House Speaker Mike Johnson said Sunday that replacing President Joe Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee would be “unlawful,” just hours before the president announced that he is officially stepping aside.
In an interview on ABC’s “This Week,” the Louisiana Republican claimed that some states would face legal challenges to putting another Democratic candidate on their ballot instead of Biden.
“It would be wrong, and I think unlawful, in accordance to some of these states’ rules, for a handful of people to go in a back room and switch it out because they don’t like the candidate any longer. That’s not how this is supposed to work,” Johnson said, repeating the same statement on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
On Sunday afternoon, Biden released a letter formally announcing his decision to drop out of the race to become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee for the November election. Biden announced his endorsement for Vice President Kamala Harris to take his place.
Biden said that while he is dropping out of the race, he will continue to serve the remainder of his tenure as president. Following his announcement, Johnson called on Biden to resign “immediately.”
But is Johnson right that there would be legal issues with a different candidate? Earlier this month, election law expert and UCLA professor Rick Hasen said there is no reason Democrats should be unable to legally put forward a different person.
“I don’t put any credence to it. Joe Biden is not the party’s nominee now, and states generally point to the major party’s nominee as the one whose name is on the ballot,” Hasen wrote on July 3 on his website, Election Law Blog.
While Johnson failed to specify any specific legal argument, his comments may be in reference Ohio, which had a law requiring parties to choose their official nominees 90 days before the election. The state’s lawmakers have since changed the law, effective Sept. 1, so that Ohio would allow Democrats to submit their nominee after the DNC.
Republicans and affiliated groups – like the Heritage Foundation, the architect behind the Project 2025 blueprint to dismantle much of the federal government – will likely still file legal challenges to the Democratic Party’s nominee in multiple states.
Speaking in passive language on Sunday, Johnson did not explicitly say that it would likely be his party filing the lawsuits. In a post following Biden’s announcement, the speaker claimed that Democrats “forced” the president off the ballot.
A Heritage memo compiled in April said there is a “potential for pre-election litigation in some states” that would make it difficult to replace Biden on the ballot.
“We’ve zeroed in on a few states that we think are the best case,” Mike Howell, executive director for Heritage’s Oversight Project, told NOTUS. “It all depends on when and how they do it. And then what state that we’re looking at now that matches up to be the right one, going in there and working with the right people.”
Johnson’s comments come just days after the Republican National Convention, where he and the GOP officially nominated former President Donald Trump, a convict who led a false voter fraud campaign and directed his followers to riot at the Capitol in an effort to overturn the 2020 election.
