Hey Mike, Are You There? It’s Me, Jesus.

How Speaker Johnson prays away his constitutional responsibilities

Speaker Mike Johnson. Look past the dewy skin. The practiced smile. The soft piety wrapped in the adolescent confidence of a high school boy who just got a hand job behind the bleachers in the shadow of Friday night lights. For a while, you want to wave it off. Let him have his moment. The assumption is that time will do what it always does, reduce him to what he is: another forgettable congressman from a forgettable district, dressed up in Warby Parker frames and a Jos. A. Bank suit, playing statesman in a city full of them.

It’s not that simple. He has enabled the United States into an undeclared war. He has the power to do something about it. He won’t. Understanding why is the story. It is a terrifying peek behind the curtain.

Johnson isn’t just a type. He’s a concentration of several troubling ones. He represents a particular strain of American public life where religion gets reshaped into something rigid and punitive, where the Constitution becomes a prop rather than a framework, a…