Scott Anderson oped in Politico:
Congress is right to address vulnerabilities in our election process. But reformers can’t simply fight the last war if they truly want to protect the presidency. When counting the results of the 2024 presidential election, Trump’s supporters won’t control the vice presidency like they did in 2020. Hence, if they want to try and seize the White House again, they will have to use new strategies that use those political institutions they do control.https://fdab65cb900bd8912ac9f2046e2afad9.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
At present, a House majority is perhaps the one thing Trump’s supporters seem most likely to run during the 2024 presidential election. But that alone might be enough to steal the presidency, unless and until Congress says otherwise.
Under current law, a simple majority in the House of Representatives could not only derail the process for counting electoral votes but would also appoint the person who becomes president if and when that process fails. If Congress wants to prevent this from happening, it needs to look past the Electoral Count Act to another area of law that reformers have yet to address: that governing presidential succession….
Putting the speaker of the House at the top of this list, however, creates some perverse incentives for the House majority. The House elects its speaker on the basis of a majority vote at the beginning of each Congress, which is just days before the joint session to count electoral votes in the years following general elections. And while every speaker to date has been a member of the House, this isn’t legally required; a majority of the House may in fact choose whoever they want as speaker and thereby make that person first in line for the presidency.
Hard-line GOP Reps. Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene recently underscored what this might mean in practice when they suggested that the House might select Trump as speaker if Republicans were to retake the majority in 2022. But the scary truth is that, if Republicans also win a House majority in 2024, they would not have to stop there. A Republican House majority could at that point not only elect Trump as speaker but refuse to participate in the joint session to count electoral votes, thereby preventing the selection of a president-elect or vice president-elect. This would leave the presidency vacant come Jan. 20 — a vacancy that Speaker Trump would then fill by operation of the Presidential Succession Act. And while this appointment would be temporary, Trump would remain there so long as the same House majority refused to finalize the electoral vote count and determine the actual winner. Trump said this week that he wasn’t interested in becoming speaker if Republicans take the House in November. But he might have a different opinion in 2024 if doing so becomes a stepping stone back to the White House.
To be certain, this scenario raises a number of unprecedented legal and procedural questions that might impact the outcome. But the possibility is credible enough to be taken seriously.
Nor should it be seen as politically beyond the pale. Disrupting the process for counting electoral votes is not so different from what 139 House Republicans did in 2021 when they voted against accepting the 2020 election results on the basis of unproven allegations of electoral fraud. Furthermore, a general election has produced a president of one party and a House of the other no fewer than nine times since the end of World War II, suggesting future House majorities may well see political advantage in such a step.