House Speaker Mike Johnson has said he won’t try to pass a federal ban on abortion either before or after the 2024 election, even if Republicans keep their majority in the latter case.
Johnson (R-La.) affirmed his stance as a “lifelong pro-lifer” in a wide-ranging interview with Politico published Friday, but added that he rejected federal efforts to outlaw abortion and other demands from his right flank that triggered a failed vote to oust him earlier this week.
“[Former] President [Donald] Trump said this is in the states’ purview now,” Johnson, 52, told the outlet. “After the Dobbs decision, I think that’s where it is.”
“I’m a product of a teen pregnancy,” the speaker added. “And so I believe in the sanctity of human life. It’s also an important article of faith for me. But I have 434 colleagues here. All of us have our own, philosophical principles that we live by, but you have to have a political consensus.”
Trump, 77, sidestepped the politically contentious issue last month, saying that he would also decline to take up a national abortion ban if re-elected in November.
But President Biden and his campaign have leaned into the abortion issue anyway, hitting Trump with eight-figure ad buys in battleground states over his appointment of the three Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Last week, the Federal Election Commission greenlit unlimited foreign and so-called “dark money” contributions for abortion and other state ballot initiatives, which have been used as a critical line of attack by Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign.
Johnson shrugged off the efforts in his sit-down with Politico, pointing out that Americans needed to reach cultural consensus on the “very contentious issue” before taking political action.
“[Andrew] Breitbart said, ‘Politics is downstream from culture.’ He’s right. Before you can have political consensus on a very contentious issue like this, you have to have cultural consensus,” he said.
“And I think there’s a lot of work to do to build a culture of life and educate people on the importance of that and to really live up to the principles of our nation’s birth certificate, which is the declaration that ‘All men are created equal.’
“And there’s value in that. But we have a long way to go to build the political consensus here to do anything in that regard.”
The House speaker also dismissed demands from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who led the motion to vacate him, to defund federal prosecutions of Trump in 2024.
“I think that there’s been a terrible dereliction of duty with regard to the special counsel and how the whole system has been abused, and how they’ve engaged in lawfare against President Trump,” Johnson responded. “All of these things are, to me, self-evident truths.
“But that’s not something you wave a wand and just eliminate the special counsel as a provision. It’s been part of the law, you know, the tradition and the law for 25 years,” he went on.
Johnson told Greene and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who also signed onto the ouster resolution, that “there is a necessity” for the independent prosecutions “because sometimes the Department of Justice, which is an executive branch agency, can’t necessarily, without a conflict of interest, investigate or prosecute the president who’s their boss or the president’s family.”
Asked about the nature of presidential immunity from prosecution, however, the Republican leader endorsed arguments from Trump’s legal team that the commander-in-chief should receive almost total immunity for his official actions.
“I think it’s common sense that you can’t have the president sitting in the Oval Office worried about whether some lawyer or some local DA somewhere is going to go after him,” the speaker said. “It’d be a serious problem.”
Johnson also expressed no concerns that Trump would cut him loose if House Republicans remain in power when the new Congress convenes in January.
“I think we have a very good relationship of trust,” he said. “And he knows that when I advise him of something or give him an idea or tell him something I have to do, I think he appreciates that I’m operating in good faith.
“I believe he’s going to be elected president again,” he added. “And I think if I’m serving as speaker, and I intend to be, I think he and I having a close relationship will be very important for the country because we have a lot of problems to fix.”
