Speaker Johnson and the Convention of States

A Politico article

At time of sending, if you go to Politico.com, you will see an article on the front page entitled “Inside Mike Johnson’s Ties to a Far-Right Movement to Gut the Constitution.” This article was written by yours truly. I’m very excited, I think it’s a great article, and you should read it if you want to.

I’ve written about the Convention of States before, for New Republic, when I attended a five-day “Constitutional Defense” course out in the high plains of New Mexico. I came away with a deep appreciation for a state I’d never visited before, dramatically improved handgun skills, and a brand new thing to worry about.

You can read more about Convention of States in either article but here’s the quick and dirty: Article V of the Constitution says that, if two-thirds of states sign a petition, Congress has to call a constitutional convention where delegates can propose multiple constitutional amendments. These amendments then go back to the states: if three-fourths of states agree, those amendments become law.

An Article V convention has never happened, mostly because it scares the shit out of people. The last time someone called a constitutional convention in this country, it was under the Articles of Confederation in 1784. The convention’s mandate was to make alterations to said Articles, but America’s framers decided to set those Articles on fire instead. Ultimately, the convention produced its own founding document: the Constitutuion we know and love today.

Anyway, an evangelical right-wing organization called Convention of States Action (COSA) is working to call an Article V convention and they’re a lot farther along than one might like. And Mike Johnson has a history of supporting the movement. Already, COSA is using Johnson’s elevation to mainstream their movement. The article goes more in-depth. It’s scary stuff.

I do not hide my own political positions. “Objective journalism,” I believe, is a myth that benefits the establishment; it allows them to pass off their ideology as unbiased truth. Every article has a word limit, so every journalist has to decide which facts are important and which should be left out. Ideology will impact that choice, every time, even if you don’t want it to.

For someone with my political outlook, writing articles about a group like Convention of States is a gamble. After all, this Politico article does a lot of the work COSA is hoping Mike Johnson will do; it is informing the general public that COSA is inching closer to the mainstream and is, in fact, a serious movement worth paying attention to. It talks about the amendments they’d like to pass: something COSA spends a lot of time publicizing. The gamble is whether the American people will look at those amendments and this movement and go “Hmm, that seems good actually” or “Wow, that’s terrifying.” I’m betting on the second one. Time will tell.

As long as you’re reading about Mike Johnson, here are some other articles that explore just how reactionary this “consensus candidate” really is:

Mike Johnson’s Old-Time Religion (NYMag) gives us some fun facts about our new Speaker, who:

• Is a young-earth creationist

• Blamed the teaching of evolution for school shootings

• Wanted to criminalize gay sex and actively opposes gay marriage. He also advocates for strict gender roles (women as helper and nurturer, man as powerful provider). I list these together because every anti-LGBTQ+ cause is undergirded by gender essentialism

• Has compared abortion to the Holocaust

Mike Johnson’s Long Flirtation with Christian Nationalism (Mother Jones) offers a very thorough exploration of Johnson’s long history of anti-gay activism. Mike Johnson Conducted Seminars Promoting the US as a “Christian Nation,” also by Mother Jones, is about exactly what it sounds like”

“[The seminar], which featured both [Johnson’s wife, Kelly], and Johnson, as exploring several questions, such as, “What is happening in America and how do we fix it?” The list includes this query: “Can our heritage as a Christian nation be preserved?”

Rep. Mike Johnson Promotes White Nationalist Great Replacement Theory (America’s Voice) has a lot of very disturbing quotes from Johnson about the Democrats’ supposed plan to flood the US with undocumented immigrants who will then vote Democrat and allow the party to stay in power forever.

I would not be comfortable calling Mike Johnson a white nationalist based on any of these quotes. There are unignorable racial overtones to the Great Replacement theory, and many supporters of said theory are white nationalist, but the version of the theory that involves a Democratic electoral scheme has some plausible deniability. Regardless, I find these quotes distressing

‘He Seems to Be Saying His Commitment Is to Minority Rule’ (Politico) is a great Q&A with historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez, who focuses on evangelical Christianity and makes a good case for Johnson being a Christian Nationalist.

Anyway, please go check out the article if you feel like it. Pretty damn stoked to have a Politico piece under my belt; they’re a great publication and this is a bucket list moment for sure.