By NICHOLAS RICCARDI (Associated Press)
The new chief of one of many chambers of Congress that can certify the winner of subsequent yr’s presidential election helped spearhead the try to overturn the final one, elevating alarms that Republicans may attempt to subvert the need of the voters if they continue to be in energy regardless of safeguards enacted after the 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol.
Mike Johnson, the Louisiana congressman who was elected speaker of the House of Representatives on Wednesday after a three-week standoff amongst Republicans, took the lead in submitting a quick in a lawsuit that sought to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential election win. That declare, extensively panned by authorized students of all ideologies, was rapidly thrown out by the U.S. Supreme Court.
After the 2020 election, Johnson additionally echoed a few of the wilder conspiracy theories pushed by then-President Donald Trump to elucidate away his loss. Then Johnson voted towards certifying Biden’s win even after the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.
Johnson’s function three years in the past is related no longer solely as a result of the speaker is second within the line of presidential succession, after the vp. The House Johnson now leads additionally must certify the winner of the 2024 presidential election.
“You don’t want people who falsely claim the last election was stolen to be in a position of deciding who won the next one,” stated Rick Hasen, a legislation professor on the University of California, Los Angeles. On Wednesday, he flagged one other fear about Johnson, who’s a constitutional lawyer.
“Johnson is more dangerous because he wrapped up his attempt to subvert the election outcomes in lawyerly and technical language,” Hasen stated.
Last yr, Congress revamped the procedures for the way a presidential win is licensed, making it far tougher to object in the best way that Johnson and 146 different House Republicans did on Jan. 6, 2021. But there’s a conservative college of thought that no laws can management how Congress oversees the certification of a president’s win — all that counts is the Constitution’s broad granting of energy to ratify the electoral faculty’s votes.
The House in January 2025 might be crammed with the winners of the earlier November’s election, so there’s no assure a Speaker Johnson would stay in energy. To make certain, it could be troublesome for the speaker to vary any of the outcomes. The vp — who can be Democrat Kamala Harris on the time — presides over the joint House and Senate session in a ceremonial function and calls votes if there are sufficient objections to take action.
Still, the aim of Trump supporters in 2020 was to advance any authorized argument towards Biden’s win to a Supreme Court the place conservative justices have a 6-3 edge, three of whom have been nominated by Trump. A speaker who supported Trump’s final effort to remain in energy can be well-positioned to take action once more if the previous president is the GOP nominee subsequent yr and loses the election.
On Tuesday evening, after Johnson was nominated to his new put up by the House GOP caucus, he smiled and shook his head as the remainder of the caucus laughed and booed at a reporter’s query about his function in making an attempt to halt certification of the 2020 outcomes. “Next question,” Johnson stated. “Next question.”
Democrats saved the difficulty middle stage because the speaker vote on the ground proceeded Wednesday.
“This has been about one thing,” Rep. Pete Aguilar stated. “This has been about who can appease Donald Trump. House Republicans have put their names behind someone who has been called the most important architect of the electoral college objections.”
“Damn right,” somebody referred to as from the Republican facet of the House.
Later, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., famous that Biden had gained the 2020 election. Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene yelled, “No, he didn’t.”
Johnson’s ascension got here after Trump on Tuesday torpedoed the candidacy of Rep. Tom Emmer, who signed onto Johnson’s transient within the lawsuit to overturn Trump’s loss however ended up voting to certify Biden’s win after the assault on the Capitol. The former president referred to as Emmer a “RINO” — or Republican In Name Only — on his social media platform, Truth Social, and stated Emmer “wasn’t MAGA,” a reference to his Make America Great Again slogan.
Johnson is a former lawyer for the non secular rights group Alliance Defending Freedom who was first elected to the House in 2016, the yr Trump gained the presidency. An energetic member of the House Judiciary Committee, he gained discover as one of many main Republican questioners of witnesses throughout Trump’s first impeachment in 2019.
He remained one in every of Trump’s chief defenders by means of the 2020 election. On Nov. 7, 2020, 4 days after Election Day, he posted on Twitter that he had instructed Trump, “Stay strong and keep fighting, sir!” In an interview on a Shreveport, Louisiana, radio station 10 days later, he repeated a debunked declare about a global conspiracy to hack voting machines so Trump would lose.
“In every election in American history, there’s some small element of fraud, irregularity,” Johnson stated within the interview. “But when you have it on a broad scale, when you have a software system that is used all around the country that is suspect because it came from Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, when you have testimonials of people like this, it demands to be litigated.”
Johnson then organized greater than 100 House Republicans to signal onto an amicus transient filed in help of a lawsuit from Texas’ Republican Attorney General, Ken Paxton, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to invalidate Biden’s wins in 4 states that gave him his successful margin within the Electoral College — Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Many authorized analysts have been aghast on the litigation, which was rapidly rejected by the excessive court docket.
On his social media streaming present, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who’s going through costs in Georgia for making an attempt to overturn the election outcomes there, praised Johnson on Wednesday for refusing to just accept Trump’s 2020 election loss.
“He seems to be right on everything, including the things I’m interested in, which is he didn’t accept the election rollover,” stated Giuliani, who additionally praised Johnson for supporting the lawsuit by the Texas lawyer normal.
In an interview with The New Yorker in December 2020, Johnson dialed down his election rhetoric.
“I don’t see a grand conspiracy,” he stated of the allegations of voter fraud. “What I see is a lot of chaos and confusion across the land, and the result is that this election will have this giant question mark hanging over it.”
On Jan. 6, simply earlier than Trump’s supporters overran the Capitol, Johnson tweeted: “We MUST fight for election integrity, the Constitution, and the preservation of our republic! It will be my honor to help lead that fight in the Congress today.”
Hours later, after the assault, Johnson condemned the violence on Twitter. But he nonetheless voted with about two-thirds of House Republicans to overturn Biden’s wins in Arizona and Pennsylvania. He stays near House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, a fellow Republican who strategized with Trump over easy methods to overturn his defeat earlier than Jan. 6.
Trump’s supporters in making an attempt to overturn the election haven’t fared nicely in elections for the reason that violent assault on the Capitol, with a slate of conspiracy theorists trying to imagine positions overseeing elections in key swing states all dropping their races final yr. Instead, they’ve excelled at successful inside get together contests and taking management of some state events. Now additionally they have claimed one of many nation’s strongest political positions.
Joanna Lydgate, chief govt officer of States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan group organizing towards election deniers, stated Johnson’s ascension was alarming: “How can you run the people’s House if you don’t believe in the will of the people?”
Noting the speaker’s function in “the peaceful transfer of power” between presidential administrations, Lydgate warned, “When those in power don’t take our democracy and the will of the people seriously, it can have dire consequences.”
Correction: This story has been corrected to point out the House must certify the winner of the 2024 presidential election, not the 2025 presidential election. And it deletes an incorrect reference to the U.S. Constitution placing the speaker second within the line of presidential succession.
Associated Press writers Mary Clare Jalonick in Washington and Michael R. Sisak in New York contributed to this report.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”