Former GOP Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming and her team have been sharing criticism of Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), who became on Tuesday the fourth selection from House Republicans for replacing the recently ousted Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who was removed as House Speaker over three weeks ago. (UPDATE: Johnson got the job.)
A major point of contention has been Johnson’s past participation in opposition to the results of the 2020 presidential election. He helped lead the support from House Republicans for the failed Texas lawsuit that challenged Joe Biden’s wins in several other states, and Johnson helped muster support in Congress for objecting to portions of Biden’s overall national victory when the results came up for consideration by legislators. The latter area was highlighted this week by Cheney’s team, which multiple journalists said had shared past reporting on Johnson’s role.
In short, the reporting to which Cheney’s team pointed shows Johnson to have argued to his colleagues for opposing certification of the results on the grounds of ostensible concerns about voting procedures amid the COVID-19 pandemic — giving some Republicans an arguably less patently incomprehensible basis for their election denialism compared to Trump’s outlandish conspiracy theories.
But it all ends roughly at the same point, since there’s still no evidence that changes to systems of voting in 2020 produced results that included votes from significant numbers of people who shouldn’t have been casting ballots. Voters were following the law as it was being executed in that year’s races — and, in general, indications are also that they were adhering to basic principles established earlier for the balloting process.
And Cheney personally criticized Johnson in an interview last weekend. “So, it certainly should be a disqualification,” she said, discussing the votes made by Johnson and others against the full certification of the electoral college results from 2020. “And I think that, if it isn’t a disqualification, it will send a very clear message, yet one more clear message, to voters, as they think about who they’re going to vote for in 2024. To what extent can you trust this group of Republicans to defend the Constitution if they’re unwilling to even acknowledge the rulings of the courts, as well as the constitutional process that unfolded and the complete lack of evidence, as well as all of the testimony that we put on in our hearings in the January 6 Committee?”
Watch below:
