Political narratives get loud. How we lower the volume.
A new U.S. House speaker sent many politics-watchers to battle lines, so our senior congressional writer went somewhere else: putting aside competing convictions about his likely impact in order to instead just probe the facts of his acts and deeds.
Speakers of the House of Representatives are typically established party leaders before they get the gavel. Their election is often a foregone conclusion. Mike Johnson emerged out of a civil war within the House Republican caucus after the obvious candidates stumbled. A torrent of “who is he?” stories followed.
But it hasn’t taken long for narratives about the relatively unknown new speaker to settle into conviction. Some accounts note his commitments to civility and responsible government. Others focus on his controversial stands on social issues and warn that he is a dangerous ideologue more likely to divide than unite.
“There’s clearly a lot of concern around Mike Johnson and what he stands for and where he stands,” says Christa Case Bryant, the Monitor’s senior congressional correspondent, on our “Why We Wrote This” podcast.
One of the main concerns is what critics see as his involvement in attempts to challenge the results of the 2020 elections. “There is a tendency to put everybody in one big election-denialism box,” she adds, including Jan. 6 protesters who broke into the Capitol and constitutional lawyers like Mr. Johnson who pursued questions about the elections through the legal system.
The high stakes around these issues put a special burden on journalists not to merely amplify dueling narratives but to probe them with enough specificity that readers can work out their own conclusions.
“We shouldn’t be surprised that it’s hard to get it right in the first week of the first month,” Christa adds. “We as journalists will be doing that in the weeks and months to come.”
Episode transcript
Gail Chaddock: Mike Johnson was barely known when he was elected House speaker, second in line to the presidency. The rush to define him since that vote has produced sharply different narratives. Some see a fresh voice, committed to civility and responsible government. Others describe a dangerous ideologue, election denier, and would be theocrat, more likely to stoke fear than forge unity.
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Chaddock: This is “Why We Wrote This.” I’m this week’s guest host, Gail Chaddock. We’re talking with Christa Case Bryant, the Monitor’s senior congressional correspondent, and frequent guest on this podcast. Welcome back, Christa.
Christa Case Bryant: Great to be back. Thanks, Gail.
Chaddock: Christa, the last time you joined us, we were talking about then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and his prospects for uniting a deeply divided Republican caucus. I love how you framed that question. You left Washington and its echo chamber. And you found an interesting angle on it: that he had more capacity than the traditional narrative would allow.
Bryant: Yes. When I went out to Bakersfield, California, his hometown, to learn more about Speaker McCarthy and what made him tick, the No. 1 thing that I heard from people who’ve known him for decades is that his special talent is getting people together behind closed doors, away from the cameras, and really helping them come to compromises or deals.
But, I think what’s become clear in the last couple of months is that that strength may have also been a vulnerability. He was probably stretching himself to meet demands on one side and then also stretching in the other direction. And then if people started talking among themselves or things got leaked out to the press, they start realizing, “Wait, he’s promising so many different things that there’s no way he’s going to be able to make good on all of these different promises.” And I suspect that that was part of what undermined trust and then caused him to be ousted.
Chaddock: After he was gone, I thought of your story again. Because the narrative on Kevin McCarthy shifted. Suddenly, he was a genius fundraiser. How would they ever function without him? He brought together a very diverse class of freshmen. And I’m thinking, where was this appreciative narrative back when he needed it in the middle of those 15 votes?
Bryant: Right, exactly, and I think it just speaks somewhat to the difficulty of governing with such a narrow majority. I can tell you, among the press corps, there was just a feeling of, “Oh my gosh, is this ever going to end?” You know, once he was ousted and they kept trying to find somebody else who could get enough support in the caucus to win the speakership.
Mike Johnson was a surprise, but he didn’t have much of a honeymoon before people started diving in and finding things to criticize about him.
Chaddock: You know, that’s also an interesting story of evolving narrative. I think back, first of all, to that sense of relief that Congress was going to be able to function again. There’s all this talk after his maiden speech of, you know, what a change of tone he was going to bring to Washington, you know? Civil, positive, even gracious. And as you say that shifted quickly. What’s going on?
Bryant: There’s clearly a lot of concern around Mike Johnson. There have been a lot of really specific quotations or references to the many things that Mike Johnson has said over the years about a lot of these hot button topics, particularly abortion and homosexuality and same sex marriage. After Roe v. Wade was overturned, he called it a great, joyous occasion. And he later wrote on Twitter that “We will get the number of abortions to ZERO,” and he was referring to his home state of Louisiana. I think a lot of those sorts of things have generated a great deal of concern.
