House Speaker Mike Johnson refused to commit to accepting the results of the 2024 election regardless of its outcome.
“Well, I hope so. That’s the intention. I agree with the sentiment,” Johnson said on Tuesday after CNBC’s Eamon Javers’ quoted former Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s recent statement that “every American should accept the [election] results.”
“I mean, we absolutely have to make sure that it will be a free and fair election,” Johnson added.
Pressed on whether that meant he would vote to certify President Joe Biden if he were to be declared the winner in November, Johnson said, “If it’s a fair election, yes, of course.”
Javers then reminded Johnson that “it is a near certainty that former President Trump, if defeated, will say again that there was some kind of fraud in this election.”
“Listen, we hope that it’s a just and fair and free election. There’s a lot of work being done across the country, in the various states to ensure that that’s true. We hope there’s not fraud. We hope there’s not illegals voting and all the rest, and we’re doing everything we can to make sure that happens,” Johnson said. “Look, we’re the rule of law team. I mean, we believe in the rule of law.”
Johnson was one of the many Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 elections, citing the same conspiracy theory garbage that Donald Trump continues to push today. Even in his response he cites the profoundly debunked racist mythology that undocumented immigrants have been voting en masse.
As the Brennan Center for Justice found in its 2016 study:
In the jurisdictions we studied, very few noncitizens voted in the 2016 election. Across 42 jurisdictions, election officials who oversaw the tabulation of 23.5 million votes in the 2016 general election referred only an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting for further investigation or prosecution. In other words, improper noncitizen votes accounted for 0.0001 percent of the 2016 votes in those jurisdictions.
Forty of the jurisdictions — all but two of the 42 we studied — reported no known incidents of noncitizen voting in 2016. All of the officials we spoke with said that the incidence of noncitizen voting in prior years was not significantly greater than in 2016.
Johnson’s equivocations match the rest of the GOP. In not committing to the results of the upcoming presidential election, he joins elected officials like South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, and Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas. He even used the same “free and fair” terminology that Cotton previously used.
“Look, we’re the rule of law team.” He really said that.
Donald Trump was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records on May 30. What are potential voters saying about this historic news? And what is the Biden-Harris campaign doing now that the “teflon Don” is no more?
