Jezebel
New House Speaker Mike Johnson Wants Women to Pop Out ‘Able-Bodied Workers’ to Fund Social Security
Kylie Cheung – October 25, 2023
Dear reader, with a heavy heart, I regret to introduce you to our new House Speaker, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.). After three long weeks of House Republicans debasing themselves (and debasing former Speaker nominees Steve Scalise (R-La.), Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), and Tom Emmer (R-Minn.)) to find a new Speaker, the caucus went with Johnson late Tuesday night, and voted him into the position Wednesday afternoon after a single ballot.
Where previous nominees flailed around, caucus support for Johnson was resounding. Scalise and Jordan were both Speaker nominees for a number of odd days before it became clear there was no path forward; Jordan saw massive rifts form in his relationships with a handful of his caucus after they received a slew of death and other threats in his name. Emmer was the nominee for just over the run-time of Avengers: Endgame. But when Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) nominated Johnson on the House floor, caucus members reportedly cheered and chanted, “Mike! Mike! Mike!”
In his remarks, not only does Johnson claim Roe “gave constitutional cover to the elective killing of unborn children,” but he rails against the imagined economic detriments of abortion, pushing his caucus’ outlandish claim that by depleting a hypothetical workforce, abortion has defunded social security: “Think about the implications of that on the economy. We’re all struggling here to cover the bases of social security and Medicare and Medicaid and all the rest,” Johnson says. “If we had all those able-bodied workers in the economy we wouldn’t be going upside down and toppling over like this… Roe was a terrible corruption.” Mind you, social security and health care have been gutted in the last several years by Republican lawmakers, not people who choose to end a pregnancy.
Alas, this is the man who will be presiding over the House moving forward as the threat of another government shutdown looms. This is the man who will be relied on to forge the bipartisan agreements necessary to pass a budget and keep the wheels of our government in motion. You’ll have to excuse me if I’m not feeling overly optimistic about things right now.