By Tom Hicks | September 20, 2026
Editorial Note:
Blind Spot is the Sunday premium edition of Off Script with Tom Hicks, where we go past the daily headlines and look at the part of the story that isn’t getting enough attention.
Most of us have a pretty simple understanding of how the midterms work. We vote on November 3, the votes are counted, somebody gets to 218 seats, and that party controls the House. We spend billions of dollars on campaigns, endure months of political commercials, and occasionally stop speaking to relatives over this stuff because the basic bargain is supposed to be pretty straightforward.
The people vote. Somebody wins. The winners take office.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said something at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas last week that made that third sentence worth examining a little more closely. After describing Democratic control of Congress in dire terms, Johnson told the crowd, “We cannot, and we will not, allow them to take the majority in Congress.” In the context of a campaign speech, the obvious interpretation is that Republicans need to win enough races to keep Democrats from taking the House. Politicians have been saying some version of that since we invented politicians. Johnson’s remarks at the Republican midterm convention
The problem isn’t simply what Johnson said. It’s the office he occupies and the power that comes with it.
Raw Story columnist Ray Richmond raised the darker possibility this week: What if Democrats win enough seats to take control of the House, Republicans challenge enough Democratic victories to muddy the majority, and the outgoing Republican leadership uses the peculiar mechanics of organizing a new House to keep some of those winners from participating? Richmond went considerably further, arguing that Johnson had effectively revealed the intention to do it. There’s no public evidence establishing that, and we’re not going to turn suspicion into fact because it makes for a scarier headline. Raw Story commentary
But Richmond asked a question worth answering: Could the machinery actually be used that way?
I expected the answer to be some variation of, “No, because obviously there are rules preventing that.” Instead, after going through federal law, House rules, congressional precedent, and the history of disputed House elections, I found something considerably less comforting. There are rules, all right. They’re also complicated, dependent on people behaving in good faith and, in a sufficiently close election, potentially vulnerable to a fight over who gets to participate before the new House has even elected its Speaker.
That’s where this story starts.
November 3 Isn’t the End of the Process
Before getting anywhere near the mechanics, there’s an important distinction to make. Nothing uncovered here proves Johnson is preparing to overturn the midterm results. There is no evidence that he plans to fire the Clerk of the House, no evidence that the current Clerk intends to manipulate anything, and no evidence of some secret Republican blueprint to manufacture a House majority after losing one at the polls.
Johnson’s history does, however, give us a perfectly legitimate reason to take questions about disputed election results seriously. After the 2020 presidential election, he rallied House Republicans behind an amicus brief supporting Texas’s attempt to challenge the results in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin. The Supreme Court docket shows Johnson and 125 other House members ultimately joined that filing before the Court rejected Texas’s case. Supreme Court docket, Texas v. Pennsylvania
The current environment doesn’t exactly encourage complacency either. Reuters reported this week that more than 50 state and local election officials, including Republicans and Democrats, are preparing for possible disruptions surrounding the midterms. Among the scenarios officials have considered are federal agents appearing at polling places, attempts to obtain election records or equipment, litigation, cyberattacks, misinformation and threats against election workers. That isn’t evidence any of those things will happen, but election administrators don’t usually spend September gaming out what to do if federal agents show up looking for voting equipment. Reuters
All of which brings us to a man almost nobody outside Washington has ever heard of.
Meet Kevin McCumber
Kevin McCumber is the Clerk of the United States House of Representatives. He isn’t a member of Congress, and the House historian lists his party affiliation as “none.” He’s a career House official who worked his way through the Clerk’s office, became deputy clerk in 2021, served as acting clerk beginning in 2023, and was sworn in as Clerk on January 3, 2025. Office of the Clerk
Most of the time, that’s exactly the kind of Washington job that allows you to walk through an airport without anybody bothering you for a selfie. But the Clerk has one responsibility that becomes extraordinarily important every two years. Before a newly elected House can organize itself, somebody has to prepare the roll identifying the people entitled to participate in that process.
Under 2 U.S.C. §26, that somebody is the Clerk of the outgoing House. The law directs the Clerk to place on the roll the names of representatives-elect whose credentials show they were regularly elected under state or federal law. When the new Congress convenes, those representatives-elect use that roll to begin organizing the House and electing a Speaker.
That’s normally a ministerial piece of housekeeping. States certify their winners, the credentials arrive, the Clerk prepares the roll, and everybody moves on to the televised food fight over who gets the Speaker’s gavel.
Then you read the House rules.
The Clerk “may be removed by the House or by the Speaker.”
Mike Johnson is the Speaker.
Now the Raw Story question doesn’t sound quite so easy to dismiss.
