Janine Jackson interviewed Media Matters’ Matt Gertz about new House Speaker Mike Johnson for the November 10, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Medium (11/4/23)
Janine Jackson: The new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, describes himself as a “Bible-believing Christian,” though theologians are coming forward to say “go pick up a Bible” is not really a coherent spiritual worldview. Johnson claims he has zero assets and no bank account because he’s “a man of modest means,” though financial analysts are saying that actually suggests something rather shadier. And then there’s when he said new US funding for Israel would be balanced out by “pay-fors” in the budget.
There are a number of questions about Mike Johnson, which is not at all the same as calling the person third in line for the presidency, as did CNN, a “blank slate.”
Our next guest has been tracking the right and its influence for many years now. Matt Gertz is senior fellow at Media Matters for America. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Matt Gertz.
Matt Gertz: Thanks for having me.
JJ: I want to ask you about this “offset Israel aid with IRS cuts” thing, but first, Mike Johnson himself: He’s not a babe in the woods with no defining characteristics. What should we know about where he’s been and what he’s done?
MG: I think Mike Johnson is a sort of House back-bencher who’s been promoted quite swiftly to one of the most powerful positions in Washington. And so I think everyone has been struggling to figure out what he’s all about and how to define him.
Rolling Stone (10/29/23)
That said, I think it’s quite clear that he comes out of the social conservative part of the GOP. He was, for a long time, an attorney for Alliance Defending Freedom, which is an anti-LGTBQ hate group. He is a fierce opponent of abortion rights, and his legislative record reflects both of those.
In addition, I think we might want to consider him as the sort of “dog who caught the car” here. He became speaker after a long struggle in which Republicans found themselves unable to find someone who could unite the party. Everyone basically got exhausted and put him forward and made him the speaker.
But Mike Johnson is someone who has never done any of the functions that the job requires. He has never served as the chief communicator for House Republicans. He has never needed to count votes to pass bills. He has never raised large sums of money, as the position also requires. He’s never run a large staff.
And so I think what we’ve been seeing, certainly in the early going here, is that he is really struggling to handle the core functions of the job. We’re seeing budget bills that are getting pulled from the floor, votes that the Republicans are losing that they’re not supposed to…. He’s really just not managing the party in the way you would expect from someone in that position.
CNN (10/27/23)
JJ: And then if we look at what he has actually said and stood for—I mean, his ability to do the job, such as it is, is one thing, but he is a person. He has a record, and part of his record is homophobia, as you’ve said, but it’s not just garden variety. He calls same-sex marriage equality a “dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy.” That’s not normal language. “It’s a bizarre choice,” he says, “to be gay.” But media talk about that as though it’s his eye color. That’s like a thing that he thinks: He hates gay people. Isn’t that actually a disqualification from making laws for the US public?
And then, also, he’s an election 2020 denier. He’s a climate change denier. There are things that we do know about him that should inform our understanding of his actions.
MG: That’s exactly right. He is very much a creature of the far-right fringe of the Republican Party, and someone who, if he gets his way and is able to pass legislation that he has previously supported—things like a national version of Florida’s “don’t say gay” law, nationwide abortion bans—would be extremely dangerous.
And I don’t think the mainstream press has done quite a good enough job of making that clear to the public. Now, on the one hand, they’re struggling just to figure out what this is all about, but you really need to do your job and get those basic details out into the public.
JJ: Yeah, I just saw a headline that was something like, “Most US Voters Don’t Have an Opinion on Mike Johnson.” I’m like, well, yeah, they don’t know him. And that would be where reporting would come in. And for CNN to call him a “blank slate,” I think that’s very telling. There’s work for journalists to do there, and to not do it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t need to be done.
Media Matters (10/25/23)
MG: I don’t usually quote Steve Bannon, but I think it’s worth pointing out here that he describes Mike Johnson as “one of the intellectual architects of pushing back on the stolen election,” and “by far the most conservative speaker in the history of the country.”
I think with January 6, his role there is very telling. He was the architect of the brief that congressional Republicans filed in support of Texas’s bid to throw out electoral votes in key states, and basically have Trump declared president. He was doing that at Trump’s request, he has said.
And of course that lawsuit went nowhere, which did not keep him from continuing to say that he was going to fight against the “stolen election” through January 6, and then vote to not count electoral votes after the insurrection happened. So he’s clearly a true believer in these heinous ideas.
But there was an initial push from reporters to get him on the record on January 6. In his first press conference, he was asked about it, and the result was the Republicans around him booed, and he simply moved on to the next question. The next reporter in line did not say, “You should just answer the question you were just asked,” but moved on to something else. And he’s basically been able to dodge that ever since.
JJ: I did want to give a little time here to talk about this offset thing, not just because of what it tells us about Mike Johnson, but because so many media seemed to swallow and regurgitate what was a fairly obviously nonsensical idea. And just like with the election denial, it’s like you can say, “Well, it came to naught, so let’s not consider it,” but you have to consider it, because it’s important to tell us the way these people are thinking.
So tell us about this idea that Johnson put forward, that we’re going to speed forward aid for Israel, but it’s not going to cost taxpayers anything, because we’re going to balance it out.
Media Matters (10/31/23)
MG: His claim was that there would be pay-fors in the budget to pay for this aid; we’re not just printing money to send it overseas. He said to Sean Hannity, “We’re going to find the cuts elsewhere to do that.” But when House Republicans released their bill, it paired $14.3 billion for Israel with $14.3 billion in cuts for the IRS, from the IRS funding that was passed last year in the Inflation Reduction Act.
The problem, of course, is that the money used to increase the budget of the IRS is actually beneficial to the budget, because it gets more money out of wealthy taxpayers who have been cheating on their taxes. So the Congressional Budget Office ends up looking into it and finds that actually it’s going to blow a huge hole in the deficit, rather than paying for it.
Unfortunately, a lot of journalists swallowed this altogether, and just reported that the aid would be paid for by cutting from the IRS. Some of them did a little bit better and pointed out, deep in the article, that actually the offset, so to speak, was going to be worse for the deficits. And some did, to their credit, actually explain that this wasn’t the case.
It was an early test whether the press would be willing to regurgitate false claims from Mike Johnson, and I don’t think we could say by any means that they passed it.
JJ: All right, we’ll end it there, but not forever. We’ve been speaking with Matt Gertz; he’s a senior fellow at Media Matters. Thank you so much, Matt Gertz, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
MG: Thank you.
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