Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Mike Johnson, a conservative Christian from Louisiana and loyal ally of Donald Trump, will head to the floor of the House of Representatives on Wednesday, in the latest effort by Republicans to find a Speaker for the chamber and end weeks of paralysis in Congress.
A floor vote of the full House is expected early in the Washington afternoon.
The House of Representatives has been without a Speaker for more than three weeks, after Kevin McCarthy was ousted earlier this month at the hands of a rebellion led by Florida congressman and fellow Republican Matt Gaetz.
Since then, Republicans have struggled to unite behind a successor amid bitter party infighting that has exposed sharp ideological divisions and raised fresh questions about Trump’s influence in Washington.
The impasse has prevented lawmakers from taking up key legislation, including a White House proposal for billions of dollars in additional aid to Israel and Ukraine.
Johnson is the fourth Republican Speaker nominee since McCarthy was removed. House majority leader Steve Scalise, House judiciary committee chair Jim Jordan and House majority whip Tom Emmer all failed to rally enough support from their own party to seize the Speaker’s gavel.
Any Speaker must be elected by a simple majority of the 435-member House. Because Republicans control the chamber by a nine-member margin, and Democrats have shown no willingness to back a Republican candidate, Johnson cannot afford to lose more than a handful of votes in the contest. Jordan, the previous candidate, failed three times last week.
Johnson was bullish on his chances late on Tuesday, speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill after he was selected as the party’s latest nominee by a secret ballot in a closed-door meeting.
“Democracy is messy sometimes, but it is our system. This conference that you see, this House Republican majority, is united,” Johnson said. He vowed to “serve the people of this country” and “restore their faith in this Congress, this institution of government”.
Johnson, 51, is a lower-profile member of Congress than Scalise, Jordan or Emmer. But his election as Speaker would put him second in the presidential line of succession, behind the vice-president, and signal a sharp tack rightward for House Republicans.
An evangelical Christian, Johnson is a hardline social conservative, opposing access to abortion in nearly all cases, as well as same-sex marriage. In Louisiana, he has been a proponent of marriage “covenant” laws, which make it more difficult for couples to divorce.
Earlier this year, Johnson voted against more US aid to Ukraine.
He was also among the most vocal proponents of Trump’s claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against him.
A lawyer by training, Johnson led a group of more than 100 fellow Republicans in filing an amicus brief to the US Supreme Court in support of a Texas lawsuit that tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election in four swing states: Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In the hours after the January 6 2021 attack on the US Capitol, Johnson voted against certifying Joe Biden’s electoral college victory.
Johnson became the party’s nominee on Tuesday just hours after Trump torpedoed Emmer’s candidacy in a blistering post on social media, calling the Minnesota congressman a “globalist Rino”, or Republican in name only.
On Wednesday, Trump, who remains the undisputed frontrunner for the party’s nomination for the White House in 2024, posted another statement calling on Republicans to “go with the leading candidate, Mike Johnson” and “get it done, fast!”
Read the full article here
