On certifying election results, Speaker Johnson offers a big ‘if’

It’s difficult to say with confidence which party will control the U.S. House next year, but there’s a reasonably good chance that House Speaker Mike Johnson will continue to wield the gavel in January when it falls to Congress to officially certify the results of the 2024 elections.

With this in mind, it was unsettling to see the Louisiana Republican hedge when asked about his willingness to honor the will of the American electorate. NBC News reported:

Before considering the GOP leader’s answer on the merits, it’s worth pausing to appreciate how unfortunate it is that Johnson had to be asked the question in the first place.

As regular readers know, in the not-too-distant past, prominent American politicians were not asked whether they were prepared to accept their own country’s election results. The line of inquiry seemed wholly unnecessary: Our political system was stable and healthy enough to make the answer to such a question obvious.

But as the radicalization of Republican politics intensifies, leading officials from the party aren’t just confronting the question, they’re also hedging while replying.

At a superficial level, Johnson’s answer might seem anodyne. If the election is free and fair, “of course” he’ll accept the outcome.

But just below the surface, a rather clumsy shell game comes into view.

1. Republicans expect to accept 2024 results, so long as the elections are “free and fair.”
2. Republicans will decide for themselves whether the elections were “free and fair,” based on amorphous and undefined standards they will not share.
3. If Democrats win elections, the results necessarily trigger questions about the “free and fair” nature of the elections — because Republicans say so — at which point the GOP’s intentions to accept the results are thrown out the window.

It’s precisely why many congressional Democrats were incensed by Johnson’s comments.

Making matters worse is the House speaker’s credibility on the subject. Following the Republican’s press conference, House Democratic Conference Chair Pete Aguilar told reporters, in reference to Johnson, “He doesn’t have a track record that would indicate to the American people that he should be believed.”

It’s a fair point. Though his record on the subject is often overlooked, Johnson helped spearhead an ill-fated effort to convince the Supreme Court to keep Donald Trump in power despite the voters’ verdict — shortly before he voted with his party to reject certifying the results of a free and fair election.

Johnson also echoed some of the wilder conspiracy theories about the race, and nearly four years later, he is still reluctant to acknowledge the legitimacy of the 2020 elections.

All of this additional context necessarily makes the GOP leader’s latest comments even worse.

But as far too many Republican officials hedge on accepting the 2024 results, I’m also reminded anew of something Rachel said in May. “The way you lose your democracy is by losing the expectation that we are participating in an election because all sides in that election plan to accept the result — to go home if they lose and to go into office if they win,” she said. “Once we no longer expect that, we are no longer in a democratic system of government in many important respects.

“Once one of the two major governing parties no longer believes elections are binding, then in many important ways, the democracy ship has sailed, because they are no longer competing on democratic grounds. Once one of the two major parties is no longer pledging that they will abide by the election results whether they win or lose, the democratic system of government is not threatened with harm, it is wounded already.”

This post updates our related earlier coverage.