GOP Speaker “MAGA Moses” Mike Johnson (R-LA) does not
believe in separation of church and state – he needs it to be 100% connected
and his view of national policy, and the constitution be damned.
Two startling news reports below from ESQUIRE with this headline and full story (formatted for the blog):
“Mike Johnson's Delusions of Religious Grandeur are Making People Very Nervous”
Speaker Johnson is surely the most obvious theocrat to occupy a space in the presidential line of succession in two centuries.
No Speaker has ever declared himself to be the modern day Moses while the majority he purports to lead thins almost to invisibility.
Now, it seems that “MAGA Moses Mike and his delusions of religious grandeur” are making people very nervous.
The second news source is from The Guardian and it is even worse
with this their headline article:
“Speaker Mike Johnson
calls separation of church and state a misnomer”
Christian nationalist GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson
bemoans “misunderstanding” of one of the U.S. founding principles
Story highlights
from the GUARDIAN:
The second-in-line to the presidency informed Americans that
our time-honored conception of one of the founding principles of the country
was a “misunderstanding.” Speaking to CNBC’s Squawk Box, he
tried to turn the conventional wisdom about the founders’ intentions on its
head and claimed what they really wanted was to stop government interfering
with religion, not the other way around.
Johnson said in an
interview with the TV channel from the Capitol: “The separation of church
and state is a misnomer. People misunderstand it. Of course, it comes from a
phrase that was in a letter that Jefferson wrote. It’s not in the
constitution.”
Johnson was referring
to Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut,
written in 1802 when the third president was in the White House.
It makes clear that the
founding fathers subscribed to a powerful separation of church and state, which
they enshrined in the establishment clause of the first amendment.
Jefferson in his letter
quotes the establishment clause (First Amendment) saying that Congress shall not: “Make
no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof.”
He went on to say that it
builds: “A wall of separation between Church & State.”
Johnson’s contentious remarks fall in line with years of
effort on his part to bring Christianity into the center of American politics
and a separation of Church and State.
The New
York Times has dubbed him the first Christian nationalist to hold the
powerful position of speaker.
Johnson’s private remarks to a small group of Republican
lawmakers at Miami’s Mandarin Oriental Hotel alarmed people, who addressed
the speech on condition of anonymity.
Rather than outlining a specific plan to hold and grow the
majority, these people said, Johnson effectively delivered a sermon. He showed
slides to the members of his Elected Leadership Committee (ELC) team in a bid
to tout the party’s prospects of hanging onto its two-seat majority in
November.
Johnson, a devout Christian, attempted to rally the group by
discussing moral decline in America — focusing on declining church membership
and the nation’s shrinking religious identity, according to people in the room.
He contended: “That when one doesn’t have God in their life,
the government or state will become their guide,” (referring back to Bible
verses, two people said).
One of the two people there added that the approach fell flat among some
in the room, then adding this part of the story he said: “I’m not at church he described Johnson’s presentation as horrible.”
The politically active evangelical splinter Protestantism with whom the GOP made a bargain back in the late 1970's has come finally to collect what has been owed to it since the election of Ronald Reagan. It achieved its long-held goal of overturning Roe v. Wade, and the current Republican frontrunner, *perhaps the most thoroughgoing heathen ever to be elected to the presidency* has promised to sign a nationwide ban on the procedure if one reaches his desk if and when he returns to misrule.
For example:
Heritage's Project 2025: A Mandate For Leadership a proposed policy plan for Trump’s “Grifter Restoration” is nothing short of a blueprint for a new, muscular patriarchy. The damned thing is almost 900 pages long, and every one of those pages is dripping with unbridled lust for authoritarianism in all aspects of American life, including the Family.
It turns the
entire public health apparatus into an investigative apparatus to chase down
anyone associated with having, performed, or enabling an abortion. That, of
course, while enfeebling in the CDC’s ability to respond to any future pandemics
because ... of freedom.
1. The document goes to war with the FDA over
mifepristone.
2. Every element of the public health bureaucracy
is turned into a fanatical modern equivalent of Operation Rescue.
3. For example, the proposal tightly restricts IVF
and other aids to fertility, as well as stem-cell protocols, on the basis of
anti-choice philosophizing.
4. Research using fetal tissue obtained from
elective abortions is immoral and obsolete.
5. Research using human embryonic stem cells also
involves the destruction of human life and should not be subsidized with
taxpayer dollars
6. Good science and life-affirming, ethical
research are not mutually exclusive.
7. In fact, ethically derived sources such as
discarded surgical tissue and adult stem cells (made pluripotent), not tissue
obtained from elective abortions, have contributed the most successful
treatments for a variety of ailments.
This is not an idle document (Project 2025) – it is
especially designed for Trump.
It is the product of a massive collective effort on the part of almost the entire Powell Memo apparatus behind American conservatism.
This
is the monster behind MAGA Moses Mike Johnson. This is his golden calf.
My 2 Cents: There is no doubt in my mind that Speaker Mike Johnson should step aside, better yet resign from congress and go back home to Louisiana and take up full-time preaching.
He does not belong in congress which
also places him second in line for the presidency, God forbid something were to
happen to President Biden and VP Harris.
All of the above and his
now almost daily antics proves that he is way out of touch with reality and
even a growing number of Republicans see and know that too as more of in key
slots are electing to resign, retire, just get out, or now using this tactic against him.
Johnson, in a word, has to
go – he has zero leadership skills and the proof is around him now 24/7 along with this related happening in this now so-called “MAGA Moses” Mike Johnson-run
GOP.
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