Mild-mannered Mike Johnson is a leading election saboteur.

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Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is not just a casual election denier, a cynical pol winking at the MAGA mob. Johnson was 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. Indeed, that was his only significant accomplishment in his few years in Congress. Johnson is a sharp-witted, bespectacled, smiling extremist.

Back in 2020, Donald Trump’s bid to cling to power had a problem. Recall that sweaty press conference where his attorneys Rudy Giuliani (now awaiting trial), Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis (both now convicted) claimed that voting machines had changed votes, dead foreign dictators had manipulated the election, and so on. Proud Boys brawled on the streets of the capital. It was a dangerous farce.

In this maelstrom of conspiracy-mongering, Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana had a plan — a legalistic-sounding claim that would enable his fellow Republicans to try to stop the peaceful transfer of power.

During the pandemic, state election officials and courts saved our democracy. They expanded access to mail ballots, increased the availability of early voting, and deployed drop boxes so citizens could cast ballots safely amid a public health crisis that killed 1 million Americans. In the end, we saw the highest voter turnout since 1900, and Trump’s Department of Homeland Security declared that the election was “the most secure in American history.” It was a civic miracle. Those involved in running such a smooth election during a pandemic deserved a medal.

Instead, Johnson accused them of breaking the law, based on 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. It had been repeatedly rejected by the courts when Johnson cited it, and the high court repudiated it by a 6–3 vote this past June in Moore v. Harper.

Johnson was the legal mastermind behind the doomed push to decertify the election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. He pressured colleagues to sign on to his effort, warning them ominously that Trump would be “anxiously awaiting the final list to review.”

When Texas sued Pennsylvania, claiming it had not enforced its own election laws, the U.S. Supreme Court refused even to hear the case, with only one dissent. Johnson organized 125 colleagues to urge the Court to act. It would have upended elections in the United States.

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.

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. The bipartisan Electoral Count Reform Act, enacted last year, should curb his ability to make mischief. But one nightmare scenario is that a third-party run (such as one by No Labels) sends the proceedings to the House, where every state gets one vote, an outcome that last happened in 1837. More broadly, the most powerful Republican in Congress will be someone who has shown himself willing to subvert American democracy. He would be, in effect, a spokesperson for the end of American democracy.

In 2020, the institutions held. In 2024, Mike Johnson will hold the gavel. That should scare us all.





Addressing Poor Conditions Behind Bars

People in many jails and prisons across the country are subjected to inhumane conditions. When state and local leaders fail to fix long-standing issues, courts have several tools at their disposal to ensure that those behind bars are treated with basic human dignity. A new Brennan Center resource outlines what judges can and can’t do to defend the rights of incarcerated people. Read more

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Holding Homeland Security Accountable

Two decades after its creation, the Department of Homeland Security has become notorious for excessive surveillance and aggressive counterterrorism practices. The Brennan Center series DHS at 20: An Agenda for Reform

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has offered numerous proposals for focusing the department’s work and strengthening safeguards against abuses of power. Nevertheless, as detailed in the series’s final installment, the success of any DHS reforms depends on improving its internal and congressional oversight. READ MORE

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Dissecting North Carolina’s Unfair Voting Map

Soon after the North Carolina Supreme Court abandoned its anti-gerrymandering precedents in May, Republican state legislators approved a new congressional map that easily ranks among the country’s most extreme gerrymanders. Under the revised plan, the formerly balanced map reflecting the state’s purple politics has been transformed into one that overwhelmingly favors Republicans. Michael Li, Peter Miller, and Gina Feliz write that worse still, “in a state where politics and race are often joined at the hip, many of the voters most impacted by a map that discriminates against Democrats are voters of color.” Read more

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Voting Rights Under State Constitutions

Despite what many might assume, state constitutions, not the U.S. Constitution, do much of the work to establish and protect the right to vote. All state charters but one explicitly recognize this right, and many have additional safeguards in place to guarantee free and fair elections. In a new State Court Report piece, Wilfred U. Codrington III explains the substantial similarities in voting rights under the 50 state constitutions and how they differ from their federal counterpart. Read more

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News

Lawrence Norden on Trump lawyer Sidney Powell’s guilty plea in Georgia election case // ASSOCIATED PRESS

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Jasleen Singh on the benefits of vote centers for voter access // DENTON RECORD-CHRONICLE

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Joanna Zdanys on public campaign financing in New York // CRAIN’S NEW YORK BUSINESS

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