The factors that lead to tragedies like the Lewiston shooting are deeply ingrained in US politics, culture, and law.
At least 16 people — and according to some officials, as many as 22 — have been killed and several dozen injured in a mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine, the northern state’s second-largest city.
The shooter wasn’t immediately apprehended and appears to have opened fire at two locations on Wednesday evening: a bowling alley and bar on Wednesday. State and local law enforcement have asked residents of Lewiston and the surrounding area to shelter in place as officials work to find the shooter. Schools and many businesses in the area have been shuttered.
The shooter, whose picture has been shared as part of the search effort, is believed to be a 40 year old white man who worked as firearms teacher and an US Army reservist.
The Lewiston shooting was of several hundred mass shootings this year; and it follows a number of other mass shootings this week, including in Colorado, Chicago, and Louisiana. This kind of violence is unique to the US and should not be normalized.
No other high-income country has suffered such a high death toll from gun violence. Every day, 120 Americans die at the end of a gun, including suicides and homicides, an average of 43,375 per year. According to the latest available analysis of data from 2015 to 2019, the US gun homicide rate was 26 times that of other high-income countries; its gun suicide rate was nearly 12 times higher. Mass shootings, defined as attacks in which at least four people are injured or killed excluding the shooter, have been on the rise since 2015, peaking at 686 incidents in 2021. There have been 564 mass shootings in the US in 2023 as of late October, and at the current pace, the US is set to eclipse the 2021 record this year.
Despite that sheer carnage, however, the political debate over how to ensure that guns don’t fall into the hands of people who may hurt themselves and others has long proved intractable. Last year, Congress reached a deal on limited gun reforms for the first time in nearly 30 years in the wake of a shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas — the deadliest school shooting since 2012.
But those narrow reforms clearly haven’t stopped America’s gun violence epidemic. The US’s expansive view of civilian gun ownership has been so ingrained in politics, in culture, and in the law since the nation’s founding that there’s no telling how many more people will die before federal lawmakers take further action. In that absence, many red states have loosened their gun laws over the last few years, rather than making it harder to obtain a gun.
“America is unique in that guns have always been present, there is wide civilian ownership, and the government hasn’t claimed more of a monopoly on them,” said David Yamane, a professor at Wake Forest University who studies American gun culture.
The US has a lot of guns, and more guns mean more gun deaths
It’s hard to estimate the number of privately owned guns in America since there is no countrywide database where people register whether they own guns, there is a thriving black market for them in the absence of strong federal gun trafficking laws, and people can manufacture their own guns with DIY kits or 3D printers. The gun lobby has also vehemently opposed federal legislation to track gun sales and establish a national handgun registry.
One estimate from the Small Arms Survey, a Swiss-based research project, found that there were approximately 390 million guns in circulation in the US in 2018, or about 120.5 firearms per 100 residents. That number has likely climbed in the years since, given that one in five households purchased a gun during the pandemic, though the 2018 estimate remains the most recent available. There has also been a significant increase in the number of guns manufactured and imported in the years since. But even without accounting for that increase, US gun ownership is still well above any other country: Yemen, which has the world’s second-highest level of gun ownership, has only 52.8 guns per 100 residents; in Iceland, it’s 31.7.
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Scott Olson/Getty Images
American guns are concentrated in a tiny minority of households: just 3 percent own about half the nation’s guns, according to a 2016 Harvard and Northeastern University study. They’re called “super owners” who have an average of 17 guns each. Gallup, using a different methodology, found that 45 percent of Americans lived in a household with guns in 2022.
Researchers have found a clear link between gun ownership in the US and gun violence, and some argue that it’s causal. One 2013 Boston University-led study, for instance, found that for each percentage point increase in gun ownership at the household level, the state firearm homicide rate increased by 0.9 percent. And states with weaker gun laws have higher rates of gun-related homicides and suicides, according to a study by the gun control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety.
The link between gun deaths and gun ownership is much stronger than the link that gun rights advocates often seek to draw between violence and mental health issues. If it were possible to cure all schizophrenia, bipolar, and depressive disorders, violent crime in the US would fall by only 4 percent, according to a study from Duke University professor Jeffrey Swanson, who examines policies to reduce gun violence.
There’s still a pervasive idea, pushed by gun manufacturers and gun rights organizations like the National Rifle Association, that further arming America is the answer to preventing gun violence — the “good guy with a gun” theory. But there have been relatively few instances in which police or armed bystanders have been able to successfully stop an active attack.
