As the spirit moves

It seems unlikely that House Speaker Mike Johnson could deliver the presidency to a losing Donald Trump in January 2025. He would be stymied even if he thought his Bible compelled him.

My Bible tells me that peacemakers are to be blessed. It does not say anything like that about election-deniers.

As you may know, this Johnson fellow from Louisiana is a smiling religious extremist and constitutional lawyer, in that order. He says pick up a Bible if you want to know his worldview.

His Bible told him in 2020 that Trump should remain president despite losing.

Johnson compiled a constitutional-law analysis during the period between November 2020 and January 2021. He contended in it that state legislatures have the power to change the state’s electors for the purpose of reporting the state’s votes in the presidential election.

He found that assertion relevant if county election officials usurped the legislature’s autonomy over elections by acting at the county level, in response to the pandemic, to permit people to vote by mail or into drop boxes.

He was arguing that majority Republican state legislators in swing states that delivered victory to Joe Biden could get together and keep Trump as president on the argument that too many danged people got to vote too danged easily in those states.

Courts local and federal and of Democratic and Republican predilection rejected lawsuits making that argument. Then, in a penultimate biblical gasp, one that left only the option of insurrection, the Texas attorney general petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out electors in close swing states like Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Johnson signed a friend-of-thecourt brief siding with the premise that Texas should run everything. He lobbied House Republican colleagues to sign with him, which dozens did.

The hangup was that, despite Johnson’s Bible bestowing extra powers on Texas, the U.S. Constitution does not permit any state to decide another state’s autonomous elections.

Otherwise, I would be on the horn to California or Vermont to pick Arkansas a better governor.

So, with so much in the world to worry about, I recommend moving down on the list of worries a Johnson-led Trump takeover of American democracy.

Even before a tightening-up law passed since the troubles of Jan. 6, any rejection of the certified Electoral College was a decided longshot.

Yes, House members could object in joint session to certification in selected states. But a senator would have to object as well. Even then, the respective chambers would adjourn to separate sessions at which non-acceptance of any electors would have to be passed not only by one chamber, but both.

After that, as Mike Pence knew, the vice president had a constitutional role only of housekeeping—to declare accepted what was put before him.

Under a law enacted since then, a fifth of the membership of the House as well as the Senate would have to pre-petition for non-acceptance of certified Electoral College reports. If that threshold were met, the chambers would adjourn to separate considerations by the same rules as before—requiring majorities in each.

And the new law makes even more explicit—in case some vice president might try some day what Pence was too good a man to try—that the vice president’s role is simply and entirely “ministerial.”

That means Kamala Harris could not personally re-elect Joe Biden if Trump beat him, which is a flip-side possibility.

Johnson as speaker might be able to persuade most Republican House members to follow him in destruction of the American democratic system. But surely—which can sometimes be a famous last word—not all moderate Republicans would go along.

Even if they did, we could fall back on a U.S. Senate more deliberative and less biblical in the Johnson sense.

As for the matter of a new speaker of the House thumping his Bible as his worldview, it seems fair to say that holding up the Good Book as the source of one’s worldview is a nobly widespread practice in the country. But it works best as a set of guiding personal principles rather than a manual of policy commandments applied to secular society.

Some biblical principles hold that Trump is God-sent in the tradition of the Lord working in mysterious ways. Other biblical principles hold that Trump is maniacally evil in his menace to our country.

Sometimes we must slip down to the level of the U.S. Constitution to settle clashes. At least we have a Supreme Court to decide the constitutional debates.

On the biblical ones, we have only the spirit of the Lord as it moves within us individually. And there are many ways it moves.