House Speaker Mike Johnson’s record on the 2020 presidential election is downright indefensible. For example, as longtime readers may recall, it was the Louisiana Republican who helped lead an ill-fated effort to convince the Supreme Court to keep Donald Trump in power despite the voters’ verdict — shortly before he left his party voted to reject the certification. the results of free and fair elections. Johnson also repeated some of the wilder conspiracy theories about the race
Nearly four years later, the far-right Republican leader still can’t bring himself to say out loud that the rightful winner of the 2020 race was, in fact, the rightful winner of the 2020 race. The Washington Post reported:
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Sunday declined to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the 2020 election when asked directly about the election denialism that former President Donald Trump continues to promote during his campaign. During a thought-provoking discussion on ABC News’ “This Week,” host George Stephanopoulos asked Johnson if he could “unequivocally say that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and Trump lost.”
Johnson declined to give a straight answer, saying only that “this is the game always played by the mainstream media with the mainstream Republicans. It’s a gotcha game.”
The Speaker of the House of Representatives was willing to acknowledge that President Joe Biden is in fact the president — hardly a bold concession on the congressman’s part — but Johnson would not say the incumbent Democratic president was the legitimate winner of the most recent the country’s presidential elections.
“When we talk about the future,” Johnson concluded, “we won’t talk about what happened in 2020.”
His party’s vice presidential candidate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, spent much of last week saying essentially the same thing, repeating the talking point again. on Friday afternoon.
I suspect there will be voters who will find this vaguely convincing. With crucial elections taking place in four weeks’ time, why focus on the last elections four years ago? Why don’t we focus on the near future instead of the recent past?
A few reasons actually.
Credibility and responsibility still matter. It is not as if Johnson, Trump, Vance and their partisan allies have expressed any degree of remorse or contrition for launching an unprecedented plot to overturn the results of a national American election. The more they refuse to acknowledge their own misconduct and alleged crimes, the less voters can trust that they will respect future elections and the rule of law.
In connection with this, it is a mistake to view this question as inherently retrospective. Both members of the GOP national ticket have refused to accept the legitimacy of the 2020 race. The same applies to the party’s Speaker of the House. Meanwhile, a CNN report this weekend noted, “At least 23 of this year’s 51 Republican nominees for governor, state elections chief or U.S. Senate have rejected or challenged the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s 2020 victory over Trump.”
In other words, the boundary between the recent past and the present is quite blurred.
But even if we put all that aside, it is not “the media” that continues to talk about the legitimacy of the 2020 election; it is the national candidate of the Republican Party.
“We won. We have won,” the former president said on Thursday. “We won. It was a rigged election. It was a rigged election.” A day earlier, Trump wrote on his social media platform: “I didn’t rig the 2020 election, they did!” pointing to a version of reality that bears no resemblance to our own.
Moreover, as we discussed last week, so does the former president refuses to say whether he will accept the results of this year’s competition. He does that on a routine basis tells the public falsely That his enemies are deceivers and the election results are suspect – unless he says otherwise.
As NBC News reported, Trump has also started calling virtually everything “election interference,” damning evidence, as part of a multi-pronged effort to preemptively delegitimize the 2024 race, in case he loses.
To hear the Speaker of the House tell it, this entire conversation is unnecessary. Those who care about democracy should know better.
This message updates our related previous reporting.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
