By Staff @ LPR
Mike Johnson has a record as Speaker that conservatives can defend, and The Wall Street Journal's editorial board said as much this week in "Mike Johnson's Good House Service." Louisiana readers should take that verdict seriously, along with the fair criticism that comes with it.
The occasion is a hard one. Republicans lost the House in Tuesday's midterms, and on Wednesday Johnson told colleagues in a letter obtained by Axios that he would not seek a leadership post in the 120th Congress, citing what the job has asked of his wife and children. He is not leaving Congress. The Associated Press reports that he won a sixth term from his Shreveport-area district and is expected to stay on as a rank-and-file member.
The case for his tenure rests on laws, and laws can be checked. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025, extended the 2017 tax cuts and carried changes to Medicaid that conservatives had sought for years. The April 2024 national security package funded aid to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan, and it set a deadline for TikTok's Chinese owner to divest the app or face a ban on its distribution in the United States. Neither passed easily, and both went through a House he had led only since his election as Speaker on Oct. 25, 2023, after weeks of Republican infighting that LPR covered at the time.
The aid vote is the part of that record most worth defending, because it cost him the most with his own side. A conservative who believes deterrence keeps Americans out of wars should want allies armed against Russia, Iran and China. Johnson made that choice knowing much of the online right would call it betrayal, and he made it anyway. That is what leadership looks like when it is not convenient.
His critics deserve a straight hearing. Populist conservatives see the Ukraine money, and spending deals that needed Democratic votes to pass, as a departure from what the voters who elected the majority wanted. And the bottom line in politics is the scoreboard. He led the conference into this election, and it lost the majority. Fair-minded supporters should not pretend that does not count.
Where we part with those critics is on blame. In the editorial reproduced on Johnson's official House website, the Journal places much of the blame on forces around the Speaker rather than on him. We think that judgment holds. A Speaker with a narrow majority does not set the national mood, pick the candidates or control the President's demands. Johnson kept the House functioning and passed the bills that mattered most. Axios reports he spent months raising money and campaigning to hold the majority. The loss happened anyway.
For Louisiana, the practical point is that the state stands to keep a former Speaker with deep relationships in the conference, and that is worth something to a delegation with a lot riding on federal energy, coastal and disaster policy. LPR has argued before that his ability to move hard legislation deserves more credit at home than it gets. The approaching end of his speakership is a fair time to say so again.
Photo: House Speaker Mike Johnson speaks at the Friends of Ireland Luncheon at the U.S. Capitol, March 12, 2025. Office of Speaker Mike Johnson via Wikimedia Commons, public domain. File photo.
