House Speaker Mike Johnson, it seems, is suddenly concerned with the Constitution.
On Tuesday, the Louisiana Republican told reporters that he doesn't "see the path" for President Donald Trump to run for a third term. "The president knows, and he and I have talked about the constrictions of the Constitution, as much as so many of the American people lament that," Johnson said. As we've been saying, Trump running for a third term would violate the 22nd Amendment of the Constitution, which limits presidents to two terms in office.
Lately, though, Trump and his cronies have been suggesting otherwise. Steve Bannon told the Economist in a recent interview that "there is a plan" for Trump to hold onto his office, adding, "Trump is going to be president in ’28, and people ought to just get accommodated with that." Yesterday, when reporters asked Trump to respond to Bannon's comments on a plane ride to Asia, he told reporters he "would love to do it," adding, "I have the best numbers ever." When a reporter followed up to directly ask Trump whether or not he was ruling out another run, the president replied: "Am I not ruling it out? You’ll have to tell me."
All this makes Johnson's comments noteworthy—coupled with the fact that, as my colleague Jeremy Schulman has written, Johnson in 2020 and 2021 "played an indispensable role in Trump’s coup attempt, pressuring his colleagues to sign on to an effort to get the Supreme Court to overturn the election." As Jeremy wrote back in 2023:
Even after the court flatly rejected this lawsuit, Johnson pressed on, rallying Republicans to vote on the House floor to throw out the electoral votes of swing states Biden won. According to the Times, three-quarters of the lawmakers who voted in favor of handing the election to Trump justified their actions by citing Johnson’s legal arguments.
So it's funny that Johnson is now pearl-clutching over the constitutionality of Trump's arguments. But you can also understand it as just another way that he may be trying to avoid answering for Trump's chaos.
—Julianne McShane
