‘I think he has handled the day-to-day, the tense, difficult, and sometimes unpredictable environment in a very good, metered way,’ one lawmaker says.
WASHINGTON—Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, first met a young Mike Johnson “way back when” in their home state of Louisiana. He helped Mr. Johnson gain his footing as an attorney and said he still talks regularly with the now-Speaker of the House.
“He jokes that when I was in office, he used to carry my briefcase. I can’t vouch for that, but I’ll take him at his word,” Mr. Perkins told The Epoch Times with a chuckle, referring to his years as a Bayou State Republican legislator, starting in 1994.
It was in the state legislature that Mr. Perkins said he first learned that achieving fundamental public policy changes almost always “takes years and years of incremental gains.”
Pro-life advocates, for example, spent decades working to reverse the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that pushed abortion regulation back to the states.
Early in his legislative career, Mr. Perkins won passage of one of the first state abortion clinic regulation acts in the country.
“Mike was the attorney representing the woman who had the malpractice case that we used,” Mr. Perkins recalled.
More recently, he said Mr. Johnson has shown he learned the same lesson, steering a deeply fractious and razor-thin Republican majority while defeating an effort to remove him from the top job in the House of Representatives.
Also on display has been a deep divide among congressional Republicans over how best to confront and control what they view as the costly, freedom-threatening leviathan that Democrats have made of the federal government.
On one side are lawmakers including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), plus a varying cast of members of the House Freedom Caucus, who say they are tired of constantly caving into Democrats on major issues. They want Mr. Johnson and the GOP leadership to push all-or-nothing votes that seek to repeal or defund President Joe Biden’s major initiatives.
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