House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is not interested in talking about the 2020 election.<\/p>\n
\u201cSee, this is the game that is always played by mainstream media with leading Republicans. It\u2019s a gotcha game,\u201d Johnson said in response to a question on the subject from ABC News\u2019s George Stephanopoulos on Sunday. \u201cYou want us to litigate things that happened four years ago, when we\u2019re talking about the future. We\u2019re not going to talk about what happened in 2020. We\u2019re going to talk about 2024 and how we\u2019re going to solve the problems for the American people.\u201d<\/p>\n
But what Stephanopoulos presented was very much a question about 2024.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s being \u201clitigated\u201d here, as you might have guessed, is not some intricate, disputed issue that arose four years ago. It is, instead, the most fundamental element of that presidential contest: who won. The voters and the votes and the states say that Joe Biden won. But former president Donald Trump says that he himself did, or at least that Biden didn\u2019t \u2014 and that attitude trickles down through his party.<\/p>\n
Stephanopoulos, interviewing Johnson on \u201cThis Week,\u201d had several reasons for asking Johnson whether he would acknowledge that Biden won four years ago, which Johnson didn\u2019t. One is that Trump\u2019s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), refused to say that Biden won in 2020 when asked during last week\u2019s vice-presidential debate. Another is that Johnson, as the leader of the House of Representatives, has a role in ensuring that the 2024 presidential results are finalized next year.<\/p>\n
Johnson insisted that he would carry out that role, saying that \u201cCongress has a very specific role and we must fulfill it.\u201d But that came shortly after his telling Stephanopoulos that he was \u201chopeful that we have a free and fair election\u201d \u2014 qualifiers that, last month, he applied to his insistence that he would fulfill that congressional role.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we have a free, fair and safe election,\u201d he said then, \u201cwe\u2019re going to follow the Constitution.\u201d<\/p>\n
Speaking to Stephanopoulos, Johnson also articulated why the election might not be free and fair, at least in his view.<\/p>\n
Americans, he said, are \u201cworried about election interference by foreign nationals like Iran who\u2019s trying to meddle in our elections. They\u2019re worried about, of course, illegals voting, noncitizens voting. That is against federal law.\u201d<\/p>\n
They are \u201cworried about this\u201d primarily if they are Republicans and primarily because people like Johnson and Trump have elevated the idea that this occurs to a significant extent, which it doesn\u2019t. But you can see the appeal to Trump in such claims, melding two of his favorite issues: \u201celection security\u201d and immigration. So, as he did in the weeks after the 2020 election, Johnson goes along.<\/p>\n
This, fundamentally, is why \u201cwas the 2020 election legitimate?\u201d is a fair question for Republican elected officials. It\u2019s certainly useful in the abstract to document which elected officials are willing to deny obvious reality. But it\u2019s also a measure of the extent to which Republicans are going to be willing to stand up to Trump\u2019s efforts to subvert the 2024 results should he once again fail to win more votes.<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t only about the \u201cvery specific role\u201d assigned to the House of Representatives, the counting of electoral votes that, as it did in 2021, will unfold on Jan. 6. It\u2019s about everything that led up to Jan. 6 last time around: the denial, the scrambling, the pressure campaigns, the lies. It\u2019s about the extent to which people lower on the pro-Trump ladder are going to be willing to try to make him the winner anyway.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s about how fervently the scores of Republicans in Congress will attempt to derail the electoral-vote count. It\u2019s about how many state and elections officials will slow-walk certification of results or actively attempt to undermine confidence in the submitted votes. It\u2019s about how many grassroots Trump supporters will feel as though it\u2019s acceptable to interfere with vote-counting or vote-casting in light of the nonexistent threats to our elections that people like Johnson have been elevating.<\/p>\n
There are scores of Trump supporters sentenced to or in prison for criminal acts related to the former president\u2019s insistence that he didn\u2019t lose in 2020. They had been convinced that their actions were offered in response to the lack of a \u201cfree and fair election.\u201d Trump and his allies did everything in their power to stoke that conviction.<\/p>\n
The \u201cwas 2020 a legitimate election\u201d question is a proxy for evaluating whether Republicans will allow Trump to do that again. If you ask them whether they would prevent Trump from elevating false claims about this year\u2019s election, you would get responses that centered on a hypothetical. When you instead ask them whether they are willing to acknowledge obvious reality \u2014 or if, instead, they believe that doing so is an unacceptable sign of disloyalty to Trump \u2014 you get a better answer to that question anyway.<\/p>\n
Asking the person who is second in line to the presidency whether he accepts a basic element of reality can never be a \u201cgotcha\u201d question \u2014 unless that person refuses to acknowledge that reality. That Johnson does so in this case tells us not just what he thinks of 2020, but also what he thinks of 2024.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is not interested in talking about the 2020 election. \u201cSee, this is the game that is always played by mainstream media with leading Republicans. It\u2019s a gotcha game,\u201d Johnson said in response to a question on the subject from ABC News\u2019s George Stephanopoulos on Sunday. \u201cYou want us to litigate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":10706,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10705"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10705\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}