A lot of people have started talking about Mike Johnson in the context of Christian nationalism. And I’ve been reading a lot of those articles and oftentimes, they rest on a quote or multiple quotes from college professors who study Christian nationalism and who say: “You know, he’s a textbook example of this,” or “it’s highly unusual to have someone in this elevated a leadership position who fits this mold.” But almost none of the articles give any specifics about, “OK, what is it exactly that he’s said or done that causes you to identify him as a Christian nationalist?” Some of them don’t even define what they mean by Christian nationalism. So, there’s a need to be more specific about how people are coming to these conclusions.
I think just way beyond the speakership race and Mike Johnson himself, I’ve observed that there’s this effort to put people in boxes and figure out quickly where they stand on things. And people try to reduce uncertainty or fear by saying, “OK, I know where this person stands, and therefore this is how I should relate to them.” I think that may be part of why we’re seeing this rush to put him in a box.
Chaddock: Well, this is also a textbook case for journalists: How do you investigate whether or not these concerns that you’re hearing are valid? Fear and anger are the currency of voter turnout. This is political organizing 101. How do you, in your own work, try to figure out how to probe beneath the soundbite to see what’s there?
Bryant: I always try to find primary documents or sources and link to those, so that my readers can see for themselves where I’m getting something. So, for example, when I was writing my piece about Mike Johnson, I knew that one of the big criticisms against him was that he was very opposed to homosexuality and same sex marriage. And one of the key things that I kept coming across was that he had co-sponsored a piece of legislation last year that would prohibit federal funds [from] being used to educate young people under the age of 10, I think it was, about a whole range of, basically, sex ed.
But included in that was topics of sexual orientation and transgenderism and things like that. It was widely described as a federal version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill. And I found the piece of legislation, and I read as much as I could on deadline, to try to get a sense of like: “OK, what was it that they were actually doing here, and what was the rationale that they provided for doing that?” And they cited some very specific examples of things that federal funds had been used to teach children about, and some of them were so sexually explicit that my editors actually insisted on taking them out of the story.
And I think, you know, that doesn’t absolve Mike Johnson of the criticism, or it might not assuage the concerns behind that criticism. But it does provide a level of specificity, and a document that somebody who’s concerned can go read and come to their own conclusions.
Chaddock: It’s interesting, too, to look at the conclusions that are drawn from some of these toxic quotations, which go viral and then take on a meaning larger than, as you say, the context they may be in. I was reading a piece in the Guardian by a college professor who had this line: “The Republicans who elected Johnson speaker by a unanimous vote have aligned themselves with total political rule by an intolerant religious sect.” Now that’s a leap. I think that may be part of the dynamics of how these narratives get established and perpetuate themselves.
Bryant: Well, and I think that points to a way that journalism has been changing in recent years. Back in the day, journalism was about, you know, answering five basic questions, “Who, what, when, where, why?” and then it sort of evolved into well, everybody already knows what happens because there’s a million people publishing stuff online. So now the real value we can add is explaining what that means, and sometimes in the process of doing that, the “who, what, when, where, why” questions get short shrift a little bit.
It’s a big ecosystem. I actually do think that it’s really valuable to have some media sources doing what I think they genuinely and sincerely believe is a service of sort of being canaries in the coal mine, like: “Look, there’s major concerns about American democracy. And we’re not going to just dance around the edges, or just give you the facts and hope you connect the dots.” And I do think that there’s a valuable place for that.
But I think the challenge is when the whole ecosystem becomes one or the other, then you sort of lose that balance and that complementary nature of the different types of journalism. It creates an environment where if you want to be seen as a respectable journalist, there’s sort of no-go zones. Like you just don’t address certain questions or you don’t entertain certain arguments, even to analyze them and determine whether they’re valid or not. And my concern, having started my beat in Congress the week of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and seeing what that kind of anger could do and could result in, my concern is that by just so ... refusing to engage with ideas that are animating a huge portion of the American population, that divide’s just going to grow wider and the potential for violence will become greater.
Chaddock: Part of this narrative is to describe Johnson as a leading election denier, or the leading election-denier, aside from the former president himself. Do you think that’s accurate?
