House Speaker Mike Johnson is a man of faith — a “Bible-believing Christian,” as he puts it, who by his own account does his best to reflect the fact that God is love, not hate.
“If you truly believe in the Bible’s commands,” the Louisiana Republican told Fox News last year, “and you seek to follow those, it’s impossible to be a hateful person because the greatest command in the Bible is that you love God with everything you had, and you love your neighbor as well.”
But Johnson is also a loyal ally of Donald Trump, a man who has repeatedly made false, outlandish and blatantly offensive claims in pursuit of political power, and has spent the last nine years blaming people born elsewhere for almost every problem facing America. But Johnson is far more than a modest disciple of a 78-year-old demagogue who hawks his own sacrilegious version of Christianity's sacred text, nor is he just another Republican who swallows his unease over the racist invective in order to get lower corporate taxes.
No, Mike Johnson is also in it for power. Like his party’s leader, he's given to self-aggrandizement (“entire industries,” he has claimed, are trying “to take down … effective political leaders like me”). In his uphill quest to preserve the Republicans' slender House majority and hold onto the speaker's chair, Johnson is participating — and even leading — a campaign of demonization directed at immigrants, one that he either knows is false or has somehow willed himself to believe is true. (Neither is an excuse, according to the dictates of Johnson's faith, that is likely to satisfy St. Peter).
Speaking to Politico while on the campaign trail in Texas, Johnson this week reiterated a false GOP talking point he has echoed many times before.
“We know that states are not requesting proof of citizenship … so there's going to be thousands upon thousands of noncitizens voting,” he claimed. “If you have enough noncitizens participating in some of these swing areas, you can change the outcome of the election in the majority.”
He made much the same fanciful claim in July, when the House passed legislation requiring states to ask for proof of citizenship from anyone filling out a voter registration form. To be clear, it's already a felony for any noncitizen to vote, but voting-rights advocates believe that requiring a passport or a birth certificate — documents many citizens do not possess — amounts to voter suppression.
At the risk of tiresome repetition, these claims that thousands of noncitizens are voting are simply not true. Don’t take the liberal media’s word for it: Consider the audits of voter rolls conducted by Republican politicians.
In Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Raffenseperger found that, over 25 years, roughly 1,600 noncitizens had attempted to file voter registrations; none of the 65 or so who attempted it every year were successful. In Ohio, GOP Secretary of State Frank LaRose uncovered a grand total of 137 “suspected” noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls. In Kentucky, another red state with free rein to out any “illegals” voting in elections, Secretary of State Michael Adams was forced to concede, “We don’t really have a problem with this.”
Donald Trump already had four years in the White House to address this allegedly massive issue, but rapidly disbanded his own “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity” after it failed to uncover any of the “millions” of illegal votes he claimed were cast in 2016.
It stands to reason, of course, that most people who are in the country without authorization would prefer to avoid deportation proceedings, and are not eager to jeopardize the lives they have built here in order to cast one of the 160 million or so ballots likely to be cast in this year's presidential election.
In the absence of literally any evidence, Johnson has invoked his gut feeling. At a press conference on the steps of the U.S. Capitol earlier this year, standing behind a podium with a sign declaring, “Americans decide American elections,” the speaker was asked by a reporter if he could estimate the scale of this so-called problem.
“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections,” he replied. “But it's not been something that's easily provable. We don't have that number."
Salon asked Johnson’s office for any data that would support his "intuitive" insight into widespread illegal voting. His staff failed to provide any, but shared a report citing another Republican-drafted report based on sketchy anecdotes, including one from a 1996 congressional race in California, where defeated Republican incumbent Bob Dornan blamed "pervasive" fraud for losing his seat. In fact, while a GOP-led task force claimed to have uncovered several hundred illegal votes, Republican leaders at the time conceded it wasn't enough to change the results.
The report from Johnson's office also alluded to a study that had concluded "the outcome in certain races was determined by the votes of noncitizens." That report was based on a small internet survey, however, and its author says that even if its findings are accurate, there's no possibility they could impact a presidential election. ("I can't quite account for the math being so badly wrong in their analyses," the author told Wired, when asked about Trump and his allies citing his work.)
The lack of hard data after all these decades of extravagant claims about massive fraud points toward an inescapable conclusion: “Illegal” voting is not a real issue but rather an attempt by Republicans to explain away their losses and delegitimatize any Democratic victories, past or future. A study by the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice found just 30 incidents of “suspected” noncitizen voting in 2016, which would account for 0.0001% of all votes cast (a finding backed by the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute).
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, told Salon that his own research suggests that noncitizen voting is a total red herring. Based on his own review of the evidence, including a database of alleged voter fraud put together by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, Reichlin-Melnick said that any noncitizen who votes "is highly likely to be a person with a green card making a good-faith mistake, as those account for the vast majority of criminal noncitizen voting cases brought in the past few decades."
Johnson, who has introduced legislation on this issue, is surely not ignorant of such data, and knows perfectly well that there is no evidence to support his own sweeping claims that America's elections are fraudulent (yet somehow, most recently, delivered a Republican majority in the House of Representatives). It’s possible he's a true believer in this nonsense, but Occam's razor suggests that when politicians tell lies they do so for their own benefit.
Perhaps it's useful to turn to a text Mike Johnson undoubtedly knows well, and consider what it has to say about the relationship between truth and dishonor: “The righteous hate what is false,” Proverbs 13:5 tells us, “but the wicked make themselves a stench and bring shame on themselves.”
