Colorado Congressman Ken Buck drew a line in the sand last week, refusing to support one U.S. House speaker candidate — fellow Republican Jim Jordan of Ohio — over his 2020 election denialism.
But on Wednesday, Buck joined with all other Republicans present to elect another speaker candidate who also had worked to overturn the 2020 presidential election and prevent the certification of Democrat Joe Biden as the winner over Donald Trump.
Buck told CNN Tuesday night that now-Speaker Mike Johnson, a fourth-term congressman from Louisiana, wasn’t perfect. But he drew a distinction with Jordan, arguing that Johnson did not engage in efforts to overturn the election at the same level that Jordan did.
“Jim Jordan was involved in all of the — not all of (it), but most of the post-election activity. Mike Johnson was not,” Buck said. Buck previously had opposed Majority Leader Steve Scalise’s speaker bid because Scalise wouldn’t say if the 2020 election was legitimate.
But Johnson, too, was seen as an active player behind the scenes in in the effort to overturn the election results in late 2020 and early 2021. He collected signatures from fellow House Republicans in December 2020 for a legal brief that supported a lawsuit seeking to throw out the election results in key states, according to The New York Times. That lawsuit was defeated.
In an interview with the New Yorker in December 2020, Johnson falsely suggested that there was election fraud “happening across the country all simultaneously.”
He also rallied Republicans in a failed bid to reject electoral votes from some battleground states when Congress convened jointly to certify the results. That process was stalled on Jan. 6, 2021, by an insurrection in which a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol. As a basis for rejecting some states’ votes — which effectively would’ve thrown out millions of legitimate votes — Johnson argued that several states’ pandemic-motivated changes to voting procedures were unconstitutional.
Buck, who said he faced threats and an eviction notice at his Windsor office over his opposition to Jordan, wasn’t unavailable for an interview or comment Wednesday afternoon. A spokesman directed a reporter to a statement describing Buck’s support for Johnson. The statement does not mention the new speaker’s previous support for lawsuits that sought to stop Biden’s election.
In his interview with CNN, Buck, who represents Colorado’s Fourth Congressional District, acknowledged that Johnson voted against certifying the election. Asked about Johnson’s vote then, Buck said it was a mistake but added that people can make mistakes “and still can be really good speakers.”
“We’re at a point now where we need to move forward and make sure the government stays open,” Buck said, and act on funding for Ukraine and Israel as well as border security. “And that is going to take a human being in that speaker position — not a perfect human being, but a Mike Johnson who has done his very best to move issues forward and is a really good person.”
The House’s election of Johnson as speaker split strictly along party lines, with none of Colorado’s members voting against their party’s nominee, as Buck had done repeatedly last week in opposing Jordan. He also had joined with a handful of Republicans three weeks ago to oust then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy, setting off the new speaker race.
Democrats blasted Johnson’s ascendency to the speaker position..
“Mike Johnson helped lead the Big Lie which drove insurrectionists to attack our Capitol on January 6,” Rep. Dianne DeGette, a Denver Democrat, said in a statement. “That alone should be disqualifying.”
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