 Therefore, the Honorable Mike Johnson of the state of Louisiana, having received a majority of the votes cast, is duly elected Speaker of the House of Representatives for the 118th Congress. After a couple of long, hard weeks, House Republicans have decided to grab hold of Johnson and ride him all the way to the finish line. That's right, House Republicans have elected Mike Johnson of Louisiana as Speaker in a unanimous vote, meaning that a lot of them had to swallow their pride and come together. Which is surprising to me, because when eight other Republicans announced their candidacy for Speaker, I really expected Johnson to slip through the cracks. But to my surprise, he stood tall in a field of limp competitors. Now, unfortunately, his lovely wife, Kelly, who's also the co-host of his Christian podcast, Truth Be Told, couldn't make it, and he explains why she wasn't there for this special moment. She spent the last couple of weeks on her knees in prayer to the Lord, and she's a little worn out. Damn, Kelly, let's go. Imagine like walking in on your spouse, and they're on their knees, and they're out of breath, and they're sweaty, and you're like, what are you doing? And they're like, oh, I'm praying, honey. Come back in like 10 minutes. Okay, it's a little bit sus, but whatever. So the question is, how did we get to this point where this dick is elected of all people? Well, before we get to that, I first want to go back to Monday, where we left off with Republican Tom Emmer as the most notable candidate. I didn't call him the frontrunner because I knew then that there was no chance he was going to become Speaker, but he was the most notable. And 90 minutes after he was officially nominated by House Republicans as Speaker Designate, Trump dropped the hammer on him, calling him a global astrino, and encouraged Republicans to vote against him. So that, in combination with fears from his GOP colleagues that he doesn't hate gay people enough, ultimately led to his quick demise. And as CNN's Christie Wilson points out, he became Speaker Designate at 12.16 p.m. on Tuesday, but by 4.26 p.m., he already dropped out. Yeah. So needless to say, his bid to be Speaker ended very quickly, which was pretty predictable. Now, other candidates also quickly started to drop out, and a consensus started to quickly form around Johnson, with Ken Buck explaining why he was a good choice to CNN's Dana Bash. Why Mike Johnson? You know, probably because he has the fewest enemies of anybody in the Republican Congress. That's a ringing endorsement. Well, it's the reality of where we are right now, with four-vote majority. Mike is one of those people who gets along with everybody, and he's well respected. And I think those two factors played a big role in this. So it's not necessarily a particular policy or relevant expertise. They chose him because he has the fewest enemies. Cool. Now, the question is, what are the reactions to this from Republicans? I'll tell you my reaction in a moment, but what do Republicans think after battling for weeks? Well, Matt Gaetz, who started this entire shitstorm, is pretty happy. In fact, he feels vindicated. It is going to be a great moment for the House. And you know what? At the very end, when some people didn't know, if they could still even bring back McCarthy, a few of them just left the room and didn't vote. And the swamp is on the run. MAGA is ascendant. And if you don't think the movement from Kevin McCarthy to MAGA Mike Johnson shows the ascendance of this movement and where the power in the Republican Party truly lies, then you're not paying attention. But they are crying. They are hand-wringing and bedwetting over on K Street because we have an honorable, righteous man who is about to take this position. He's going to do great things for the country. So he thinks that Johnson's victory has proved that the MAGA movement is ascended. And I think he's correct. And you'll kind of see why once you see who Mike Johnson is. But what are people like Mike Lawler, who was very critical of Gaetz saying about Johnson? Well, here's what he said and what a couple of other Republicans said last night when it became pretty clear that Johnson did have the votes needed to become speaker. Obviously, I did not support the removal of Kevin McCarthy. I think it was arguably the stupidest move ever made in politics. But we have to move forward. And so we're going to rally around Mike Johnson and elect him speaker tomorrow and get back to work. It's a different situation now. There was a trust factor with leadership last time. So you can tell that there's still some bad blood there, but they've all found a candidate to settle for. Maybe they're not 100% happy, but they picked them. And unanimous consent for this caucus is pretty surprising, honestly. Now, the likely question on most of your minds is, who the hell is Mike Johnson? And I know that most liberals and leftists who are watching this probably aren't going to be satisfied with any Republican. Don't blame you. But understand that there is a spectrum of Republicans. So in the House, on one end of that spectrum, you have the more moderate economic conservative Republicans who focus disproportionately on tax cuts for corporations and deregulation. And on the other side of that spectrum, you have actual demons who pose a threat to democracy and require human blood for sustenance. Mike Johnson represents all of that, the entire spectrum. He is the worst of the worst. He's essentially an amalgamation of every Republican, the so-called moderates, the fascists, the Austerians, the populists. He is, I think, the worst case scenario or about as close to the worst case scenario as you could get, much worse than McCarthy and certainly worse than Jim Jordan as well arguably. And first and foremost, the main thing that you should know is that this man is an election denier. We must vote to sustain objections to states of electors, submitted by states that we genuinely believe clearly violated the Constitution and the presidential election of 2020. So that was a snippet of him objecting to Arizona's slate of electors in particular, but make no mistake about it. He went on to vote against certifying the 2020 election. But it gets so much worse because he's not just one of the many Republicans who voted against certifying the election. He actively promoted lies about the 2020 election. Take what he said about Georgia in this radio interview, for example. I was on the floor of the house last night talking with my colleagues from Georgia and they are so frustrated they want to pull their hair out because they feel helpless in the matter. But they know that in Georgia, it really was rigged. It was set up for the Biden team to win. So he's just straight up denying the results of the 2020 election. But it'd be a mistake to characterize him as just another election denier because he was one of the ringleaders. As he put it in a tweet that he wrote on December 10th of 2020, proud to lead over 100 of my colleagues in filing an amicus brief to express our concern with the integrity of the 2020 election and our election system in the future. So he's not just an election denier, he also spread lies about the election. But believe