Mike Johnson

Mike Johnson (born January 30, 1972, Shreveport, Louisiana, U.S.) American lawyer and Republican politician who became the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives in October 2023. Johnson, an ardent social conservative, represents the 4th district of Louisiana, encompassing the state’s northwestern and western regions. He was elected speaker after a roughly three-week scramble by a fractious Republican caucus to find a replacement for his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, whose historic ouster from that office had been orchestrated by the party’s hard right. In terms of tenure in the House, Johnson is one of the least experienced speakers in modern U.S. political history.

Early life

The eldest of four children of James and Jeanne Johnson (who later divorced), Mike Johnson grew up in a rural area outside Shreveport, Louisiana. After being burned and disabled while serving as firefighter, Johnson’s father cofounded and acted as the director of the nonprofit Percy R. Johnson Burn Foundation. Later he founded PM Hazmat, Inc., which developed safety and emergency response training programs.

His father’s injuries had a profound effect on Johnson. It had been thought that there was little chance that his father would survive, but, when he did, Johnson, then age 12, saw it as a miracle and became a person of deep faith. At some point during his teenage years, he gave up his ambition of becoming a firefighter to instead pursue a legal career and conservative politics.

Following graduation from Captain Shreve High School in Shreveport, Johnson received a B.S. in business administration (1995) from Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge. As an undergraduate, he was a member of the Order of Omega honor society and Kappa Sigma fraternity, and he served as president of the LSU Interfraternity Council. While earning a law degree (1998) at LSU’s Paul M. Hebert Law Center, Johnson was elected class president and president of the Christian Legal Society. During his tenure in law school, he volunteered for the Louisiana Family Forum, an affiliate of the Family Research Council, a Christian conservative advocacy organization.

Legal career

As a constitutional lawyer, Johnson rose to become a senior attorney and partner at Kitchens Law Firm in Minden, Louisiana. He also served as a litigator and spokesman for Alliance Defense Fund (later Alliance Defending Freedom; ADF), a conservative Christian legal advocacy group that has pursued an anti-LGBTQ rights agenda. Twice (in 2004 and 2014) Johnson defended Louisiana’s ban on same-sex marriage before the state Supreme Court. He also acted as counsel for Freedom Guard, an organization that aided public officials who refused to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) recognizing same-sex marriage. In 2016 Johnson explained to the Louisiana Baptist Message how his evangelical Christian faith had shaped his legal career:

I was called to legal ministry and I’ve been out on the front lines of the “culture war” defending religious freedom, the sanctity of human life, and biblical values, including the defense of traditional marriage, and other ideals like these when they’ve been under assault.

In 2005 Johnson helped guide “Day of Truth,” an ADF-led action against “Day of Silence” protests targeting anti-gay bias in schools. According to Johnson, reflecting later on “Day of Truth,” the “truth” in question was derived from a strict biblical interpretation that “if someone’s trapped in a homosexual lifestyle, it’s dangerous.” In an opinion piece for a Shreveport newspaper the previous year, Johnson had described homosexuality as “inherently unnatural.”

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From 2004 to 2012 Johnson acted as a trustee of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which articulates the public policy of the Southern Baptist Convention. Before seeking elected office, Johnson also was a college professor and a conservative talk radio host.

Political career

In February 2015 Johnson ran unopposed as a Republican in the special election to fill the vacant seat in the lower chamber of the Louisiana legislature representing District 8, made up of a section of the northwestern part of the state, including a portion of Shreveport. He was reelected in the regularly scheduled election in November. As a legislator, he was driven by his opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage and his support for religious freedoms. In the Louisiana House of Representatives, Johnson authored the Marriage and Conscience Act, a bill aimed at averting harmful treatment by the state of individuals in response to their views on marriage. Critics of the legislation—which failed to advance beyond committee consideration—argued that it offered legal cover to discriminate against same-sex couples. On the other hand, the House unanimously approved legislation introduced by Johnson that prohibited “dismemberment abortion,” the dilation and evacuation (D&E) procedure often used to terminate second-trimester pregnancies. Also passed by the Senate and signed by the governor, the law went into effect in August 2016.

In 2016 Johnson defeated a pro-gun, anti-abortion Democrat by more than 30 percent of the vote to gain the seat representing Louisiana’s deep-red 4th district in the U.S. House of Representatives. (He was reelected in 2018, 2020, and 2022.) He entered Congress in the same election that elevated Republican Donald Trump to the White House. Johnson soon became a member of the president’s inner circle, regularly joining the entourage that flew with the president on Air Force One. When Trump was first impeached (December 2019) as a result of the Ukraine scandal, Johnson was a member of his defense team for the impeachment trial by the Senate.

In Congress, guided foremost by his evangelical faith and belief in traditionalist family structures, Johnson has amassed a staunchly conservative voting record. As of 2022–23, he had earned lifetime scores of 89 percent and nearly 92 percent, respectively, from Heritage Action for America and the Conservative Political Action Conference (formerly American Conservative Union). Moreover, the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America organization’s scorecard awarded him an A+ rating.

