Stop asking whether they would really do it.
Prepare as if they will.
Judge J. Michael Luttig has warned that Republicans could try to keep control of the House by refusing to seat duly elected Democrats on January 3, 2027.¹
Luttig is not some wild-eyed liberal professor looking for a television hit. George H. W. Bush put him on the federal appeals court, where he served for fifteen years. He worked in the Reagan administration and clerked for Antonin Scalia. He also helped provide the constitutional reasoning Mike Pence relied on when he refused to help overturn the 2020 election. This is a conservative judge who has already been called when the constitutional fire alarm went off.²
And his warning is not vague.
Luttig describes a scenario in which Speaker Mike Johnson replaces the House clerk with a partisan loyalist and Democratic winners are simply left off the opening roll. Those representatives would then have to go to court and fight for seats they had already won while Republicans tried to organize Congress without them.
Would that ultimately hold up? Maybe not. Constitutional scholars disagree about whether it could work.
But that is almost beside the point.
Imagine the country while it gets sorted out.
You vote. Your candidate wins. Then the losers announce that, well, maybe your guy does not get to count after all.