According to a database maintained by Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University, there were 520 active attacks — defined as when one or more people are “actively killing or attempting to kill multiple unrelated people in a public space,” including but not limited to shootings — between 2000 and 2022. In many of those cases, police were unable to stop the attacker, either because the attack had already ended by the time they arrived or because the attacker surrendered or committed suicide. Only in 160 cases were police able to successfully intervene by shooting or otherwise subduing the attacker.
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Another 2021 study from Hamline University and Metropolitan State University found that the rate of deaths in 133 mass school shootings between 1980 and 2019 was 2.83 times greater in cases where there was an armed guard present. The researchers argue the results suggest the presence of an armed guard increased shooters’ aggression and that because many school shooters have been found to be suicidal, “an armed officer may be an incentive rather than a deterrent.”
“The idea that the solution to mass shootings is that we need more guns in the hands of more people in more places so that we’ll be able to protect ourselves — there’s no evidence that that’s true,” Swanson said.
The prevalence of the self-defense narrative is part of what sets apart the gun rights movement in the US from similar movements in places like Canada and Australia, according to Robert Spitzer, a professor at SUNY Cortland who studies the politics of gun control.
Self-defense has become by far the most prominent reason for gun ownership in the US today, eclipsing hunting, recreation, or owning guns because they’re antiques, heirlooms, or work-related. That’s also reflected in ballooning handgun sales, since the primary purpose of those guns isn’t recreational, but self-defense.
American gun culture “brings together the hunting-sporting tradition with the militia-frontier tradition, but in modern times the hunting element has been eclipsed by a heavily politicized notion that gun carrying is an expression of freedom, individuality, hostility to government, and personal self-protection,” Spitzer said.
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Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images
That culture of gun ownership in the US has made it all the more difficult to explore serious policy solutions to gun violence after mass shootings. In high-income countries lacking that culture, mass shootings have historically galvanized public support behind gun control measures that would seem extreme by US standards.
Canada banned military-style assault weapons two weeks after a 2020 mass shooting in Nova Scotia. In 2019, less than a month after the Christchurch massacre, New Zealand lawmakers passed a gun buyback scheme, as well as restrictions on AR-15s and other semiautomatic weapons, and they later established a firearms registry. The 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Australia spurred the government to buy back 650,000 firearms within a year, and murders and suicides plummeted as a result.
By contrast, nearly a decade went by after the 2012 school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, before Congress passed a new gun control law. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the law passed in June 2022, was relatively limited: It incentivized states to pass red flag laws, enhanced background checks for gun buyers under 21, and closed the “boyfriend loophole,” which allowed some people with domestic violence convictions to purchase guns. But it did not ban any types of weapons, and certain studies suggest that even truly universal background checks may have limited effects on gun violence.
At the same time, many states have sought to expand gun ownership in recent years. At least 27 states have now passed laws allowing residents to carry a handgun without a permit and allow school staff and teachers to carry guns on campus.
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“Other countries look at this problem and say, ‘People walking around in the community with handguns is just way too dangerous, so we’re going to broadly limit legal access to that and make exceptions on the margins for people who might have a good reason to have a gun,’” Swanson said. “Here we do just the opposite: We say that, because of the way that the Supreme Court interpreted the Second Amendment, everybody has the right to a gun for personal protection, and then we tried to make exceptions for really dangerous people, but we can’t figure out who they are.”
While the majority of Americans support more gun control restrictions, including universal background checks, a vocal Republican minority unequivocally opposes such laws — and is willing to put pressure on GOP lawmakers to do the same. Alongside the NRA, and a well-funded gun lobby, this contingent of voters sees gun control as a deciding issue, and one that could warrant a primary challenge for a lawmaker who votes for it.
The gun lobby has the advantage of enthusiasm. “Despite being outnumbered, Americans who oppose gun control are more likely to contact public officials about it and to base their votes on it,” Barnard College’s Matthew Lacombe explained in 2020. “As a result, many politicians believe that supporting gun regulation is more likely to lose them votes than to gain them votes.”
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Sarah Reingewirtz/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images
The Supreme Court has made it impossible to cure America’s gun violence epidemic
In 2008, the Supreme Court effectively wrote NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre’s “good guy with a gun” theory into the Constitution. The Court’s 5-4 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) was the first Supreme Court decision in American history to hold that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm. But it also went much further than that.