Johnson having the authority to remove McCumber doesn’t mean he’s going to use it. It certainly doesn’t mean McCumber has done anything wrong. His career stretches across leadership from both parties, and nothing I found gives me any reason to portray him as anything other than a longtime institutional official doing his job. House history: Kevin F. McCumber
But we’re no longer dealing with somebody’s fever dream about a Speaker simply refusing to accept an election. We have an actual federal statute assigning the outgoing Clerk responsibility for the opening roll, an actual House rule allowing the Speaker to remove that Clerk, and an actual Speaker who previously participated in an effort challenging presidential election results.
That’s enough to keep digging.
Before We Do
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What comes next is the part almost nobody talks about: what happens if the Clerk is removed, who takes over, whether a certified election winner can actually be kept from taking a seat, and what one of the ugliest House election fights in modern history tells us about all of it.
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If Johnson Fires the Clerk, Then What?
This is where the story gets uncomfortable, because Congress has already provided for that possibility. Under 2 U.S.C. §5501, when the Clerk’s office becomes vacant or the Clerk cannot perform the job, the Speaker may temporarily appoint someone to exercise the Clerk’s duties until the House chooses a permanent replacement. So removing McCumber wouldn’t leave an empty chair and bring the process to a halt. The Speaker has statutory authority to put somebody else in it.
Rep. Joe Morelle, the ranking Democrat on the House Administration Committee, has publicly discussed a version of precisely this scenario. If Democrats win the House and Trump alleges fraud in enough Democratic victories to matter, Johnson could remove McCumber and attempt to replace him with someone willing to take a different view of which credentials establish that a representative was “regularly elected.” Morelle also identified a serious obstacle: Johnson might have trouble persuading members of the outgoing Republican majority, particularly retirees with nothing left to lose politically, to cooperate with an attempt they believed was intended to overturn an election.
That distinction is important because Johnson cannot wave the Speaker’s gavel over a pile of election certificates and magically turn a Democratic majority into a Republican one. State certifications matter. Federal law matters. Courts may become involved. Members of Johnson’s own party would have choices to make, and an acting Clerk doesn’t suddenly become king because the Speaker handed him the keys to the office.
But in a close election, nobody needs magic.
They need a dispute.
Now Do the Math
Suppose Democrats win 225 seats. Creating enough contested races to affect control of the House would require an extraordinary number of challenges, each bringing its own facts, state procedures, and political consequences. At some point the supposed procedural maneuver starts looking exactly like what it is, and finding enough people willing to participate becomes harder.
Now suppose Democrats win 218 seats and Republicans win 217.
One seat.
A genuine dispute over a single election could suddenly affect which party has a majority among the people attempting to organize the House. Questions about credentials that ordinarily belong in the parliamentary weeds could determine who participates in choosing the Speaker. The difference between a constitutional curiosity and a national crisis might be one congressional district.
And the Constitution gives the House itself an enormous role in resolving that dispute. Article I, Section 5 says that each chamber “shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members.” That authority is broad, but it isn’t limitless.
The Supreme Court drew an important boundary in Powell v. McCormack, 395 U.S. 486 (1969), holding that the House couldn’t exclude a duly elected member who satisfied the qualifications established by the Constitution merely because a majority didn’t want him seated.
But a dispute over who actually won the election is a different animal.
We know because the House has done it before.
The Winner Who Came to Washington and Didn’t Get a Seat
The 1984 election in Indiana’s 8th Congressional District was spectacularly ugly. Democrat Frank McCloskey appeared to win on election night by 72 votes, but a correction to the returns later put Republican Richard McIntyre ahead by 34. Indiana’s secretary of state issued McIntyre a certificate of election, and both campaigns pursued recounts as the new Congress approached. McIntyre v. Fallahay, 766 F.2d 1078 (7th Cir. 1985)
When Congress convened on January 3, 1985, McIntyre had the state certificate saying he’d won. He still wasn’t seated. The Democratic-controlled House seated neither candidate and directed the House Administration Committee to investigate the election, leaving the district without a voting representative while the fight continued. McIntyre v. Fallahay
A state-supervised recount subsequently put McIntyre ahead by more than 400 votes, but the House conducted its own recount using standards established by its committee rather than Indiana’s standards for determining which ballots counted. That recount produced a four-vote victory for McCloskey, 116,645 to 116,641. On May 1, after four months of partisan warfare, the House seated McCloskey. McIntyre v. Fallahay
Think about what actually happened there before trying to turn it into an analogy for 2027. The race was legitimately disputed from the beginning, recounts were already underway when Congress convened, and the House didn’t simply invent allegations against an undisputed winner. Those differences are enormous, and anybody using 1985 as proof that Johnson can casually erase certified Democratic victories is overselling the precedent.
But the opposite claim doesn’t survive 1985 either.
A state certified a winner, and that certification did not force the House to seat him. The House exercised its constitutional authority to investigate the election, conducted its own count, and ultimately seated the other candidate. Whatever else we argue about this scenario, “the state certified the winner, so Congress has no role left” simply isn’t how the system works.
That’s the part worth remembering.
