Mike Johnson has opinions.
He has opinions about abortion. About gay marriage. About pornography. About what constitutes a proper family, what you should be doing with your genitals, whom you should be doing it with, and under precisely which circumstances God has signed the permission slip.
The man has built a career on the premise that your bedroom is a matter of legitimate public concern.
Then Politico’s Dasha Burns asked him about Max Miller.
“There’s all sorts of domestic events going on with 435 members of Congress all the time, it’s not my business to get engaged in it.”
Domestic events.
Your kid flushing a Hot Wheels down the toilet is a domestic event. Uncle Gary drinking the bourbon you were saving is a domestic event. Allegations that a sitting congressman held a gun to his wife’s head and broke his toddler’s collarbone do not typically get filed under Miscellaneous, Household.
Miller denies all of it. He calls the claims politically motivated, he requested his own Ethics investigation, and he is refusing to leave the race. Fine. Due process is real and the Ethics Committee exists. That is not the interesting part.
The interesting part is the drawer Johnson’s brain reached for.
The receipts on jurisdiction
Because it turns out the Speaker’s sense of what constitutes “his business” is unusually elastic.
This is a man who told the world that he and his teenage son Jack use Covenant Eyes, software that monitors your devices for pornography and reports the findings to an accountability partner.
They are each other’s accountability partners.
The kid gets Dad’s report. Every week.
Look, parents put filters on their kids’ phones. Normal. But if your teenage son is receiving a weekly briefing on whether Dad has been looking at titties, we have sailed a considerable fucking distance past Screen Time settings and washed up somewhere in the deep evangelical uncanny valley.
I could not care less what Mike Johnson looks at. That is between Mike, Mrs. Johnson, Jesus, and apparently Jack’s notification center.
The point is that Johnson demonstrably does not believe sexual conduct is private. He believes it requires surveillance. He believes marriage requires rules, that homosexuality requires laws, that pregnancy requires government intervention, and that his own browser history requires a chaperone who is in high school.
But a colleague accused of violence against his wife?
Whoa, now. Let’s respect the man’s privacy.
The walls of the American home are apparently transparent when Mike Johnson wants to see inside your bedroom and reinforced fucking concrete the moment somebody in there says she’s being hurt.
He does have an enforcement record. That’s the problem.
The Speaker is perfectly capable of getting engaged in it. He does it all the time.
Here is what kills the “I don’t get involved in members’ personal lives” defense: he gets involved constantly.
In April, after Eric Swalwell and Tony Gonzales resigned, Johnson called their conduct “detestable” and “shocking,” described the behavior as that of “predators,” and vowed to “exact punishment upon those who violate that sacred obligation.” Big talk. Genuinely fine sentiment, actually.
In July, when the Ethics Committee delivered a report on Chuck Edwards and his conduct toward women in his office, Johnson’s leadership team helped push Edwards out of his reelection campaign. Engaged. Involved. Business fully minded.
But in March, asked twice about the restraining order a Florida judge issued against Cory Mills, Johnson said he had not “heard or looked into the details of that.”
And now Max Miller gets “domestic events.”
So the Speaker’s jurisdiction expands and contracts. The question is what’s driving the tide.
It isn’t severity. Miller is accused of the most serious conduct on that entire list, by a margin that isn’t close, by a woman whose father is a sitting Republican senator who says on the record that Miller is “a danger to my daughter” and should not serve in Congress.
It isn’t partisanship either. Swalwell is a Democrat, sure, but Gonzales and Edwards are Republicans and they got the hammer.
What separates them is the math. Gonzales was already losing his primary. Edwards is in a district the party can hold without him. Miller’s seat is safely red right up until the moment Miller is on the ballot, and Johnson is running a House majority you could lose behind a couch cushion.
That’s it. That’s the variable.
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The org chart problem
There is a theological layer under this, and it isn’t decoration.
Johnson comes out of conservative evangelical complementarianism, which is not all of evangelicalism and it would be stupid to pretend otherwise. But it has a specific, explicitly articulated model of the family. The Southern Baptist Convention’s Baptist Faith and Message says the husband is to “provide for, to protect, and to lead his family” while the wife should “submit herself graciously” to his leadership.
That doctrine does not say beat your wife. It says the opposite, at length, in loving terms.
But before anything has gone wrong, it has already established one thing: authority has a direction.
And that creates a structural failure mode that has nothing to do with anyone’s intentions. When the person occupying the divinely appointed authority slot is also the person accused of causing the harm, the system has to distinguish between legitimate leadership and coercive control using the same org chart that made him the boss.
It resolves this badly. It has resolved this badly for decades, in documented, institutional, extensively reported fashion, not because pastors thought beating women was good but because they had an overriding commitment to marriage, reconciliation, male leadership, and institutional reputation.
Which reliably turns the woman reporting the harm into the disruptive element.
Why can’t you forgive? Have you prayed about it? Have you considered the children? Have you respected his leadership?
Meanwhile the guy gets counseling. And another chance. And another. Until somebody finally calls the cops.
Protect the family. Which part, exactly?
This is the sleight of hand buried in the phrase.
When most people hear “protect the family,” they picture protecting the humans in it. The wife. The husband. The kids.
But inside a hierarchical system, “protect the family” quietly becomes protect the institution. Preserve the marriage. Maintain the structure. Avoid scandal. Reconcile. Forgive. Submit. Work it out. Keep it together.
And the thing being protected is no longer the person saying she’s being hurt. It’s the structure she’s being hurt inside.
That distinction matters like hell, and it explains why Johnson’s answer isn’t really hypocrisy.
Calling him a hypocrite is easy and satisfying and slightly wrong. Johnson is being consistent. Gay marriage, pornography, abortion, trans kids: those are threats to the structure from outside. They demand mobilization, legislation, and roughly forty percent of the conservative media ecosystem’s daily output.
Violence by a husband happens inside the structure. So the instinct flips. Let’s not interfere. Let’s let the family handle it. Let’s wait. Let’s pray. Let’s let the process play out.
A thousand miles of grace suddenly materialize where five minutes ago there wasn’t enough room for a lesbian couple to order a wedding cake.
Family values, my ass
For fifty years the GOP has sold itself as the party of family values, and it has always been worth asking what the hell they meant by that.
Because it increasingly does not mean families should be places where people are safe.
It means families should be shaped like this.
Dad here. Mom there. Kids underneath. God on top. Stay married. Make babies. Don’t be gay. Don’t be trans. Don’t look at porn. Don’t get an abortion. And for Christ’s sake don’t rearrange the furniture.
The structure is sacred.
The people inside it are having domestic events.
And that, apparently, is none of the Speaker’s fucking business.
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