House Speaker Mike Johnson “expects” Democrats to object to the 2024 electoral count if former President Donald Trump wins office again — but doesn’t anticipate their antics will halt the peaceful transition of power, he told The Post in an exclusive interview.
“Democrats have now made it a tradition to object to electors, certain slates of electors, and they have [done so] every single time a Republican president has won in the last quarter century,” Johnson (R-La.) said last week.
“They have objected for often ridiculous reasons, and I expect that many of them would object when Trump wins, for no reason other than they just don’t like him, and that’s not the way the system works,” he added.
In October, some senior House Democrats were already laying the groundwork for those objections, telling Axios that certification of the Electoral College result would hinge on the election’s “integrity.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, told the outlet that if Trump “won a free, fair and honest election, then we would obviously accept it,” but he “definitely” didn’t anticipate the former president playing by those rules.
Trump “is doing whatever he can to try to interfere with the process, whether we’re talking about manipulating Electoral College counts in Nebraska or manipulating the vote count in Georgia or imposing other kinds of impediments,” Raskin said.
“We have to see how it all happens,” added Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), the ranking member of the House Rules Committee.
“My expectation is that we would,” McGovern said, “assuming everything goes the way we expect it to.”
Raskin objected to some of Florida’s electoral votes in 2016, and McGovern took issue with the count that year in Alabama — with the latter claiming Russian interference had altered the outcome of the presidential contest.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, however, has rejected the speculative fear-mongering.
“House Democrats are going to do everything necessary to … ensure that the winner of the presidential election is certified on Jan. 6 without drama or consequences,” Jeffries (D-NY) declared during a press conference in September.
Johnson, 52, told The Post Thursday that it was “disappointing” to hear Raskin and McGovern’s remarks.
“All I know is, I took an oath to follow the Constitution and that’s what we’re going to do,” he said. “And I think the vast majority of my colleagues on our side of the aisle are going to do that. They’re going to do the right thing, under the law, and we’re going to do our best to ensure a peaceful transition of power. And I believe that will happen.”
The House speaker pledged on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” earlier this month that a “free and fair and legal election will be certified.”
Congressional Democrats also contested the 2000 electoral count in Florida for George W. Bush and ballots cast in Ohio for the incumbent Republican in 2004. Both times they alleged fraud.
Eight GOP senators and 139 Republican reps initially objected to certifying President Biden’s 2020 victory — but were halted mid-vote as a mob of Trump supporters breached police barricades and broke into the US Capitol building.
The Trump campaign failed to present evidence of widespread fraud that would have tilted the vote count in the Republican’s favor, though many GOPers also argued that state election officials had unilaterally altered voting procedures without legislative approval.
“What happened, because of COVID, was everything was different,” Johnson told Politico in an interview this year. “Everything was irregular. Some in good faith, and others not in such good faith, began to act at state levels to change their laws.”
“They thought, ‘This is a presidential election year. How will people vote? Well, maybe we should do mail-in ballots to every voter in the state. Maybe we should put unmanned drop boxes in public parks for people to drop off their ballots. Maybe we should do all these things,’” he explained.
“Some of that was well-intended, perhaps. But the problem is, none of that was ratified by state legislatures because the legislatures weren’t meeting and they don’t do proxy voting. By extension, that clearly violated the plain language of the Constitution.”
Johnson had a testy exchange by text with Liz Cheney last weekend over the matter, according to Axios, after the former Wyoming GOP rep charged on “Meet the Press” that “I do not have faith that Mike Johnson will fulfill his constitutional obligations.”
The House speaker told the outlet that he and Cheney, who endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris last month despite previously ripping her as a “radical liberal,” have “agreed to disagree” about the threat Trump poses to democracy.
Cheney responded to Axios that the pair “used to be friends, but we did not ‘agree to disagree’” and that “there was never any good faith basis for the stolen election allegations” and claimed that the House speaker “knows Trump is dangerously unstable.”
“Had Mike been acting as a lawyer representing Trump, he would have been sanctioned, disbarred or indicted for taking those positions — just as several Trump lawyers were. The courts, including several conservative judges appointed by Trump, rejected each legal argument Mike makes,” she said.
Johnson broke that years-long silence on Saturday, sharing “how disappointed I was in that, to make things personal, because I’ve not done that.”
“You know the idea that President Trump is somehow a danger to the Republic, and that any of us who support him are a danger or would not fulfill our constitutional obligations, all these things that have been said are it’s just nonsense,” he also told the outlet.
Harris, 60, currently leads Trump, 78, by 0.9 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls.
