“Rep. Mike Johnson’s relative anonymity inside the Republican conference helped him make the unlikely jump from three-term congressman to speaker of the House,” The Messenger reports.

“But that lack of a public profile is also exactly what excites Democrats as they begin their efforts to publicize the Louisiana Republican’s conservative positions on abortion, same-sex marriage, and the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen ahead of the 2024 campaign.”

“Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has a history of harsh anti-gay language from his time as an attorney for a socially conservative legal group in the mid-2000s,” CNN reports.

“In editorials that ran in his local Shreveport, Louisiana, paper, The Times, Johnson called homosexuality a ‘inherently unnatural’ and ‘dangerous lifestyle’ that would lead to legalized pedophilia and possibly even destroy ‘the entire democratic system.'”

“And, in another editorial, he wrote, ‘Your race, creed, and sex are what you are, while homosexuality and cross-dressing are things you do. This is a free country, but we don’t give special protections for every person’s bizarre choices.'”

“Mike Johnson is Jim Jordan in a sports coat.”

— Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesman Viet Shelton, quoted by The Atlantic.

Punchbowl News: “Johnson is a paltry fundraiser, having brought in just a half-million dollars in the third quarter of 2023. By comparison, former Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California raised $15.3 million over the same period.”

Playbook: “Remember that there were two giant electoral drags on the GOP during the 2022 elections: (1) denialism about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, and (2) policies on abortion rights that voters saw as overly restrictive or out of the mainstream.”

“Now, the Republicans have elected a speaker who Dems bet they’ll be able to use as an albatross around the neck of every Republican in a swing district or suburban seat. He was the architect of a lawsuit to overturn results of the 2020 race. He has supported abortion restrictions that make no exceptions for rape, incest or the life of the mother. He fits neatly into their talking points about ‘MAGA extremism’ in the GOP.”

“And given his brief time in Congress, they see the rare chance to define a leader of the opposing party before Washington (or the press) knows much of anything about him.”

Punchbowl News: “Johnson is far from a household name. This is an opportunity for Democrats to establish a vision of Johnson in the minds of voters.”

Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) was elected Speaker of the House in a floor vote with every Republican falling behind the fourth-term lawmaker.

Johnson is the least experienced speaker elected in 140 years.

NBC News: Five things to know about Mike Johnson.

“Voters in a Tennessee city have firmly rejected a far-right mayoral candidate after she refused to denounce her white supremacist supporters, and the incumbent mayor decried hate and divisiveness as he celebrated his election win,” the AP reports.

“Gabrielle Hanson lost the race by a wide margin Tuesday.”

The House of Representatives will consider candidates for speaker shortly after convening at 12 p.m. ET.

Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) is the nominee for the Republican majority.

Watch the proceedings and leave your reactions in the comments.

Tim Miller: “For about a decade and a half now the governing wing of the party has attempted every strategy imaginable to delay handing congressional leadership power to the group of lawmakers who better represent the desires of today’s GOP voters—the erstwhile renegades the late John McCain dubbed ‘wacko birds.’ That group has grown from only a handful of troublemakers to a significant bloc of Congress that’s bolstered by an additional group of “closet normals” who dress in wacko bird costumes for the retweets.”

“Throughout this period, Republican congressional leaders have taken whatever steps they thought necessary to accommodate and placate these members as long as they could retain what they saw as the real power—leadership posts, committee assignments, big-donor private jet rides—for themselves.”

“Among the many lowlights of this long-running spectacle of appeasement: engaging in wildly irresponsible brinkmanship, granting plum committee assignments to kooks, submitting to power-sharing arrangements and hosting struggle sessions with the House Freedom Caucus, launching sham impeachment inquiries, holding umpty-nine explicitly political hearings over a deadly embassy attack, flying down to an extremely dated South Florida resort to take degrading pictures with a wannabe authoritarian, defending a drag queen fabulist in their ranks, and, most egregiously, agreeing to be complicit in an attempt to overthrow our democracy to soothe the bruised ego of the man-baby-in-chief.”

“The nation is depending upon your resolve. We must exhaust every available legal remedy to restore Americans’ trust in the fairness of our election system.”

— Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA), quoted by Bloomberg on November 7, 2020, urging Donald Trump to fight the election results.

Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy endorsed Rep. Mike Johnson for speaker, Politico reports.

Three other failed speaker designees, Reps. Jim Jordan, Tom Emmer and Steve Scalise, also backed Johnson.

“I no longer doubt the decision to run for the Senate. Too many Senators think they should be president. Some House members think they should be king.”

— Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND), quoted by Semafor.

Punchbowl News: “Johnson stands a good chance of getting to 217. After former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, he may be the best positioned of any House Republican to do so. Johnson can lose only four votes, so this will be tough. But he can make it. Both House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, who failed in their own speaker bids, have offered support.”

“Three GOP lawmakers voted ‘present’ last night in the private GOP-only roll-call vote… There were another 23 absences. This is where Johnson’s problems will be, if he has any. Some may be holdouts, but there was also an event last night that some GOP lawmakers attended instead of the vote.”

The key takeaway: “If Republicans can’t elect Johnson as speaker, the game is up. Moderate Republicans will go to the floor and join with Democrats to elect Speaker Pro Tem Patrick McHenry for some indeterminate period of time. The House has been without a speaker for 22 days. Members are fed up with the paralysis.”

“Yet this actually works in Johnson’s favor. If Republicans rally around him, they’ll end up with a speaker elected by just GOP lawmakers without owing Democrats anything.”

“It was clear from the start that House Republicans would struggle to govern this year given their deep ideological divisions, narrow majority and myriad personal feuds and grudges. But even the most pessimistic of predictions could not have captured the remarkable, drawn-out Republican self-own now raging on Capitol Hill,” the New York Times reports.

“In merrily decapitating their third speaker candidate on Tuesday in a move worthy of the French Revolution, House Republicans took a situation that did not seem like it could get any worse to a breathtaking new low. They piled chaos upon chaos as members threw up their hands in frustration and anger over their inability to coalesce.”

Semafor: Republicans suddenly optimistic after nominating Mike Johnson for speaker.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) told Fox News the eight Republicans who voted to remove Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) as speaker should apologize to “heal the conference.”