Heller held that one of the primary purposes of the Second Amendment is to protect the right of individuals — good guys with a gun, in LaPierre’s framework — to use firearms to stop bad guys with guns. As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in Heller, an “inherent right of self-defense has been central to the Second Amendment right.”
As a matter of textual interpretation, this holding makes no sense. The Second Amendment provides that “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
We don’t need to guess why the Second Amendment protects a right to firearms because it is right there in the Constitution. The Second Amendment’s purpose is to preserve “a well-regulated Militia,” not to allow individuals to use their weapons for personal self-defense.
For many years, the Supreme Court took the first 13 words of the Second Amendment seriously. As the Court said in United States v. Miller (1939), the “obvious purpose” of the Second Amendment was to “render possible the effectiveness” of militias. And thus the amendment must be “interpreted and applied with that end in view.” Heller abandoned that approach.
Heller also reached another important policy conclusion. Handguns, according to Scalia, are “overwhelmingly chosen” by gun owners who wish to carry a firearm for self-defense. For this reason, he wrote, handguns enjoy a kind of super-legal status. Lawmakers are not allowed to ban what Scalia described as “the most preferred firearm in the nation to ‘keep’ and use for protection of one’s home and family.”
This declaration regarding handguns matters because this easily concealed weapon is responsible for far more deaths than any other weapon in the United States — and it isn’t close. In 2021, for example, a total of 14,616 people were murdered in the US, according to the FBI. Of these murder victims, at least 5,992 — just over 40 percent — were killed by handguns.
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Allison Dinner/AFP via Getty Images
Last year, the Supreme Court made it even harder for federal and state lawmakers to combat gun violence. In its decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, it massively expands the scope of the Second Amendment, abandons more than a decade of case law governing which gun laws are permitted by the Constitution, and replaces this case law with a new legal framework that, as Justice Stephen Breyer writes in dissent, “imposes a task on the lower courts that judges cannot easily accomplish.”
Bruen has since allowed handguns — which are responsible for the overwhelming majority of gun murders in the United States — to proliferate on many American streets. That’s because Bruen strikes the types of laws that limit who can legally carry handguns in public, holding that “the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.” Amid a flurry of activity in the courts over the last year, more than a dozen state and federal gun control laws have been invalidated in whole or in part as a result.
Under this new legal regime, the future of firearm regulation looks grim for anyone who believes that the government should help protect us from gun violence.
Update, October 26, 7:50 am ET: This story was originally published on May 26, 2022, and has been updated multiple times, most recently with details from the October 25 shooting in Lewiston, Maine.
How a collection of jump scares and killer animatronics shaped a decade of gaming culture.
You might not think a story about a bunch of terrifying animatronic pizza joint robots who routinely kill children would make for a hot-ticket movie, but Five Nights at Freddy’s is finally getting a hotly anticipated theatrical release on October 27.
The movie, a product of Universal and Blumhouse, seems to be a faithful, fanservice-heavy adaptation of the hit video game franchise, which became an immediate hit when it was released in 2014. Over time, its popularity grew, a relatively rare indie game penetrating mainstream culture. The game is known for its abundance of classic nostalgic horror elements: scary empty buildings with a maze of corridors, creepy children’s toys that seem fun during the daytime but turn malevolent at night, and jump scares — lots and lots of jump scares. The titular Freddy is a giant animatronic teddy bear that wants, along with all of his fun animal friends, to murder you, and he could be waiting around any corner.
If all that sounds like a fairly straightforward pastiche of classic horror movies, you’re not wrong. That’s also why it’s surprising that it took this long to adapt Five Nights at Freddy’s for cinema — it already has all of the components of a horror movie built into its setting and structure.
Yet Freddy’s (colloquially styled FNAF, pronounced “finaff”) is more than just a fun horror game. The franchise had a huge impact on gaming fandom and YouTube culture, and epitomized the now-ubiquitous popularity of games that keep their audiences guessing, not just about what’s going to happen, but about what it all means. The game’s ability to worldbuild while taking you through a standard horror scenario only grew over the years, through a staggering eight main games including one in virtual reality, five spinoff games, dozens of books and graphic novels, and now the movie.
