The House GOP Did the Right Thing in Electing Mike Johnson Speaker

This article originally appeared in Newsweek on October 30, 2023. 

After 22 days, multiple candidacies, and much tumult, the United States House of Representatives at long last elected a speaker on October 25. Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) is a good man, a good choice, and will be a good speaker—and Americans can have confidence that the Republican House majority has the leadership that it needs.

The qualities and record of the new speaker have been much discussed in media, and I will not belabor them here except to note that in my own work in Washington, D.C., both in the Trump White House and in the policy world, I have found Rep. Johnson to be consistently principled and indefatigably optimistic. You can't ask for much more from an officeholder or an American. What deserves a spotlight now is less the man and more the process: what it means that it took so long to get here, and that this whole 22-day episode happened at all.

Read full op-ed in Newsweek.