ranks of understudies and failed series of antibiotics compared to Capitol Hill in the autumn of 2023.
Perhaps simply the phrase “Speaker Mike Johnson” will do.
Mike Johnson – not the former Canadiens and Maple Leafs right-winger but instead a right-winger from Louisiana – finally mounted the greasy pole to House leadership Wednesday, though that metaphor, 155 years old and dating to the rise of Benjamin Disraeli to Downing Street, is oddly insufficient, perhaps even misleading. It is Dante and descent rather than Disraeli and ascent that most matches the moment.
In a vivid political version of “next man up” (the phrase from NFL football describing the readiness of players in the far reaches of the depth chart to step up and replace injured first-stringers) Mr. Johnson, 51, was the fourth candidate put forward since conservative insurrectionists toppled Kevin McCarthy of California early this month.
But the procession of Next Men – Jim Jordan, Steve Scalise, Tom Emmer and then Mr. Johnson – bore scant resemblance to the phenomenon expressed by the young senator John F. Kennedy made about his family’s ascension to political leadership: “If anything happened to me tomorrow, my brother Bobby would run. … And if Bobby died, Teddy would take over for him.”
While the world burned and various Republican resentments smouldered, the House engaged in a sort of mannered mayhem. Its centuries-old protocol calling for a certain etiquette was honoured in the breach at a time – a little more than a year from the presidential election – when Republicans endeavour to show they are capable of governing a superpower of 332 million people as two wars rage, economic uncertainty persists and democratic values are under assault at home and abroad.
But instead, the gaudy sideshow gave lie to the customary image of the Republicans as the party that was the curator of order and stability in a raucous political system. The old GOP was, in words Graham Greene employed in a different context in his 1955 novel The Quiet American, a group of patricians who “never, one felt, dressed carelessly, said the wrong word, were a prey to untidy passion.”
Now the Republican motto might be Untidy R Us.
The Speaker they finally in fatigue settled on – for that is what they did – is a classic social and cultural conservative of the modern strain.
He is ardently against abortion, strongly in favour of legislation banning the mention of gender identification in public schools and libraries and sufficiently MAGA to satisfy former president Donald Trump, whose opposition to Mr. Emmer as a Speaker nominee (“He never respected the Power of a Trump Endorsement, or the breadth and scope of MAGA”) sank the Minnesotan.
In his first remarks from the Speaker’s rostrum, Mr. Johnson won applause from both sides of the aisle for saying he would establish a bipartisan commission to examine ways of addressing the country’s debt and “in our time of great crisis our duty is to work together.” He told the country, “the peoples’ House is back in business.”
This is the moment when analysts customarily say that winning the position is the easy part, and that what awaits the newly crowned incumbent is the hard part.
There is unavoidable truth to that in this episode, for Mr. Johnson, a leading figure in the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election, must navigate the dangerous waters that ended Mr. McCarthy’s speakership. (A better characterization might be the “dumpster fire,” in the words of GOP Representative Bill Huizenga of Michigan.) He must bring an unruly chamber to heel or face the prospect of an unruly chamber bringing its leader to heel.
And that is not all.
The new Speaker must lead a House divided in at least two dimensions: between Republicans and Democrats, and among Republicans themselves. And he must do this against the backdrop of a Capitol Hill agenda topped by providing military aid to both Israel and Ukraine and avoiding a government shutdown. From the bullpen and offstage, Mr. Johnson has a difficult task, which he must perform with a wobbly, and perhaps tentative, hold on the Speaker’s gavel. He’ll need a political antibiotic, or a string of them.