Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Donald Trump has been repeating his claims that the 2024 election is already “rigged,” and we know what this led to in the last presidential election. So it’s important to pay very close attention to potential preparations by Trump’s campaign and his allies for another assault on an adverse election result. Yes, thankfully, Congress closed off many of the avenues pursued by the former president on and before January 6, 2021, when it enacted the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022. And the courts and other key institutions in our system of laws and norms did prove resilient in stopping any 2020 coup, which is why Trump wound up relying on a mob to try to stop Congress from confirming the election results. All in all, election-law expert Rick Hasen is right in reassuring us that it won’t be remotely as easy for Trump to get as close as he did in 2020 to a purloined presidency in the name of “stopping the steal.”
But you get the sense in considering the massive resources of dollars, people, and rhetoric the Trump campaign is devoting to “election integrity” that MAGA folk are probing the system for weak spots at every point in the process that leads from Election Night to the inauguration of the 47th president. The likelihood of a very close election with delayed counts in key battleground states (notably Michigan and Pennsylvania, where election officials are banned from opening mail ballots until Election Day, and Georgia, where a Republican-majority state election board appears to be engineering delays in county vote certifications) makes it quite possible Trump will again claim victory on Election Night even if the pattern of returns makes it clear he’s actually losing.
What’s unclear is the MAGA endgame for tampering with the results. Thanks to ECRA, fake electors aren’t an option. Team Trump can try to delay certifications, but ECRA provides for federal judicial intervention to force certifications, and so do state laws in most battleground states. The vice-president who will preside (with significantly diminished discretion, per ECRA) over the joint session of Congress that will confirm the winner is Trump’s opponent, Kamala Harris. So which lawmaker can be relied on to do whatever the former president wants? Mike Johnson, that’s who.
All else being equal, if Trump loses, Republicans will probably lose control of the House, making Johnson an ex-Speaker (and probably ex–party leader via a postelection defenestration). But it’s still possible Trump will lose while his party hangs onto the House and flips the Senate. The vengeful former president might look to his congressional allies to find a way to block a Harris confirmation. If he does, he’ll be looking mostly at Johnson, a man who is not only a fierce MAGA warrior of long standing but was the chief congressional strategist for the January 6 effort to stop Joe Biden’s confirmation, and who is and definitely will be totally dependent on Trump’s goodwill to keep his gavel. It’s worth noting that Johnson is more personally identified than any of his troops with the voter-fraud fables that are the most likely grounds for some Trump claim that the election was systemically “rigged” and illegitimate. Indeed, at this very moment, the Speaker is steering the House toward a potential government shutdown if Democrats refuse to accept the SAVE Act (which provides redundant and highly disruptive “protections” against already illegal and extremely rare noncitizen voting).
No wonder, as Politico tells us, Democrats are worried at what Johnson might do on the next January 6:
[T]he following concerns have circulated on Capitol Hill:— That Johnson could try to rewrite the rules that govern the Jan. 6 vote-counting session. For the past century or so, the two chambers have unanimously adopted boilerplate, bipartisan procedures for the count. Johnson could decide to try to write his own, inserting provisions that would open up new avenues to challenge the results, or simply refuse to adopt a process at all, creating ambiguity and doubt.
— That Johnson could muster enough Republicans to object to certain contested slates of electors — and, if the GOP also holds the Senate, possibly gather the votes to throw those slates out. If neither candidate receives 270 electoral votes, the House could have authority under the 12th Amendment to choose the winner.
— That Johnson could delay the vote-counting session. While the Jan. 6 date is written in law, it’s the speaker who has to call the House to order first. Democrats worry that Johnson could essentially push pause …
— That Johnson could challenge the Electoral Count Act entirely. Under a novel legal theory, he could ask a court to rule that the law on the books cannot bind Congress from exercising its power under the Constitution.
It’s unclear whether any of these stratagems, if deployed, would work, but if the electoral-vote count is preceded by two months of Trump agitprop imploring MAGA activists to somehow stop a monstrous theft of the presidency by hordes of criminal immigrants brought into the country by Democrats precisely in order to cast illegal votes — a lurid claim the former president has been making since 2016 — the chaos could stress-test the system and the Constitution. Mike Johnson could be the kind of trustworthy agent Trump thought he had in Mike Pence in 2021 until the veep flaked out.
Source link
