There's nothing phony about California elections

Is Mike Johnson stupid?

- Mark Z. Barabak, Tribune News Service

The five-term Louisiana congressman earned a law degree and maneuvered his way to become speaker of the House. That requires a certain mental aptitude. However, wanting that job, which entails bowing and scraping to President Donald Trump while herding an unruly GOP conference with an eyelash-thin majority, does tend to land on the stupid side of the scale. But maybe Johnson isn’t stupid. Maybe he's just willfully ignorant, or uninformed. Perhaps he simply doesn't know any better.How else to explain his persistent claim there's something sinister and nefarious about the way California casts and counts its election ballots? Just last week, Johnson once again repeated one of the sophistries the president uses to dump all over the country’s elections system and explain away his oft-verified loss in the 2020 presidential campaign. With an apparent eye toward rigging the 2026 midterm election, Trump suggested Republicans should “take over the voting” in at least “15 places,” which, presumably, would all be Democratic strongholds. Johnson - bowing, scraping - echoed Trump's phony claims of corruption to justify the president's latest treachery.