New U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson has joined his conservative Republican colleagues in voting against abortion and same-sex marriage, but has drawn the most attention for his efforts to overturn Donald Trump's 2020 election defeat.
His new role gives him huge clout steering the chamber, and a seat at the table with Democratic President Joe Biden and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer in negotiating bills of all kinds. But after action Congress took last year he'll have little ability to interfere with the 2024 presidential election, unless he refused to follow the law.
"If it's followed we should be in good shape, and there should be every expectation that it would be followed," said Edward Foley, an election-law expert at the Ohio State University. He also represented a biblical theme park in a religious discrimination lawsuit against the state of Kentucky and opposed a court ruling that struck down laws criminalizing gay sex.
Johnson argued not that the election had been tainted by widespread voter fraud, as Trump and many of his allies falsely claimed, but instead that some states Trump lost had illegally changed their election procedures during the COVID-19 pandemic, rendering the results from those states invalid."We are convinced the election laws in certain states were changed in an unconstitutional manner," Johnson wrote in a statement that was signed by 36 other House Republicans and released on Jan.
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