All of this means that now, nearly 10 years out from FNAF’s debut, its so-called “lore” is incredibly deep. The story about a bunch of giant scary robot animals is also, according to many of its fans, a giant, bottomless, murderous puzzle box.
Let’s go exploring!
FNAF is about a scary pizzeria stuffed with animatronic animals that are trying to kill you
This entire saga is the brainchild of Scott Cawthon, a veteran Christian game developer who said in a 2014 interview that he got the idea for FNAF after one of his previous games garnered negative reviews: “[P]eople said the main character looked like a scary animatronic.” At some point, much like the villain of FNAF, Cawthon “snapped” and decided to show the world just how scary he could be. The fascinating element of this backstory, however, is that in the interview where he reveals his Christian faith, he talks of speaking to and being guided by God to direct his life, much as fans of his games are guided by the signs and clues he includes in the design to interpret the story they’re in. (Cawthorn received significant backlash in 2021 after fans discovered he had donated to several conservative causes including political campaigns for Donald Trump and former Congress member Tulsi Gabbard, as well as anti-abortion groups. After the controversy, he announced his retirement from game development.)
According to a tongue-in-cheek Reddit post from Cawthorn, the film won’t delve too heavily into the fan-constructed universe that spun out over all of the games; instead, it will draw on what he dubbed “the Mike script,” which, judging from his description and from the trailers, seems to be a loose but faithful adaptation of the first game. “The Mike script” is so named because of its central character, Mike Schmidt, played by Josh Hutcherson in the movie. The basic conceit of FNAF — survive five nights with murderous animatronic dolls in this creepy building as they steadily level up their murderous methods — should translate well to the big screen, especially since the film seems to level up the stakes in at least one big way: by giving Mike a daughter, Abby (a variant on a game character introduced later in the series), and bringing her into the nightmarish funhouse.
In the game, you play as Mike Schmidt, a lowly new night guard tasked with caretaking the beloved Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza in your town. Everyone loves Freddy’s, with its fun giant robotic dolls and arcade-style galleria. At night, however, the animals begin what the game describes as “free-roaming”— meaning they can move freely throughout the building. The problem arises from the way the animals view humans in their orbit during this free-roaming period: as animatronic robots who’ve lost their suits. If they see a human, your handler informs you at the beginning of the game, they’ll try to stuff the human inside one of the animatronic robot suits. This is apparently not optimal for survival.
The titular five nights refers to the time you have to spend in the building after everyone else has gone home. If you can last the whole week without getting found and murdered by the robots, you win the game.
Surviving is easier said than done. The main animatronic crew of FNAF consists of an aggressive purple rabbit named Bonnie, a giant yellow chicken named Chica, a broken-down robot pirate fox named Foxy who wears an eyepatch and a hook for a hand and has his own devoted subfandom, and Freddy, a slow-moving but ominous brown teddy bear. Together, they roam the halls of the pizzeria, and if they find you, they’ll kill you.
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Universal / Blumhouse
Okay, but you’re a security guard, surely you can just stay in the guard room with all the doors locked, right? Not so fast. The guard room uses power to monitor the locations of the animals, light the hallways, and keep the security doors locked. As the night progresses, you use more power. If you run out of power, you can no longer keep the doors locked — and Freddy will surely find you. What’s more, as each night passes, your role gets more and more dangerous. The fifth and final night finds you facing unimaginable horrors in classic scary movie fashion.
When you explore the building using the hidden cameras, you begin to gather clues about the characters that deepen your understanding of what’s happening at Freddy’s and why the animals are after you. You eventually discover what seems to be a whole deranged backstory as the games introduce you to dozens and dozens of new vicious animatronic dolls, all with murder in mind. You also learn details that help constitute a rich meta-narrative about the game. This exploration, combined with the ideas the fandom has brought to the table, make FNAF a famously interactive experience, even though — and perhaps even because — the first game was just a single player in a room by themselves.
FNAF helped unlock multiple core elements of internet culture and gaming fandom
The thing that made FNAF stand out from a crowded field of horror games when it launched was its minimalism. Its stripped-down nature and the spare but immersive effect of being in a dark building at night effectively allowed it to recreate the mounting dread and anticipation of a horror movie and keep that suspense going for the entire game — or at least as long as it took for you to die. And if you think watching jump scares in a movie can be scary, try experiencing them alone in your room with headphones, in the dark, when you are the character being acted upon.
