Speaker of the House Mike Johnson says he has a “duty” and “responsibility” to contest the results of the presidential election if there is a question about the process complying with the U.S. Constitution and vowed to do so again this year as he did in 2020, if the same “circumstances were presented.” The U.S. Supreme Court refused to take up the 2020 case with Johnson’s claims, and his argument was dismissed by a constitutional expert as being on “the far-right fringes of American legal thought.”
Johnson joined an increasing number of top GOP lawmakers this past week who were asked if they will accept the results of the 2024 election, especially if the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump, loses. Up until the 2020 election amid Donald Trump’s interference, the United States had enjoyed the regular, peaceful transfer of power for more than 200 years.
Before being elevated to Speaker, Johnson was a little known Louisiana Republican back-bencher who happened to be the “congressional architect of the effort to overturn the 2020 election, advocating an interpretation of the Constitution so outlandish that not even the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority could swallow it,” according to Michael Waldman, a constitutional attorney and president of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law.
That effort came in the form of an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, signed by 126 Republican members of the House of Representatives, including Johnson.
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“Johnson was the legal mastermind behind the doomed push to decertify the election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin,” Waldman wrote in October of 2023 after Johnson became Speaker of the House. “He pressured colleagues to sign on to his effort, warning them ominously that Trump would be ‘anxiously awaiting the final list to review.'”
In a lengthy interview with Politico published Friday, Johnson was asked if he had any “regrets” about his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election that Joe Biden won.
“No, I don’t,” Johnson told Politico. “My point in the amicus brief — people often ask me about this and they never read the brief — was a very simple and very profoundly important legal question. And that is, was the plain language of the Constitution violated in the days that led up to the 2020 election? And it very clearly was, because the language of the Constitution says plainly the state legislatures are the bodies in each of the states that determine the process by which electors are chosen. In a presidential election year, it’s a critically important thing.”
The U.S. Supreme Court, Waldman notes, refused to hear the case. He wrote that Johnson’s legal argument is “an obscure idea on the far-right fringes of American legal thought. Many of you now know the name — the ‘independent state legislature theory.’ Johnson argued that state legislators are the sole state-level decision-makers in federal elections, and that no one else can exercise any form of discretion, oversight, or agency to administer an election. It’s a baseless, ahistorical, dangerous, and completely bonkers reading of the Constitution.”
Johnson claims that only state legislatures have control over the specifics of elections management. But in most states the Secretary of State is – by law – responsible for the elections and how they are managed.
Johnson doubled down in his claims, suggested that the Supreme Court shirked its responsibility, and even suggested they did so because the real answer was too “profound” and “unsettling” for the nation to grapple with.
“Now remember my background as a constitutional law attorney,” declared Johnson, who frequently likes to remind reporters of his work before becoming a congressman. “For 20 years, I litigated constitutional questions in the courts. And to me, this was just such a plain and very important question to be answered. The only mechanism we had to present that to the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court, was to attach it along to that Texas case that was going to be before the court. That’s why the amicus brief was filed there. The Supreme Court dodged the question. Perhaps they calculated that the answer was so profound, it would be so unsettling, and it was not worth them addressing, but well.”
The Speaker made clear he would do the “exact” same thing again.
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“And so you asked me if I regret that? I don’t. I would do the exact same thing today if the circumstances were presented, because I feel like I have a duty. I’m an officer of the Congress and I have a responsibility. We take an oath to uphold the Constitution, and if it’s plainly on its face not being followed, I have an obligation as an officer of this body to present that to the judicial branch.”
Waldman went on to write, “Johnson’s election denial isn’t mere ‘one could argue’ lawyerly guff. Johnson has ties to a movement that incorporates election denial into evangelical Christianity. Members of the movement held prayer sessions in which they asked for divine intervention to reverse the 2020 result.”
“Mild-mannered Mike Johnson is a no-holds-barred, hold-on-to-power-at-all-costs election denier,” Waldman concluded. “How could this matter in 2024? It seems clear the election deniers won’t wait until the actual election this time. Their bid to subvert the results will start well before ballots are cast and counted. Johnson may preside over key proceedings.”
Indeed, as Newsweek reported Friday, former Trump “fixer,” attorney Michael Cohen, is warning of a Republican “plot” to “steal the election.”
“Their plot to steal the election if they don’t win has already been set in motion,” Cohen warned on his podcast. “Open your eyes. It’s already being set in motion.”
