Mike Johnson’s Election Denial Should Raise Alarms for 2024

The chances of Donald Trump refusing to accept defeat in the 2024 race already seemed high. Now, he may have an election-denying Speaker, too.

The U.S. House of Representatives is now under the gavel of a Republican Speaker who is not only a 2020 election denier but also largely formulated the strategy for overturning the presidential election results in Congress on January 6, 2021. Mike Johnson didn’t hang his hat on some made-up anecdote about electoral fraud, either; he agreed with Donald Trump’s broad-based argument that by making voting a bit easier during a pandemic, state election officials had “rigged” the contest; thus Congress should not legitimize the election, at least without additional ratification of the outcome by Republican-controlled state legislatures.

The father of these 2020 lies, Donald Trump, is, of course, very close to winning his third consecutive Republican presidential nomination, and he’s never even once suggested he regretted his claims and the violence they induced. Even in urging Republicans to take advantage of liberalized voting-by-mail procedures in 2024, he continues to call them totally illegitimate. And he’s got a new “rigged election” claim that he’s not about to abandon: that the federal criminal prosecutions he faces in multiple courts are themselves a form of “election interference” by his past and future opponent Joe Biden.

To the extent that growing majorities of rank-and-file Republicans believe Trump was robbed of victory in 2020, there’s an obvious mass base for future election denials. And barring a huge and undeniable Democratic landslide in 2024 (which really doesn’t appear to be on the table), there’s just as much incentive as existed in 2020 for Republicans to seek via lawsuit, political trickery, or perhaps even violence to take the prize that pluralities of Americans have stubbornly denied the GOP in all but one presidential election of the 21st century.

Reforms of the Electoral Count Act of 1887 enacted late last year took away one form of election coup that might otherwise be available to the GOP. And the more recent U.S. Supreme Court rejection of the “independent state legislatures” doctrine that was the foundation for Mike Johnson’s effort to overturn the results in Congress closes off another avenue for stealing the presidency. But as the Washington Post notes, there are still some sinister things an election-denying Speaker can do in conjunction with an election-denying presidential nominee:

Richard H. Pildes, a New York University law professor, said the speaker would have significant power to shape the rules if neither candidate wins an outright majority of electoral college votes — a possibility if a third-party candidate manages to win one or more states.

In that scenario, a “contingent election” would occur in the House, where each state’s delegation is given one vote.

A more alarming concern is whether Johnson would, assuming he’s still speaker after the next election, attempt to disrupt the proceedings in a more dramatic way — for instance, by preventing the session from happening altogether. Although the vice president presides over the occasion, it occurs in the House chamber — the domain of the speaker.

More fundamentally, though, the advent of Speaker Johnson represents another major blow to what’s left of the Republican wall of resistance to Trump’s authoritarian and anti-democratic impulses. One way or another, MAGA Republicans will find ways to deny any Democratic victory. And that’s particularly true of those like Johnson who really do seem to believe God Almighty is depending on the GOP’s success, and/or will smite America with hellfire if it gives power to the devilish Democrats.

It may get tedious, but Democrats, the independent media, and Republicans who remain loyal to the U.S. Constitution, need to constantly, day in and day out, challenge Trump, Johnson, and their allies to tell us under what circumstances they would accept defeat in 2024. If an answer is never forthcoming, that’s all anyone should need to know about the perils the country could face next year and beyond.