This immersive experience is directly linked to FNAF’s role in YouTuber culture. When the game launched, the platform was just beginning to embrace Let’s Play videos, a format in which gamers share their screens and comment on the game as they play it, so that audiences can follow along and enjoy their reactions. This format has since become ubiquitous on Twitch and across YouTube, but at the time, it was still taking off. FNAF reaction videos took Let’s Plays to a whole new level of visibility. Multiple YouTubers like PewDiePie and Markiplier, who would soon become household names in the gaming world for their Let’s Play vlogs, got their first boosts of popularity directly because of their Freddy’s reaction videos, which went massively viral, reaching millions of casual gamers and horror fans who otherwise probably wouldn’t be tuning into YouTube for this kind of content. Markiplier’s first video declaring FNAF “the scariest game in years” has over 100 million views. The main appeal of these videos came from watching the players experience the game for the first time and react wildly to each jump scare.
The jump scares may have been the gateway, but if the game were just a walk through a scary building, there’d be little value in replaying it, and little reason to obsess over it the way its fans do. Enter the cryptographic narrative. As academics Ana Paklons and An-Sofie Tratsaert wrote in their 2021 case study of the game, a cryptographic narrative is akin to a detective novel, one that “allows the player to become the detective.” A game full of secrets and hidden clues creates “a puzzle-like relation [between] the text and the reader.” In FNAF, “the player does not need the story to enjoy playing the game; its main function is to create a sense of immersion.”
The kernels of information fans decipher as they play FNAF significantly deepen their understanding of the universe and what’s happening in it. You can enjoy the game as a straightforward frightfest where things are trying to kill you. However, if you want to understand the why of it all, the games are strewn with nonlinear clues that help you piece together a whole picture of the FNAF storyline — or at least the storyline as people presume it to be, since the game itself is a closed box that provides plenty of questions but very few actual answers.
Fans are also guided by other fans. Matthew Patrick, creator of the YouTube channel The Game Theorists, began posting analysis videos of FNAF in 2014 and quickly became a major clearinghouse for FNAF fan theories — the ultimate decoder and keeper of the lore, if you will. His FNAF playlist alone has over 60 videos with nearly 800 million views. In his most popular FNAF video, which serves as an introduction to the first game and several of the many mysteries it serves up, Patrick describes the game as “a delightfully incomplete and mysterious story with just enough threads to keep you guessing.”
What you might not realize if you don’t do much gaming is that, these days, this metatextual style of game design is now everywhere — from other popular survival games like Hello Neighbor to intricate RPGs like Disco Elysium. In such games, the element of competition and winning is no longer the primary objective for many players; rather, settling into the universe, exploring the game world and secrets hidden throughout the games, and immersing yourself in the mystery are as important as the narrative goals that are set for you. This shift carries over to fans, too: As with many other parts of fandom, gamers are no longer content with playing games. Now they have to solve them, or at least have fun trying — which means fan theories and community problem-solving and sleuthing have become major parts of the gamer experience.
That all comes full circle now that the FNAF film is upon us: Fans have already spun elaborate theories about the film’s additions to or deviations from the lore, its new mysteries, and its structure, just based on the trailers they’ve seen and gossip they’ve heard. The film’s director, Emma Tammi, has discussed the importance of accurately representing the lore as well as balancing it with new elements. Plus, she’s hinted she’d be down to direct the rumored film trilogy that might result if this film is a success, which could mean even more rabbit holes for fans to fall into.
What does all this mean for the movie? It might just mean that FNAF fans will find themselves with a whole new set of mysteries on their hands. In any event, if you leave the cinema more mystified than when you came in, you’ll know you’re probably on to something.
Right-wing hardliners ultimately triumphed by making Rep. Mike Johnson speaker.
The winner of the game of House Speaker musical chairs is … Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA), who won the job Wednesday with unanimous GOP support.
After a 22-day struggle among Republicans to agree on Kevin McCarthy’s replacement, the right-wingers and the mainstream members in the conference decided to settle on Johnson, despite — or perhaps because of — his limited experience in leadership and lack of a national profile.
As in all good face-saving compromises, there’s some ambiguity over which side has caved — but overall, the right-wingers appear to have emerged triumphant.
