“It
is increasingly looking as if Joe Biden can beat President Donald Trump in
November. The president seems more and more out of step with the national mood,
from his handling of the pandemic to his response to racially biased policing, not to mention a wide array
of other issues. Even in key swing states, Trump is losing ground that will be
difficult for him to make up.
“For
Trump, there are two broad pathways to maintaining power. First, we can already
see very clearly a strategy designed to suppress voter turnout with the purging of registration rolls of large numbers of
mostly urban voters; efforts to suppress mail-in ballots, which are more necessary than ever,
given COVID-19; a re-election apparatus that is training 50,000 poll watchers for the purpose of
challenging citizens' right to vote on Election Day; and significant efforts to
make in-person voting in urban areas as cumbersome as possible in order to
have long lines that discourage people from exercising
their voting rights.
“The second pathway to
subverting the election is even more ominous—but we must be cognizant of it
because Trump is already laying the groundwork for how he can lose the popular
vote, and even lose in the key swing states necessary for an Electoral College
victory, but still remain president.
“This spring, HBO aired The Plot Against America, based on the Philip Roth
novel of how an authoritarian president could grab control of the United States
government using emergency powers that no one could foresee. Recent press
reports have revealed the compilation by the Brennan Center at New York University
of an extensive list of presidential emergency powers that might be
inappropriately invoked in a national security crisis.
“Attorney General William Barr,
known for his extremist view of the expanse of presidential
power, is widely believed to be developing a Justice Department opinion arguing
that the president can exercise emergency powers in certain national security
situations, while stating that the courts, being extremely reluctant to
intervene in the sphere of a national security emergency, would allow the
president to proceed unchecked.
“Something like the following
scenario is not just possible but increasingly probable because it is clear
Trump will do anything to avoid the moniker he hates more than any other: ‘loser.’
Trump actually tweeted on June 22: ‘Rigged 2020 election: millions of mail-in
ballots will be printed by foreign countries, and others. It will be the
scandal of our times!’ With this, Trump has begun to lay the groundwork for the
step-by-step process by which he holds on to the presidency after he has
clearly lost the election:
1.
Biden wins the popular vote and carries the key swing states of
Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania by decent but not overwhelming
margins.
2.
Trump immediately declares that the voting was rigged, that
there was mail-in ballot fraud and that the Chinese were behind a plan to
provide fraudulent mail-in ballots and other ‘election hacking’ throughout the
four key swing states that gave Biden his victory.
3.
Having railed against the Chinese throughout the campaign,
calling Biden ‘soft on China,’ Trump delivers his narrative claiming the Chinese
have interfered in the U.S. election.
4.
Trump indicates this is a major national security issue, and he
invokes emergency powers, directing the Justice Department to investigate the
alleged activity in the swing states. The legal justification for the presidential
powers he invokes has already been developed and issued by Barr.
5.
The investigation is intended to tick down the clock toward
December 14, the deadline when each state's Electoral College electors must be
appointed. This is the very issue that the Supreme Court harped on in Bush v. Gore in ruling that the election process
had to be brought to a close, thus, forbidding the further counting of Florida
ballots.
6.
All four swing states have Republican control of both their
upper and lower houses of their state legislatures. Those state legislatures
refuse to allow any Electoral College slate to be certified until the ‘national
security’ investigation is complete.
7.
The Democrats will have begun a legal action to certify the
results in those four states, and the appointment of the Biden slate of
electors, arguing that Trump has manufactured a national security emergency in
order to create the ensuing chaos.
8.
The issue goes up to the Supreme Court, which unlike the 2000
election does not decide the election in favor of the Republicans. However, it
indicates again that the December 14 Electoral College deadline must be met;
that the president's national security powers legally authorize him to
investigate potential foreign country intrusion into the national election; and
if no Electoral College slate can be certified by any state by December 14, the
Electoral College must meet anyway and cast its votes.
9.
The Electoral College meets, and without the electors from those
four states being represented, neither Biden nor Trump has sufficient votes to
get an Electoral College majority.
10. The election is thrown
into the House of Representatives, pursuant to the Constitution. Under the
relevant constitutional process, the vote in the House is by state delegation,
where each delegation casts one vote, which is determined by the majority of the
representatives in that state.
11. Currently, there are 26
states that have a majority Republican House delegation. Twenty-three states
have a majority Democratic delegation. There is one state, Pennsylvania, that
has an evenly split delegation. Even if the Democrats were to pick up seats in
Pennsylvania and hold all their 2018 House gains, the Republicans would have a
26 to 24 delegation majority.
12. This vote would enable
Trump to retain the presidency.
“We cannot let ourselves believe that this is a far-fetched
scenario. We have just
seen Trump threaten to invoke emergency powers under the Insurrection Act of 1807 to
call up the U.S. military against domestic protesters. The remarkable apology by Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley, stating
that it was wrong to create a perception that the military would get directly
involved in a domestic political protest and intervene against American
civilians, underscores the corrupt use of executive powers Trump is willing to
employ. As Fareed Zakaria recently said in summing up the lessons of former
national security adviser John Bolton's new book: ‘Donald Trump will pay any
price, make any deal, bend any rule, to assure his own survival and success.’
“So
what do we do as citizens to face the impending reality of The Plot Against America? We must ‘out’ this
scenario—and do so loudly and consistently. We have an imperative to build a ‘people's
firewall’ that reaches deeply across the country and reflects public revulsion
at the potential for Trump to undermine our entire democratic system of
governance.
“Nancy Pelosi, the House
speaker, should immediately ask the Judiciary, Commerce, Armed Services and
Intelligence Committees to hold hearings on how steps can be taken to safeguard
against this scenario, especially how to confront any invocation of emergency
powers by the president.
“There needs to be an outpouring
at all levels of society that this will not be tolerated—from government
officials and lawmakers at all levels; to civic associations and civil rights
groups; to business groups and trade associations, who have to recognize the
economic chaos that would result from this kind of coup; to lawyers, academics
and student groups practiced in resisting government policies; and, of course,
to the editorial voices of the press, both local and national.
“The
recent resistance of our military establishment is an encouraging sign and
necessary component of the ‘people's firewall.’ The president has to know there
will be overwhelming resistance to any post-election chaos to undermine our
constitutional order. He must know that the ‘people's firewall’ will not yield
to lawlessness. He has to be confronted with the reality that The Plot Against America must remain a work of
fiction”-Timothy E. Wirth is a former U.S. Senator from Colorado/Tom Rogers is the Editor-at-Large for Newsweek.
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