Democrats have spent much of the 2024 campaign reminding Americans of what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. But on Capitol Hill, some are already growing concerned about Jan. 6, 2025.
They are hoping that Kamala Harris will win in November and they’ll flip the House, too — meaning it would likely be Hakeem Jeffries holding the speaker’s gavel as the process of certifying a Harris victory gets underway.
But it’s another scenario that is nagging top House Democrats — that Speaker Mike Johnson might keep his majority as Harris wins and find himself in a position where he could obstruct the counting of electoral votes and possibly throw the election to the House under the constitutional provisions of the 12th Amendment.
Johnson, after all, led House Republicans in filing an amicus brief after the 2020 election asking the Supreme Court to essentially overturn swing-state results, an effort personally blessed by Donald Trump. Now, he’s leading a charge suggesting that undocumented immigrants are voting en masse in what Democrats view as a coordinated effort to sow doubt in the election and lay the groundwork for mischief….
Other Republicans close with Johnson told us they doubted the speaker would succumb to Trump’s wishes so easily. They noted he withstood MAGA pressure on Ukraine funding, and they drew a distinction between writing a legal brief as a back-bencher and moving to overturn the will of voters as a constitutional officer.
Other roadblocks are in place, as well: For one, it will be Harris, as vice president, who will actually preside over the certification of electoral votes, as Mike Pence famously did in 2021. And under a 2022 rewrite of the Electoral Count Act, the law governing the process, it’s now much harder to object to the counting of votes. Rather than a single member, it now requires 20 percent of each chamber to proceed with an objection.
Yet Democrats are still fearful, fretting over unresolved ambiguities in the Constitution and in the law surrounding the certification process, as well as the fact that Johnson could be in charge for Republicans come Jan. 6.
They fear his constitutional-law background, conservative movement bona fides and aw-shucks demeanor could make him uniquely formidable in a contested-election scenario — sharp enough to come up with novel legal arguments that could throw the election to the House and savvy enough to get his members on board.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, the Democratic constitutional law expert who tangled with Johnson over his 2020 brief, paraphrased the ancient Greek poet Hesiod: “He has the muses say something like, ‘We know how to tell the truth when we want to tell the truth. And when we want to tell lies, we know how to tell lies that seem like the truth.’ And that’s how I view Johnson’s jurisprudence.”
“He can state what the Constitution really says — and then he knows how to make polished arguments for Trump that are utterly false and would gut our constitutional system,” Raskin (D-Md.) said.
While Raskin and other Democrats were loath to speculate about how exactly Johnson and other Republicans could possibly wreak electoral havoc after voting is done, the following concerns have circulated on Capitol Hill…
