The election of Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana to Speaker of the House has thrown into stark relief the difference between what one might call “personal conservatives” and those of us who consider ourselves to be part of the conservative movement, or movement conservatives.
There’s no doubt that Speaker Johnson lives his life according to a set of conservative principles: He’s a church-going man known for his personal rectitude; he married his wife in a “covenant marriage”; as a lawyer he advocated a constitutional “textualist” approach to his cases; he spent many years actively involved in advancing the Right-to-Life; he opposes same sex marriages, and in 2015 he took one of his daughters to a purity ball.
All evidence points to Mr. Johnson living his life according to conservative principles.
So, why has he failed to move, or even fight for legislation that advances those principles?
And even worse, why has he advanced anti-conservative Members of the House Republican Conference to positions of power?
The late M. Stanton Evans observed “When our people get to the point where they can do us some good, they stop being our people,” in enunciating what later came to be called “Evans’ Law of Politics.”
Stan’s point being that movement conservatives must continue to hold elected officials to conservative principles no matter how “conservative” those “friends” appear to be in their personal lives.
And Speaker Mike Johnson is certainly proof of Evans’ Law.
Now that Johnson is in a position to do us conservatives some good, he has betrayed us at every opportunity.
Constitutional textualist? Give us a break, Johnson just spent the last week twisting arms to pass a renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that continues the federal government’s unconstitutional warrantless spying on Americans.
Advocate for the right-to-life? Again, give us a break. Johnson has steadfastly refused to use the House of Representatives’ power of the purse to rein-in the Biden administration’s expansion of abortion.
Opponent of the LBGT++ agenda? Johnson just signed on to a deal that gave millions of taxpayer dollars to organizations that promote the grooming and mutilation of children and promote the radical homosexual agenda.
Protector of American sovereignty? As Speaker Johnson has refused to use the power of the purse to rein-in Biden’s open borders policy and has caved on every opportunity to stop the impending WHO treaty that will place unelected foreign bureaucrats in charge of American health policy.
Proponent of equality before the law? Virtually no action as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion continue to run amuck in the federal government and senior federal bureaucrats hired under DEI, such as the State Department’s Zakiya Carr Johnson have the temerity to say the U.S. represented a “failed historical model” embedded with racism, colonialism, and other isms.
Fiscal conservative? Not even close, the two-bill appropriations process produced a $6.5 trillion budget with over 6,000 earmarks costing taxpayers around $12.7 billion. This is six times what the federal government spent in 2014, just ten years ago.
When he was elected most of us in the conservative movement saw Johnson as a reliable conservative managing as speaker under challenging conditions inherited from Kevin McCarthy, his definitely unreliable, and definitely not-conservative predecessor.
Today, after the latest round of cave-ins on spending and active opposition by the Speaker to conservative FISA reforms conservatives are now asking themselves if Kevin McCarthy would have done any worse than the allegedly “reliable conservative” Mike Johnson.
After all, with McCarthy we expected to be lied to and let down, but based on his personal conservatism we expected better from Mike Johnson. The letdown, when such a prominent “personal conservative” betrays the conservative movement, has been a major blow to the movement and the prospect for an expanded Republican majority In the House.
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Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
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Republican House majority