Answers With Andrew Weissmann — What Happens If Mike Johnson Refuses to Certify the Election?

First question today is Valerie from McMinnville, Oregon, and she asks, is there any recourse if on January 3rd Mike Johnson refuses to certify the election? A lot of you have asked that question and I wanted to get to it. So Judge Michael Ludig has written about this and spoken about it and sort of sent up a flare, a warning about what could happen. Well, the first thing I want to say is first things first. This is an issue if the Democrats win the House, obviously that would apply to Mike Johnson or if they win the Senate. And so that's sort of first things, which is we need to have a free and fair election. The Democrats would need to win. And then this is sort of the next tier of terms of what to worry about legally. So what has been posited by Judge Ludig and others is what if Mike Johnson fires the clerk who is supposed to sort of count and report on what the various elections are and puts in somebody who is a sort of MAGA person. And that's the kind of thing that there would have to be a darn good reason for that firing if it was done just with the intent to put somebody there who is not going to actually count the actual votes and report them out. That seems like somebody would be able to rush to court, whether it's the clerk or whether it's other people who have refused to be sort of counted. In other words, if you're a Democrat who won and you should be counted as an elect member of the incoming House, you would have standing to go to court. And I think that would clearly be something that the courts would say is improper, very much like what we saw, unfortunately, on January 6th, this idea that some ministerial vote could be suddenly be turned into a political vote and that Vice President Pence pushed back on after getting advice from people like Judge Ludig. The second thing is whether after that sort of report to the House or to the Senate, for that matter, whether the House would say, oh, wait, we're not going to see people because we have found fraud and they sort of manufacture a case of fraud, whether it's claims of foreign election interference, et cetera, things that get claimed that are not true. That's going to be a trickier question because it's going to come down to what are the facts. And there, the Constitution does give a lot of discretion to the House and to the Senate. However, that discretion is limited. There has to actually be a factual basis. And as much as I just as long as just as much as the next person is very concerned about the Supreme Court of the United States and what they would do, I think they would not be down for that. But I think that is the second order problem here. Hey, it's Rachel. I am so glad to see you at the end of that clip, because this is where I get to tell you about a new way to watch all our clips and all of our shows and everything on MSNOW on your phone or your tablet or your laptop. You can watch things live or recorded. Plus, you can ask me and all the other hosts and reporters questions in our weekly live chats. You can go to MS.NOW membership or just click below. Thanks.