Johnson has served as a member of the House committees on the judiciary (including chairing a subcommittee on the Constitution and serving as a member of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government), armed services, and natural resources. His rise through the ranks of the Republican Party also has included service as House Republican conference vice chair and chair of the Republican Study Committee, the large conservative caucus of House Republicans.

Role in 2020 presidential election denial

Notwithstanding those positions, Johnson remained a relatively unknown member of Congress until he played a pivotal role in advancing Trump’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential election. In the run-up to the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021, at which the Electoral College totals were to be ceremonially reported, some dozen Republican senators and scores of Republican members of the House of Representatives indicated that they intended to challenge the Electoral College slates of several states lost by Trump, despite the fact that dozens of legal challenges to the election results in states that Trump lost had been almost universally summarily dismissed by the courts. Republican legislators seemingly were faced with two options: accept the results of the election or deny the legitimacy of the election on the basis of Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of fraud. Johnson presented them with a third option that provided a different justification for voting against accepting the election results.

In the immediate aftermath of the election, Johnson advanced the spurious allegation that voting software used in the election was suspect because it had supposedly come from the authoritarian regime that ruled Venezuela. However, it was his later argument—that COVID-19 pandemic–related changes to voting procedures in some states were unconstitutional—that gained steam. Some three-fourths of the 146 Republicans who opposed certifying the election cited it as the rationale for their vote. That narrow, technical, and questionable argument was predicated on Johnson’s assertion that, by authorizing changes to early voting and mail-in voting procedures without consulting their state legislators, state election officials had violated the Constitution.

In addition to framing this argument, Johnson pressured House Republicans to endorse an amicus curiae brief based on his “constitutional infirmity” objection, which he had prepared in support of a legal appeal brought by the Texas attorney general that attempted to invalidate the election results in several states on the basis of a variety of unsubstantiated allegations of fraud. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case. But before that happened Johnson had elicited the signatures of 125 of his Republican colleagues to the letter accompanying the brief—some of them perhaps in response to Johnson’s notification that Trump would be monitoring who signed it.

Ascent to speaker of the House

Kevin McCarthy’s removal as speaker of the House in early October 2023 began an anxious period of internecine strife for House Republicans in which they cycled through three speaker designees before arriving at a surprising candidate who was able to muster the broad support necessary to claim the gavel: Johnson. Because of the Republicans’ narrow majority in the House and the Democrats’ lockstep voting for Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries on every ballot, no Republican candidate could afford any more than four defections from within the party to attain the 217 votes necessary to become speaker. In the first intraparty secret ballot vote, Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana bested (113–99) Jim Jordan of Ohio, darling of the hard-right Freedom Caucus, which had brought down McCarthy. But even the deeply conservative Scalise was not conservative enough to secure the backing of the party’s rebellious hard right, which saw him as an establishment figure, and he quickly stepped aside. It was then Jordan’s turn to try to get to 217, but Republican moderates bridled at his candidacy amid reports of death threats against those who refused to support him. After failing to win enough support in three votes on the House floor, Jordan (who had been endorsed by Trump) also withdrew his candidacy.

As the process stretched toward three weeks, the House remained paralyzed, unable to conduct business without a speaker, which most immediately prevented it from considering additional military aid for Ukraine in its war against Russia and for Israel in the wake of an unprecedentedly deadly terrorist attack by Hamas. Moreover, the prospect of a government shutdown loomed as the end of a short-term government-funding compromise neared. Some legislators argued for granting special powers to Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry to get the House back to business. The candidacy of the Republicans’ next nominee, moderate Tom Emmer, lasted only about four hours. Torpedoed by opposition from Trump (who denigrated the Minnesotan as a “globalist RINO” [Republican in name only]), Emmer’s evanescent failed bid revealed what appeared to be the ultimate apostasy in a party still very much under the sway of Trump: acknowledgment of the legitimacy of the 2020 election results.

As the end of October approached, Johnson emerged from the chaos as a consensus candidate whose relatively short tenure in the House and rather low profile meant that he had yet to generate many enemies. His staunchly conservative ideological orientation and election denial satisfied the far right, and his gentle personal style was widely appealing. Johnson was considered to be a nice guy. It was even posited that he might be able to work well with the Democrats, though Johnson had ranked 429th out of 435 representatives on a 2021 bipartisan index released by the Lugar Center and Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. Just the same, on October 25 Johnson was elected the 56th speaker of the House and stood second in the line of succession to the presidency. Exhausted Republicans breathed a sigh of relief.

Personal life

In 1999 Johnson married Kelly Lary, an elementary- and secondary-school teacher, who later became a licensed pastoral counselor. Johnson and his wife host the podcast Truth Be Told, which explores Christianity’s role in American civil life. They have four biological children—two sons and two daughters. Early in their marriage, they took custody of a Black teenager (now an adult), whom they raised as a son though never formally adopted.