Speaker Mike Johnson Begins Role With Significant Pro-Life Funding Battle, by Lauretta Brown

By Lauretta Brown, EWTN News, November 13, 2023

Lauretta Brown is the Register’s Washington-based staff writer.

The newly minted leader faces the challenge of forging GOP unity on the life issue.

WASHINGTON — In his first weeks as speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, R-La., faces the formidable task of uniting a deeply divided Republican caucus — and one immediate obstacle is an internal GOP struggle over inclusion of language in a funding bill that would bar the mailing of the abortion pill mifepristone.

Even though a Nov. 17 funding deadline is looming to avert a government shutdown, Tom McClusky, director of government affairs for Catholic Vote, told the Register that he did not see “a scenario where that language is pulled” from a measure to fund the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, because he didn’t see Johnson backing down from defending the language. …