We know little about how Johnson would tackle the seemingly intractable governing problems that took down McCarthy, such as how he’d keep the government funded and avoid a shutdown. (He has distributed a plan that would allow for a short-term funding bill to avert a government shutdown, but the best-laid plans …)
Overall, though, Johnson is a movement conservative close to the Christian right. He’s also a stalwart Trump ally who actively worked to help the former president try to overturn Joe Biden’s victories in key 2020 swing states — making Trump, who helped torch the chances of Johnson’s leading rival Tom Emmer on Tuesday, another winner.
The losers include the existing slate of House GOP leaders, all of whom took embarrassing public L’s over the past few weeks. And while a bloc of mainstream Republicans got some satisfaction in taking down Jim Jordan, they decided to stop there rather than flexing their muscles further — meaning that the party leadership has ultimately gotten further away from them.
Winner (for now): Mike Johnson
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When this saga started 22 days ago, no one would have predicted that it would end with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. And yet it has.
Johnson was first elected to the House in 2016, which would make him the least experienced speaker since the 1880s. Yet for close House watchers, Johnson didn’t totally come out of nowhere. Since 2021, he’s been the fifth-ranking member of the House GOP leadership’s team, serving as vice chair of the conference. Before that, Johnson chaired the Republican Study Committee — an organizing body of House conservatives who are mostly not far-right enough to be in the Freedom Caucus.
But now he’s suddenly speaker, in large part because all the other contenders who were more prominent than him — McCarthy, Steve Scalise (R-LA), Jim Jordan (R-OH), and Tom Emmer (R-MN) — had made too many enemies. Since it currently takes a mere five Republican defections to sink a GOP speaker nominee on the House floor, having few haters in the party is actually more important than having passionate supporters.
Hence Speaker Johnson. But is the speakership a poisoned chalice, destined to result in the demise of anyone who drinks from it? The core problem that has bedeviled GOP speakers since John Boehner is that there is a faction of hardliners on the right who seem fundamentally unsuited to the reality of governance and especially to the compromises necessary when Democrats control the White House and Senate.
Speaker Johnson has no secret plan to force President Biden and 60 senators to bend the knee and accept massive cuts to government spending. He may be talking a big game about passing 12 separate appropriations bills with Republican votes, but McCarthy made that same promise in January and found it impossible to fulfill. And inevitably, a spending deal has to be cut with Democrats, or the government shuts down and Republicans get blamed, imperiling their chances of holding the chamber in 2024.
Johnson’s best hope is that he can convince the hardliners to chill out for a bit and give him more leeway to cut those deals than they gave McCarthy. But the longer he remains in the speaker job, the more he’ll inevitably disappoint some Republicans. And it is worth noting that he has never done this job before. Can he do it?
Winner: GOP hardliners
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who started this whole ball rolling by moving to oust McCarthy, summed up his takeaway on Steve Bannon’s podcast Wednesday: “If you don’t think that moving from Kevin McCarthy to MAGA Mike Johnson shows the ascendance of this movement and where the power in the Republican Party truly lies, then you’re not paying attention.”
Indeed, Republican hardliners didn’t get the Speaker Jim Jordan that they dreamed of. But they firmly established the principle that the hard right is entitled to veto any speaker nominee the conference produces — and they torched the careers of all of the top three “establishment” party leaders. Not a bad month’s work.
Johnson’s surprising ascendance is also a win for the Christian right. While Boehner, Ryan, and McCarthy all supported conservative policies and viewed the religious right as an essential part of the GOP coalition, Johnson is of that movement: Before entering elected office, he was a top lawyer for a Christian legal advocacy group and has long opposed abortion rights and LGBTQ rights. (In contrast, Emmer was sunk in part because he had voted in favor of marriage equality — one holdout House Republican told him Tuesday that he needed to “get right with Jesus.”)
The practical impact of Johnson’s conservatism will be limited so long as Democrats control the Senate and the White House. A more conservative speaker does not necessarily translate to more conservative laws. But the right-wing hardliners have proven that while they may not yet fully control the party, they’re now the most powerful force inside it.
Losers: The House Republican leadership slate
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McCarthy, Scalise, and Emmer were the first-, second-, and third-ranking members of the leadership team the House GOP elected less than a year ago. But in the past few weeks, they’ve all been publicly humiliated as their speakership dreams were dashed by right-wing hardliners — even though each was clearly preferred by a majority of the GOP conference.
McCarthy was tossed out of his job by just eight defecting Republicans (who joined with all Democrats to oust him as speaker). Then Scalise, after winning an internal GOP conference vote, lasted barely more than a day as speaker nominee before quitting. And this week, Emmer exceeded even that — he was the speaker nominee for just four hours before dropping out.
