Survival of US democracy is now on the line

One year from now the next President of the United States of America will be elected.

That is, of course, the most important job in American politics. It is therefore going to be a big election year, and much of our own media will be full of US news: primaries, the swing states, polls, running mates, the discussions about whether President Biden is too old, all the rest of it.

But last week saw another election, for the holder of the next most important job in American politics, the Speaker of the House of Representatives. The Speaker’s powers are very different from those of our Ceann Comhairle, who presides over the Dáil but does not control it.

The Speaker controls the full agenda of the House of Representatives, the lower house of the American Congress. It – along with the Senate – passes the laws, but the House pretty much exclusively controls the money. It decides how much to tax and what to do with the tax revenue. Whoever is Speaker controls the House and so has a lot of influence and can exert a lot of pressure on individual members. It is a very big and powerful job.

But in the context of the crazy world of American politics right now, it might just become even more important – in a way that is so far from good it is downright scary.

The election last week saw Mike Johnson, a 51-year-old from Louisiana, catapulted into the job of Speaker. No one saw it coming. It was certainly not predicted and for good reason.

Johnson got elected because the Republican Party had gotten itself into absolute knots over the job of Speaker, a job they are entitled to as they have the most seats in the House. Their extreme right wing rebelled against their old Speaker, and the party then spent more than three weeks making an absolute mess of electing a new one. Fourteen candidates later, they eventually settled on Mike Johnson.

He comes with no great experience. His only major distinction as a member of Congress before now has been leading efforts back in 2020 to challenge the legal election of President Biden. That is if we count trying to overturn a lawful election as a distinction.

Those efforts by Mr Johnson arose because the members of Congress must vote after a Presidential election to certify, in other words, to confirm, the lawful election of a new President. This always happens shortly after the election.

It is meant to be conducted with great dignity, and even with a certain solemnity. In simple terms, it is the moment after a boxing match when both sides acknowledge the winner and shake hands. It confirms to both that the battle is over and we shall fight another day.

Before 2020, and certainly in the modern era, such a vote had always been a ceremonial event, the confirmation by lawmakers that power has been passed in a democratic fashion from one Presidential term to another. It is supposed to happen that way even after a bruising contest.

After the election of 2000, the Democrat Al Gore went into the Senate and presided as the outgoing Vice-President over the certification of George W Bush’s election. He did this even though he had won the popular vote, but lost out to Bush following a very contentious result in Florida. 

In the election of 1960, Richard Nixon, the Republican Vice-President, presided over the certification of the election of JFK, even though he had grounds for thinking that some actually dodgy things had happened in the election in the state of Illinois, which voted for Kennedy and won him the election. But Nixon – who history remembers for Watergate – did not wish to challenge the certification of a President. He thought to do so would be wrong in and of itself and he reasoned rightly that to challenge a result in this way would ruin him politically.

How things have changed. Donald Trump’s former Vice-President, Mike Pence, did the same for Biden’s election in 2020: and he received death threats from Trump supporters for doing so. For doing his lawful duty. For doing what Mike Johnson did not do.

In that process back in 2020, 147 Republicans in the House of Representatives – Mr Johnson prominent among them – voted against certifying the election of President Biden. They advanced all kinds of nonsense, spurious, disgraceful arguments for their actions. These arguments are pieces of literal rubbish – all since discredited and thrown out by every court that has reviewed them. Some of those 147 voted against certifying because they were afraid of Mr Trump’s supporters. Others, Mr Johnson it would appear included, did it out of conviction.

And this is why the election of Mr Johnson last week is so significant – so worryingly significant.

For what happens if in the next election, Republicans – led by their new Speaker – actually succeed in preventing the certification of a Biden victory? However the election goes, Mr Johnson will still be Speaker in the immediate aftermath of the election, right up to the time when the certification of the results will be needed. What if he was able to marshal the entire Republican Party to refuse to certify a lawful election?

So no wonder Donald Trump lauded the election of Mr Johnson. For he may need his services again.

Now maybe Trump can win it without relying on Mr Johnson. The polls at the moment are mostly favourable to Trump, even though some of them vary and many commentators will also tell you that polls at this stage of the electoral cycle aren’t really good predictors of what will happen in a year’s time. Maybe Trump will win fair and square, and if so, that is the way of it.

But it is worth remembering that Joe Biden hammered him in 2020 in the national vote. Biden got just over 81 million votes, Trump just over 74 million. And yet, with a few thousand votes either way, in a few swing states, Trump would have won. But he didn’t, and Biden also won reasonably comfortably in the Electoral College, which is the total of the results from all the states and which decides who wins.

When you see those figures, isn’t it absolutely outrageous for anyone – let alone the Speaker of the House of the Representatives – to claim that Joe Biden doesn’t deserve to be President? How outrageous would it be if in 2024 Biden won in the Electoral College as well as the popular vote, by anything close to that kind of result, and then members of Congress – led by the Speaker of the House – tried to overturn it?

If they succeeded, it would be the biggest constitutional crisis in the United States since the Civil War, without exception. It would be a constitutional coup d’état, no less than the overthrowing of the constitutional democratic order.

Over the next year, the survival of American democracy is on the line. The stakes have never been higher.