The Real Danger Is the Gap
The strongest safeguards against the nightmare scenario are also fairly obvious. The Clerk’s job isn’t supposed to be partisan. State certifications carry legal weight. Courts can address some disputes. Members of the outgoing majority aren’t automatons, and any transparent attempt to manufacture election controversies merely to preserve power would produce an immediate political and constitutional fight.
There’s another safeguard that gets lost in some of the scarier versions of this theory: the old Republican House doesn’t simply get to stay in business because it doesn’t like the election results. House terms expire at noon on January 3. The House is not a continuing body like the Senate, which is exactly why the organization of the new House and the Clerk’s opening roll matter so much in the first place.
That also exposes the real vulnerability here. An attempted power grab wouldn’t necessarily have to produce a convincing legal theory establishing that Republicans permanently own seats Democrats won. It could be enough to create uncertainty over a few seats at exactly the moment the new House is trying to determine who may participate in organizing it.
That’s a much uglier problem because delay can have political consequences even when the underlying argument eventually loses. Lawsuits take time. Election contests take time. Congressional investigations take time. The Indiana dispute lasted until May.
And government doesn’t politely stop the clock while everybody finds a lawyer.
That’s Why January 3 Matters
Most of the country will spend the next six weeks watching November 3. We’ll watch polls, turnout, district results, and the crawl across the bottom of the television screen until somebody finally projects which party got to 218.
I’m going to keep one eye on what happens afterward.
Watch the certifications in close House races. Watch for allegations that particular winners shouldn’t be recognized. Watch Kevin McCumber and whether anyone suddenly starts talking about replacing him. Watch for challenges to credentials. Most of all, watch what Johnson says and does once the voters have actually rendered their verdict.
If Republicans win enough seats to control the House, Republicans should control it. If Democrats win enough seats, Democrats should control it. That’s not a partisan position. That’s the whole fucking point of having the election.
So this article isn’t predicting that Mike Johnson will steal the House. It’s asking whether the machinery contains vulnerabilities that could be exploited if somebody tried.
Because democracies rarely come with a giant red button marked IGNORE ELECTION RESULT. They run on statutes, certifications, officials, deadlines, precedents, and assumptions about how people entrusted with power will behave. Sometimes the dangerous part isn’t breaking the machinery. It’s learning how much damage you can do while insisting you’re merely operating it.
November 3 tells us what voters decided.
January 3 may tell us whether Washington listened.
THE BULLSHIT DETECTOR
The claim:
American truck drivers are launching a nationwide strike October 1 that will cause food and supply shortages.
Bullshit.
Posts spreading across Facebook, TikTok and other platforms claim American truckers have organized a nationwide strike beginning October 1 over supposedly record-high fuel prices, with warnings that grocery shelves could start emptying within days. Snopes checked with major trucking organizations and unions and found no evidence that any nationwide strike has been organized or announced. The posts have all the ingredients social media loves: angry workers, scary gas prices, and the promise that civilization will begin collapsing somewhere around the canned-goods aisle. What they don’t have is an actual strike. Snopes
Apparently we’re now scheduling national labor actions the same way we schedule Facebook birthday parties: somebody makes a graphic, and everybody assumes it’s happening.
The claim:
Democrats shot four U.S. presidents, Martin Luther King Jr. and Charlie Kirk.
Bullshit.
A viral graphic making the rounds attempts to pin a collection of American assassinations and assassination attempts on “Democrats,” including attacks on Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, Ronald Reagan, Martin Luther King Jr., and Charlie Kirk. The history doesn’t cooperate. Several of the attackers either had no established Democratic affiliation, held political beliefs that don’t fit the graphic’s neat little box, or lived in eras when today’s party labels can’t simply be pasted backward onto them. Snopes checked the individual cases and found the sweeping claim false. Snopes
Six different attackers, more than 160 years of American history, wildly different motives and circumstances. But sure, slap one party label across the whole thing and call it research.
The claim:
A 104-year-old woman named Mabel Rose Thompson went viral after delivering a blistering attack on Trump.
Bullshit.
The video certainly looks like the kind of thing built for millions of shares: a 104-year-old woman supposedly named Mabel Rose Thompson calmly explaining why Trump is the worst of the 18 presidents who served during her lifetime. There’s one fairly significant problem. Snopes found no evidence that Thompson exists as presented in the video and identified indications that the clip was AI-generated. The inspirational elderly truth-teller people were cheering, quoting, and sharing appears to have been manufactured along with the speech. Snopes
We’re reaching the stage of the AI era where checking whether the person exists has become part of checking the quote.
From the Tom Hicks Media Store
Like the Bullshit Detector?
The Bullshit Detector is available from the Tom Hicks Media Store for $4.95, and it’s free to subscribers.
Because the internet has apparently decided that verifying whether the strike, the history, or the human being is real is now our problem.
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One Question Before You Go
What’s your bigger concern: interference with how votes are cast, or interference with what happens after they’re counted?
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