The New Yorker:

Though he has adopted a “nerd constitutional-law guy” persona, he is in lockstep with the law-flouting former President.

By David D. Kirkpatrick

The Capitol Hill Club, in a white brick town house a few blocks from the House of Representatives, is a social institution exclusively for Republicans. One evening in October, Representative Mike Garcia was eating there alone when Representative Mike Johnson stopped to chat. Garcia is a first-generation immigrant and a retired Navy pilot from a Democratic-leaning district in Southern California. His predecessor, a Democrat, resigned after a scandal four years ago, and Garcia highlighted disagreements with his party to win reëlection in 2022. He was also a loyalist to former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a fellow-Californian who had just been ousted by a small band of hard-line conservative rebels annoyed at his willingness to compromise on budget disputes. Garcia had formally nominated McCarthy as Speaker at the beginning of 2023, and his removal deprived Garcia of a patron.

Johnson was personally and ideologically close to the rebels. His district, in northwest Louisiana, votes lopsidedly Republican, and his voting record was as far to the right as that of anyone in the G.O.P. Where Garcia talked about his immigrant story and combat experience, Johnson was a conservative Christian litigator who sometimes warned that hordes of “military-age” migrants were “coming to a neighborhood near you.” Yet, unlike other Republican hard-liners, he cultivated a mild and bookish persona. He wore horn-rimmed glasses, called himself “a nerd constitutional-law guy,” and garlanded his speeches with quotes from Chesterton and Tocqueville. Johnson had only a small national profile, but inside the Republican conference he was a comer. In 2018, after his first term in Congress, he had been elected chairman of the Republican Study Committee, a conservative caucus that includes about three-quarters of the House G.O.P. and often launches lawmakers toward Party leadership.

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