Ordinarily, when political observers want to know which congressional Republicans have earned the “election denier” label, they simply check the list from early-January 2021. Newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson was among the several dozen GOP members who voted to reject the results of the 2020 presidential election, which is one of the reasons the description applies to him.
But while it’s accurate to call the Louisiana congressman an election denier, it’s also incomplete — because while the Republican cast an indefensible vote on Jan. 6, that’s not all he did.
In the wake of Donald Trump’s defeat, state Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a crackpot lawsuit intended to invalidate state election results that Republicans didn’t like. As NBC News reported, it was Johnson who took the lead, not only in endorsing that ill-fated lawsuit, but also in getting his GOP colleagues to sign onto an amicus brief supporting the Texas case.
As The New York Times reported last year, the lawyer for the House Republican leadership told Johnson at the time “that his arguments were unconstitutional.” The future speaker proceeded anyway. The same Times article referred to Johnson as “the most important architect of the Electoral College objections” on Jan. 6, 2021, intended to keep Trump in office despite his defeat.
While trying to recruit other members to his cause, Johnson sent the rest of the GOP conference an email. As NBC News reported, the subject line read, “Time-sensitive request from President Trump.”
“President Trump called me this morning to express his great appreciation for our effort to file an amicus brief in the Texas case on behalf of concerned Members of Congress,” Johnson wrote in the December 2020 email, which was obtained by NBC News. “He specifically asked me to contact all Republican Members of the House and Senate today and request that all join on to our brief,” he continued. “He said he will be anxiously awaiting the final list to review.”
Or put another way, Johnson was a member of Congress, but he effectively took on the role of serving as a member of Trump’s political/legal operation, basically becoming the then-president’s point man on Capitol Hill while Trump was trying to seize illegitimate power.
This came on the heels of a radio interview in which the Louisiana congressman echoed a discredited conspiracy theory involving Hugo Chávez and Dominion voting systems — nonsense that even many Trump acolytes no longer feel comfortable repeating.
In the same on-air appearance, Johnson also falsely told the public, “In Georgia, [the 2020 election] really was rigged. It was set up for the Biden team to win.”
It was after this when Johnson voted with other far-right Republicans to reject the results of the 2020 election. None of this is ancient history. We’re talking about events from less than three years ago. If the new House speaker were willing to express any kind of regrets, or perhaps a degree of contrition, about any of these efforts, it would certainly be relevant when assessing his record. But instead of expressing shame, a year after the Jan. 6 attack, Johnson continued to argue that he was right. So, by all means, call Johnson an election denier, but when it comes to the radical Republican efforts to undermine democracy, observers should appreciate the fact that he went drastically further than the others in his party who balked at the results of a free and fair American election.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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