it or not, it gets even worse. Now let me explain why. So do you all remember the infamous press conference that took place on November 19th of 2020 where Trump attorney Sidney Powell falsely claimed that the software for Dominion voting machines were actually engineered in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chavez? Well, here's what Mike Johnson said just a couple of days before that press conference took place. And no, in every election in American history, there's some small element of fraud, irregularity, error. We just know that you just accept that that's the case. But when you have it on a broad scale, when you have a software system that is used all around the country that is suspect because it came from Hugo Chavez as Venezuela, when you have testimonials of people like this, but in large numbers, it begs to be litigated and investigated. And the problem is it's exceedingly difficult to do that in a 45 day time window. And that's the problem that we're up against and that's why the president is so frustrated. And that's why so many, so many 71, 73 million Americans around the country feel like that the election was stolen from them. Now I'm assuming that he laughed after saying that the software came from Venezuela because it was such an idiotic comment to say he couldn't possibly say it with a straight face. But just let that sink in for a moment. One of the most outrageous lies told about the 2020 election was made by him before it was made by Sidney Powell. Sidney Powell, the Trump attorney who pled guilty over her efforts to overturn the 2020 election, whose own attorneys claimed that her election lies were so outrageous that quote reasonable people would not take them seriously. But Mike Johnson said that shit first. So the question is, did Sidney Powell get the idea from him? Are there going to be any consequences for him? I mean, she's going to be on probation. But he gets to become speaker. Seems a little bit weird, don't you think? Now the question is, what do Republicans have to say about his election denialism? Well, don't bother asking because this was the response from House Republicans when a reporter tried to ask. All right then, I guess they're not concerned. Now the old lady who yelled shut up was actually Congresswoman Virginia Fox who also voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election. But she wasn't the only Republican to hiss at the reporter for daring to ask a very reasonable question because right now the GOP caucus doesn't want to hear any of this. There's election deniers and non-election deniers, but right now there's a moment of harmony and they don't want a question about our democracy to get in the way of that. So they were very outraged at the idea that a reporter would dare ask this question. But it's a pretty important question, don't you think? Now, let's not pretend like the only bad thing about Mike Johnson is his election denialism because he's seemingly a Christian nationalist with genocidal anti-LGBTQ plus policy positions and unsurprisingly he also happens to be a forced birther who's currently cosponsoring three different pieces of legislation that would ban abortion nationwide. And when a total abortion ban went into effect in his state of Louisiana last year, he celebrated on Twitter and reminded doctors that they could be sentenced up to 10 years of hard labor and given a fine of up to $100,000 if they performed an abortion in his state. And he recently stated that his forced birth position was necessary to produce more people to help pay for social security. He said this, listen. Yeah. Now, on the subject of social security, he's also expressed interest in cutting it. It's difficult as somebody dedicated to principles of limited government to see the ballooning out of the deficit and a complete abandonment of entitlement reform. Your thoughts? We'll start with Mike and we'll go to Mark. We have to get back to it as a number one priority. The CBO says that entitlement spending, which they define as Medicare and Medicaid Social Security interest on the debt, right? Those four obligations, we've got Eclipse GDP and what it does in years or something. I mean, this is not, this can can no longer be kicked down the road. You can't wait eight years to address this. It hasn't happened yesterday. So we have to have our hand at the wheel and do this. We are completely derelict in our duty. We're rearranging furniture on the Titanic if we don't get this problem under control. So one way to address it isn't to lift the cap on taxable income. Let's just force women to have more babies. Also, let's cut it. Amazing. But there's more because he also authored the Stop Sexualizing Children Act of 2022, aka the national version of Florida's Don't Say Gay Bill, which would censor all LGBTQ plus content in classrooms and even go as far as to designate quote unquote transgenderism as sexually orientated content on par with porn. As Alejandro Carbio points out, which means that exposing kids 10 and under two quote transgenderism would be banned, which in practice could result in the mass firing of trans teachers, trans pediatricians, trans social workers, and so on. I don't know how this policy would even be enforceable, but trans existence would be classified as inherently sexual under this legislation that he supports. Not on top of that, during his tenure as an attorney for the ADF, he supported the criminalization of homosexuality and wrote editorials calling it dangerous and claimed that it could lead to pedophilia and also the end of democracy, which is ironic given his lack of support for democracy itself, given that he voted to overturn the 2020 election. But on top of that, he unsurprisingly is also against same sex marriage in the year 2023. Oh, and he also thinks that weed is a gateway drug. So he's not very bright. And on top of that, he's a climate denier and he's skeptical of the COVID vaccines to put it charitably. And he's just an unhinged lunatic overall, who doesn't represent people named Mike very well. As a Mike, I denounced this Mike and all other Mike should as well. So in the end, I think it was clear that Matt Gaetz was vindicated. He got what he wanted. He wanted a more conservative speaker than Kevin McCarthy, and he got it. But regardless of what you think about him, he is the new speaker now. We're stuck with him and the saga is officially over. And his first test is coming up in November when the government is set to shut down on the 17th unless it gets more funding. So beyond the lookout for that, he's saying that the first order of business is to give money to Israel so they can continue their genocide against Palestinians. So he seems like a really nice guy overall. But I just have to admit that I am a little bit disappointed that this entire debacle is over because I did find the GOP's dysfunction a really nice distraction from all the other terrible things happening in the world right now. But I think that the best case scenario is that he pisses off Republicans in some way and they'll lead up to the next government shutdown and we get a season two of speaker roulette. But I mean, until then, we'll just have to sit back and watch America get fucked by Johnson.