Mike Johnson

President Joe Biden has put himself in an awkward position as the 2024 Democratic primary inches closer. The Democratic Party voted last February to change its primary calendar, honoring South Carolina as the first state to vote and demoting Iowa and New Hampshire. The DNC spun a yarn that South Carolina should vote first because it has a larger black population, but that seems a neat excuse to cover up the fact that really they are rewarding South Carolina for being the state that revived Biden’s 2020 campaign after humiliating defeats in Iowa and New Hampshire.Either way, the new primary schedule may come back to bite Biden and the Democratic establishment.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where after three long weeks, the Republicans in the House finally found their path toward a speaker — and boy is it a Flamin’ Hot Cheeto of a choice. Louisiana’s Mike Johnson, known for his kinglike dominance of the green line meme, is your new speaker of the House. He is eminently difficult to categorize, a cipher, an ardent social conservative with little in the way of fiscal conservative instincts but with a lot in favor of Zionist support for Israel. If you are a Squad member, this guy’s your nightmare. But he’s also likely to drive the media crazy, because he’s basically an unupdated social conservative from 2004. Perhaps not exactly what the Democrats had in mind when they helped Matt Gaetz knife Kevin McCarthy.

It took a few weeks, but Republicans got their act together and did the impossible: elected a new speaker of the House, Louisiana’s Mike Johnson. Johnson and his team have an incredible amount of work ahead of them — from funding the government to fundraising for House Republicans. What’s particularly noteworthy to me in the hours ahead of Johnson becoming speaker is the all-out effort Democrats and their media mouthpieces are making to define him — mostly by spreading provable misinformation.  Johnson’s Democratic counterparts on the Judiciary Committee immediately lashed out at him for being a member of the Freedom Caucus, which is an outright lie.

Will today be the day we get a permanent speaker of the House? It’s tough to say. House Republicans huddled this morning to figure out who they will put forward as their speaker-designee in the hopes that someone — perhaps, anyone! — can steer the rowdy House at a time of growing international strife. They eventually settled on Minnesota representative Tom Emmer. There’s no guarantee that Emmer will even get the required votes from the full House, however. To minimize that possibility, Representative Mike Flood circulated a “loyalty pledge” of sorts that all current speaker candidates signed, which requires them to support whoever the conference selects. Flood noted to me, though, that even Jesus Christ would struggle to get to 217 votes in this House GOP conference.