Bryant: Well, I think that specificity is really helpful. There’s a tendency to put everybody in one big election-denialism box, you know. And that includes January 6 protesters who showed up with bear spray and were shattering the windows to get into the Capitol. And it includes a constitutional lawyer like Mike Johnson, who was pursuing these questions through the legal system.
It seems that Mike Johnson played two key roles. One was he led an amicus brief on a case brought by Texas regarding four swing states. That case was basically saying that these four states violated the constitution because they circumvented the constitutional role of state legislatures to be the ones to determine how elections should be carried out. And the Supreme Court said: “Well, Texas doesn’t have standing to bring that case because Texas is not one of the four swing states and wasn’t affected by what happened there.” And so the case was thrown out on standing.
So what my colleague Sophie Hills and I were trying to figure out on deadline is, [...] did the arguments themselves not hold any weight. And what we were able to figure out is [that] even if the arguments had had weight, you can’t bring something like that after an election because they really should have been brought before the election, because once everybody votes according to the ways that the state officials have determined is legal, it’s not fair to say: “Oh, well, we just need a complete redo, or we’re just going to throw out all your votes,” or whatever.
And then the other main role he had, and this is where he’s called the leading architect of the Electoral College challenge, is, you know, you had Trump pressuring members of Congress to vote against certifying the election, and then you had some minority of Republicans saying: “You can’t do this, this is totally wrong and unconstitutional. This is not our role and also just think of what would happen if the Dems followed suit the next time our guy won.” And so, Mike Johnson came in with like a third way, which is: “You don’t have to go along with everything Trump’s saying about the election being ‘rigged’ or ‘stolen.’ What you can say is just the changes that were made leading up to election day were unconstitutional, and that’s all, that’s why we want to investigate this further.” And so a lot of members of Congress cited Mike Johnson’s legal arguments in explaining why they chose not to certify the election. And so that’s why he’s been identified as such a key player in all of this.
Chaddock: This speaker has made a great point, both before and after his election, to a commitment to civility. Is there any evidence, looking at him now, looking at how he’s functioning, that this commitment is real?
Bryant: Well, I did think it was noteworthy that in his maiden speech just after being elected speaker, pretty much the very first line was a recognition of his Democratic counterpart, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. And he said: “I know that in your heart you love and care about this country and want to do what’s right. We’re going to find common ground there.” And you can say, well, words are cheap, and anybody can say that – it’s another thing to do it. But in the current environment in Congress, even just saying something like that, putting it at the beginning of your speech, is significant. And it’s a change in tone from how the Democrats were talking about Mike Johnson. It’s a change in tone from how many Republicans have talked about their Democratic colleagues. And so I think it’s significant, and time will tell to what extent he can walk the walk as well as talk the talk.
Chaddock: Does that mean that groups with genuine concerns about comments he’s made about homosexuality, trans [issues], abortion, women’s place and so forth – are their concerns illegitimate?
Bryant: No, I think those concerns are very legitimate. My sense is that there’s a feeling that: “Wait, we thought we’d moved beyond this,” you know, just like with Roe v. Wade. Like, “we thought this was settled law for decades, and now somehow Republicans have managed to turn back the page. And well, can it happen with all these different things that we thought were settled?” And I think that’s an important part of this story, too, reporting out what is it that concerns you? What sort of hurt has he caused already? How much of this is, like about what he already did in the past versus his potential to do more harm going forward?
Mike Johnson embodies sort of the entire culture wars of the United States in one guy. And so to unpack all of that and its ramifications for the Republican Party, for Congress, for American citizens across the spectrum, and to do it in a way that is fair, and not shirking from controversy, but also nuanced and respectful, is just a huge challenge. And so, we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s hard to get it right in the first week or the first month. We all as journalists will be doing that in the weeks and months to come.
Chaddock: Christa, thank you for that. Thank you for being willing to write about questions that are right at the edge of thought and still pushing them.
Bryant: Thank you, Gail. It’s always a pleasure to talk with you about Congress.
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Chaddock: And thanks to our listeners. You can find more, including our show notes with a link to the stories we’ve discussed in this podcast, at CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Gail Chaddock, edited and produced by Clay Collins, Jingnan Peng, and Mackenzie Farkus. Our sound engineers were Tim Malone and Alyssa Britton, with original music by Noel Flatt. Produced by The Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2023.
