Maddow Blog | On Certifying Election Results, Chairman Johnson Offers a Big ‘If’

It’s hard to say with certainty which party will have a majority in the House of Representatives next year, but there’s a good chance that House Speaker Mike Johnson will be back in power in January, when it’s up to Congress to officially certify the results of the 2024 election.

With that in mind, it was troubling to see Louisiana Republicans back down when asked about his willingness to respect the will of the American electorate. NBC News reported:

Before we dive into the GOP leader’s response, it’s worth pausing for a moment to appreciate how unfortunate it is that Johnson had to be asked this question at all.

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 entirely unnecessary: ​​our political system was stable and healthy enough to make the answer to such a question obvious.

But as Republican politics grows more radical, leading party officials are not only confronting the question, they are also hesitating to answer it.

On the surface, Johnson’s answer may seem innocent. If the election is free and fair, he will “of course” accept the outcome.

But just beneath the surface, a rather clumsy game of balls emerges.

1. Republicans expect to accept the 2024 results as long as the election is “free and fair.”

2. Republicans will decide for themselves whether the election was “free and fair,” based on amorphous and undefined standards that they will not share.

3. If the Democrats win the election, the results will necessarily raise questions about the “free and fair” nature of the election – because Republicans say so – and at that point the GOP’s intentions to accept the results go out the window.

That’s precisely why many Democrats in Congress were outraged by Johnson’s comments.

What makes matters worse is the credibility of the Speaker of the House on this issue. After the Republican press conference, House Democratic Conference Chairman Pete Aguilar told reporters, referring to Johnson, “He doesn’t have a track record that would tell the American people that he should be believed.”

That’s a fair point. While his record on the issue is often overlooked, Johnson helped lead a failed effort to convince the Supreme Court to keep Donald Trump in office despite the voters’ verdict — shortly before voting with his party not to certify the results of a free and fair election.

Johnson also voiced some of the wilder conspiracy theories about the race, and nearly four years later, the Louisiana Republican is still reluctant to acknowledge the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

All this added context only makes the GOP leader’s latest comments worse.

But as far too many Republican officials hesitate to accept the 2024 results, I’m also reminded of something Rachel said in an A-block in May. “The way you lose your democracy is you lose the expectation that we go into an election because all the parties in that election intend to accept the outcome — to go home if they lose, and to come to power if they win,” she said“If we stop expecting that, then in many important respects we are no longer in a democratic system of government.

“If one of the two major parties in government no longer believes that elections are binding, then in many important ways the ship of democracy has sunk, because they are no longer competing on democratic grounds. If one of the two major parties no longer promises to abide by the election results, win or lose, then the democratic system of government is not threatened with damage, but is already wounded.”

This post is an update to our related previous reporting.

This article was originally published on MSNBC.com