Now, the top three ranking Republicans all have egg on their face, with their political futures uncertain. The party is moving on to new leaders and may no longer have room for them.
Winner: Donald Trump
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Trump was mostly a minor player in the House speaker race — the GOP hardliners don’t need his encouragement to make trouble for party leaders. But while he didn’t end up with Speaker Jordan (his initial endorsement), he may have ended up with the next best thing.
“Johnson was deeply involved in efforts to keep Trump in power starting immediately after 2020 election,” the Washington Post’s Robert Costa tweeted. “Johnson — then all but unknown — worked with allied Trump groups and conservative leaders in a coordinated way to make sure that whole orbit was working together to help Trump.”
Early on, Johnson publicly made false claims that voting machines were “rigged.” In December, he used his constitutional law expertise to put together a legalistic justification for throwing out Biden’s wins in key swing states — he claimed that state voting policy changes implemented during the pandemic were illegal unless they went through state legislatures, and got more than 100 House Republicans to sign on to the argument. He stuck by that argument up to January 6 itself, and even when Congress reconvened after the attacks, he voted to throw out Biden’s wins.
Trump also played a role in the denouement of the crisis. Emmer had initially defeated Johnson for the speaker nomination midday Tuesday, but he’s long had a tense relationship with Trump. And while Emmer was struggling to win over hardliner holdouts, Trump publicly blasted Emmer as a “Globalist RINO,” in what may have been the nail in the coffin for his bid. Now, he has a true loyalist in the speaker’s chair rather than someone backing him through gritted teeth.
Loser: Anyone dreaming about bipartisanship
As Republicans struggled for so long to achieve near-unanimity to elect a speaker, many observers asked an obvious question: Why couldn’t some Republicans cut a deal with some Democrats to pick a speaker, and govern the House from the center?
Various ideas to this effect were batted around — the one that gained the most steam was for an “empowerment” of temporary speaker Patrick McHenry for a set period of time. But it proved to be toxic among Republicans. It drew fury from conservative media, and GOP leaders distanced themselves from any idea of a “coalition government.”
A Washington Post editorial blamed Democrats for failing to throw a reasonable Republican their votes. But that argument missed the point — the relatively more “reasonable” Republican options, Scalise and Emmer, never actually went to the House floor, instead quitting beforehand. For Emmer in particular, there had been chatter that some Democrats might throw him their votes or vote present. But he evidently didn’t want to be elected as a speaker with Democratic votes, since that would forever mark him as a party traitor. Partisanship and polarization remain ascendant.
This is also why the mainstream bloc of Republican holdouts ultimately lost their staring contest with the hardliners. The ultimate leverage the mainstreamers could have deployed would have been a threat to deal with Democrats. But they all have Republican primaries they want to win, Republican donors they want to woo, and Republican social worlds they inhabit. A deal with Democrats would likely have meant the end of their own political careers, and evidently no one wanted to take that risk.
Loser: The stability of the US electoral system
After Johnson won the GOP conference’s speaker nomination Tuesday night, one reporter asked him about having led Trump’s challenges to the 2020 election results. The assembled GOP leadership team booed, with one member yelling “shut up!” Johnson demurred: “Next question.”
In January 2021, when Trump was trying to stay in power, the House of Representatives was under Democratic control, so the actions of House Republicans didn’t matter all too much. Most of them could vote to throw out Biden’s wins in key states, but they didn’t have a majority, so they couldn’t actually do that.
January 2025 could be different. The House that meets to certify the presidential election results that month will be newly elected, but Johnson could well still be speaker. If so — and if there’s a similar dispute where Trump is denying a Biden victory — it’s far from clear what Johnson will do.
Generally, from November 2020 through January 2021, the Republican Party behaved terribly irresponsibly, but just enough Republicans in positions of power did the right thing — certifying the results at some political cost. Since then, critics of Trump’s attempt to seize power have largely been purged from the party, and election denial has been increasingly normalized. For instance, Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), an idiosyncratic conservative, said he initially wouldn’t support a speaker candidate who denied the election results — but he backed Johnson anyway.
Would a GOP-controlled House certify a Democratic victory in the 2024 presidential election? With Johnson in charge, that may have grown less likely — and that has ominous implications for the state of American democracy.