You don't hate anything as much as House Speaker Mike Johnson hates the Constitution

Every day that House Speaker Mike Johnson opens his mouth counts as a bad day, but I suppose this time around it at least serves as a helpful reminder that Donald Trump, or President Dementia von Sex Criminal, as he prefers to be called, is not the reason our nation's democracy is collapsing in real time and people are being murdered in the streets for (checks notes) recording cops.

The problem is that the Republican Party, from college Republican clubs to the elected banalities in the House and Senate, has now morphed completely into an anti-Constitutional, anti-democracy, pro-authoritarian and pro-violence movement. We do not have to be ruled by the most openly corrupt goon squad in the history of the republic; it is a choice. At any point, a bare handful of Republican elected officials could say to each other "You know what, maybe we don't want a so-called leader who tears down parts of the White House in bizarre tantrums, who solicits obscene amounts of foreign cash in return for granting special favors to the foreign interests who play along, who explicitly weaponizes the Department of Justice to harass his perceived enemies while sweeping real corruption under the rug, and who doesn't understand how percent signs work."

But first you'd have to get to "Maybe the guy caught accepting $50,000 in cash hidden in a fast food bag should not have a government job after promising to use his government job to do bribe things" or "Maybe we don't want to be a country in which anyone who doesn't look white enough gets slammed to the ground by racist federal agents demanding they prove their citizenship to avoid being renditioned to a concentration camp" and if the party of small government yada yada yada can't find even ten people who have a problem with those things, then what you have there is a deep and party-wide commitment to crookery and fascism.

Johnson continues to be a wonderful example of the batshit crookery that has consumed the party. Here's a man who has open contempt for any part of the Constitution you ask him about, he thinks we need to shred the whole thing and do whatever the Great Gilded Fart wants to do instead, and buddy: That is Republicanism. There is no "party of Lincoln," there is no Reaganism, there is no deeply held beliefs, or shallowly held beliefs, or any ideology at all that goes beyond walking up to Dear Leader and giving him a great big sloppy lick from boot to forehead.

One of the Constitution's biggies is a prohibition on "unreasonable searches and seizures," also known as the Fourth Amendment. The only reason it is not fought over with the frothing urgency of Amendments 1 and 2 is because there are precious few non-Nazis in America willing to argue about it; no matter where you are on other issues, everyone agrees that amendment that reads

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

means though shall not bash in somebody's door or rifle through their stuff or steal their smartphone unless you can get a neutral judge to agree that you have, in fact, a vaguely good reason to do so. It doesn't even have to be a good reason, God knows—you just have to convince a judge that you, a random law enforcement official, are not Making Shit Up. It is a very low bar, but Mike Johnson hasn't found one he couldn't slink underneath yet.

What? Imagine we have to follow the same 4th Amendment that we've always followed? Imagine we did that, and it made Border Patrol agents ... sad? Depressed? Filled them with angst? Because going to a judge with a paper offering up some proof that you've even identified the right house (note: in the Minneapolis raids, federal agents have shown a repeated inability to identify the right house) before you bash in the door with guns drawn?

What are you, Mike Johnson? What the hell possessed you to run for office, if this is the level of Who The Fuck Cares that you bring to the job? You're telling us that the 4th Amendment has outlived its purpose because federal agents are trying to do an illegal racist pogram and that darn Amendment is making their illegal acts inconvenient?

That sounds like a you problem, buddy.

The Constitution also explicitly puts the states in charge of their election procedures, not the president, yet another separation of authority that was motivated at least in part by the question of "What if a batshit insane man, one with no moral scruples at all, and/or one who believed themselves to be the only human being of consequence on this entire soggy planet was in charge of all national elections and decided to rig them to sabotage the peoples' will?"

It would be an easy no-brainer for Johnson, if he were not himself a sewer-brained fascist, to stand with the Constitution on this one. But no.

Johnson was of course one of the purveyors of the asinine Trump-led Republican claims of "fraud" that Trump used to justify his attempted coup, and Johnson himself was a ringleader in that attempted toppling of the legitimate government. You can't expect a seditionist to like the parts of the Constitution meant to thwart sedition, no more than you could a bank robber to like silent alarms. But the asshole could at least pretend at it, given that he took an oath to do so. Nope. He don't care.

(For the record, again, there is no conspiratorial reason for the Republicans to lose early vote leads as election night wears on, and this is a common feature in every statewide election. Republicans do better in less populated areas, areas in which there aren't as many votes to count and the counting can be done relatively quickly; Democrats do better in population centers, aka cities, in which the total number of voters is much higher and much more condensed, which leads to slower counting. It is a feature of election nights that has been well known to Everybody since approximately Always, and you know a Republican lawmaker is either crooked, stupid, or both if they pipe up with it as something that they only just discovered despite having it explained by Everyone Always on each election night's televised pundit panels. Jackass.)

But it's not just our Constitution that Johnson has lost all patience with. He's also quite pissed off with some guy named Jesus, a guy who is supposedly both so important that Mike Johnson thinks all of American government should be retooled to honor as our nation's only God and Savior but who Mike Johnson thinks was a gullible hippie who doesn't know how to God and Savior as well as Mike does.

You see, what Jesus didn't understand was Shut Up, That's What.

If you don't keep up with the man's eternal weirdness, you might think that this is out of character for Johnson. Yes, we all know him as the man who will throw every law, moral, ethical consideration and constitutional edict into the fire just to watch them burn, if Dear Leader has another brain-burp that suddenly requires it. But Mike here has been pushing for a retooling of government according to his very very very specific religious micro-beliefs since before you ever realized a guy named "Mike Johnson" was in Congress.

If anything, telling people that he knows more about Jesus than Jesus was the man's origin story; ripping up the Constitution would be a low-effort task once you've reached that lofty egotistical peak.

I think we all understand that Trump is the show pony here, not the trainer. He continues to slide through the presidency believing he is part king, part interior decorator, but when the press asks him to justify any of the details of his supposed reign you will more often than not, these days, see him respond with some variation of "my people are taking care of that" that makes it clear he doesn't know the details, doesn't know the justification, and is mainly coasting along on vibes and gutter racism.

It's Johnson who's carving up American democracy for sport and self-satisfaction. It's the Jim Jordans, the James Comers, the John Thunes, the Susan Collinses.

If they wanted to stop any of this, from the bribery to the street violence, they could do it tomorrow. It's not happening because they like all of it just fine.