In the past 6 weeks since Mike Johnson became Speaker of the House, we’ve uncovered a significant amount of what can only be described as “deeply messed up stuff” regarding the GOP legislator’s views on issues ranging from gay marriage to abortion to the cause of mass shootings to why America is seemingly on a path to destruction. And unfortunately, there’s a lot more messed-up stuff where that came from.
The Daily Beast reports that before entering politics, the man who is two heartbeats away from the presidency did legal work for clients “linked with some of the country’s most extreme antiabortion and anti-LGBTQ groups in the nation– including agitators associated with militant movements with a fondness for violent expression.”
One of those clients was Jason Storms, whom Johnson, as a lawyer for the Christian activist group Alliance Defending Freedom, represented in a 2009 Milwaukee lawsuit, arguing that Storms and several other antiabortion extremists had their right to free speech violated by a court injunction against protests at abortion centers. Who is Storms? Among other things, he’s the leader of Operation Save America–formerly known as Operation Rescue–which, as the Daily Beast notes, “has been called the country’s largest militant antiabortion group,” and it’s not hard to see why. Per the outlet:
… the year of [the free speech] lawsuit, Operation Rescue was connected to the murder of Kansas abortion provider Dr. George Tiller. The killer had been in contact with a group official about Tiller’s location, and claimed to be a member. While the group condemned the killing and the assailant’s claims to membership, Tiller was a primary target of Operation Rescue’s ire for years–in 2002, they moved their headquarters to Wichita specifically to target his clinic–and its leader at the time had previously referred to the murder of abortion providers as a “morally justified defensive action.”
Today, OSA and its militant allies still believe women who get abortions should be charged with murder–a step up from more mainstream antiabortionists who would only place that burden on the doctor… Earlier this year, a member of OSA was charged in connection with a bomb scare at a Milwaukee-area Pride event, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. In October, the Sixth Circuit of Federal Appeals upheld a 2022 restraining order against the group, after disruptive demonstrations in Tennessee.
In addition to Storms– who, by the way, participated in January 6–the group of extremists Johnson represented in the 2009 lawsuit included Robert Breaud and Jim Soderna. Here’s a little background information on those two, per the Daily Beast:
In 1999, Soderna publicly opposed a Milwaukee city council resolution “against domestic terrorism in the form of violence against health-care providers, particularly those providing family planning services.” Breaud–a self-described former “homosexual”–ran a failed campaign in 1999 for the Louisiana state House as a Republican. According to a piece from The Times-Picayune, which is not publicly available online but accessible through the Lexis Nexis publication database,
