House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) affirmed he is standing behind Rep. Max Miller’s (R-OH) reelection campaign despite allegations of domestic violence and child abuse. When asked Monday if he supported Miller, Johnson said “yes,” and that…
Page A7From§Eachthe early evening edition — 31 August 2026
Mike Johnson backs Max Miller's reelection despite abuse allegations; Susan Collins skips the party's own convention.
As it ran on the front
Speaker Johnson's decision to back Congressman Miller's reelection bid is, this desk maintains, a straightforward application of due process. Allegations are allegations. Endorsements are endorsements. The two categories do not, as a matter of the Speaker's stated position, need to interact at all, which is either a profound legal principle or a scheduling convenience, and honestly at this point it's hard to tell them apart.
Consider the framing critics are using: that backing a candidate facing abuse allegations sends a message. This desk rejects that framing. Endorsements send exactly one message, which is 'I would like this person to remain in Congress,' full stop, no further inference permitted, and if voters draw a second message from that first one, that's a reading comprehension issue on their part, not a messaging issue on the Speaker's — actually, that's not right either, because messaging is the entire point of an endorsement, that's the only reason it exists, so if the message being sent is that the allegations don't matter to him, then that is, definitionally, the message. I'll come back to that.…
…(cont) Then there's Senator Collins skipping her own party's midterm convention, which multiple outlets are reporting as some kind of signal. This desk would like to remind readers that senators have busy schedules, full of hearings, constituent calls, the ordinary business of governance, and it is entirely possible that a sitting senator simply had a conflict on her calendar during the one convention her party holds every two years to rally support ahead of an election she is presumably invested in the outcome of. Entirely possible. This desk stands by 'possible.'
What we will not do here is connect these two data points into some kind of pattern — a party's own senator distancing herself while its Speaker doubles down on a candidate facing allegations — because that would require this desk to admit that the distance and the doubling-down are reactions to the same information, arrived at differently, by two people in the same party, looking at the same set of facts, which, now that it's typed out, is sort of the whole story. This column is going to end here.
“One senator can't sit in the same room as her own party this year, and the Speaker's out here endorsing a guy facing abuse allegations like it's a normal Tuesday. That's the tell — the ones closest to the exits usually know something the base doesn't.”
“The Speaker's endorsement reflects confidence in due process, full confidence, total — and Senator Collins skipping the convention has nothing to do with that, scheduling conflicts happen, conventions aren't mandatory, this isn't a — why would anyone read into that.”
The receipts
Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) is one of the growing number of battleground Republican candidates who have decided against attending next week’s inaugural Republican midterm convention in Dallas before November’s elections. “She won’t be at the…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.