Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Oct. 26. Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Image

By Jacob Kornbluh October 26, 2023

Newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson once compared abortion to the Holocaust and wrote that the judicial philosophy underlying the Supreme Court case that legalized abortion nationally, Roe v. Wade, was “no different” than Hitler’s atrocities, CBS News reported on Thursday.

In an op-ed published in the Shreveport Times in 2005, unearthed by the watchdog group Documented, Johnson objected to a Florida county court’s ruling in a right-to-die case, and tied it to the legalization of abortion. “It is a holocaust that has been repeated every day for 32 years, since 1973’s Roe v. Wade.”

“The prevailing judicial philosophy is no different than Hitler’s,” he wrote.

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Johnson wrote the piece after the death of Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman in a vegetative state whose family fought over whether her feeding tube should be removed. Their division led to a court battle and a public, national debate.

A four-term Republican congressman from Louisiana, Johnson, 51, was elected speaker Tuesday following weeks of chaos after the ouster of Kevin McCarthy earlier this month. A spokesperson for Johnson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

At the time his op-ed was published, Johnson was a lawyer for the Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative Christian advocacy group that opposes abortion and is now called the Alliance Defending Freedom.

Abe Foxman, the former head of the Anti-Defamation League and a Holocaust survivor, said he hopes Johnson as speaker “will refrain from promoting his extremist personal views.” Foxman suggested that Johnson visit the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum “to understand the difference between the Holocaust and abortion.”

Republicans have in the past faced backlash for drawing Holocaust analogies when discussing abortion. Darren Bailey, the Republican nominee in last year’s election for Illinois governor, came under fire for remarks he made in a video posted to Facebook in 2017 in which he said that the Holocaust “doesn’t even compare” to abortion on the scale of human atrocities. Pennsylvania State Sen. Doug Mastriano, who lost his bid for Pennsylvania governor last year, referred to abortion as a “barbaric holocaust.” 

And Georgia Republican Jason Shepherd, a member of the Republican state committee, likened major corporations that cover abortions in their health insurance plans to Nazis.

Halie Soifer, chief executive of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, called Johnson’s comments in the unearthed op-ed “on brand for the GOP” and said that it’s “not surprising” that he has “extremist views” that are “misaligned with Jewish American values.”

This post was updated.

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