“There is a cohort of close observers of our presidential elections,
scholars and lawyers and political strategists, who find themselves in the
uneasy position of intelligence analysts in the months before 9/11. As November
3 approaches, their screens are blinking red, alight with warnings that
the political system does not know how to absorb. They see the obvious signs
that we all see, but they also know subtle things that most of us do not.
Something dangerous has hove into view, and the nation is lurching into its
path.
“The danger is not merely that the 2020 election will bring
discord. Those who fear something worse take turbulence and controversy for
granted. The coronavirus pandemic, a reckless incumbent, a deluge of mail-in
ballots, a vandalized Postal Service, a resurgent effort to suppress votes, and
a trainload of lawsuits are bearing down on the nation’s creaky electoral
machinery.
“Something has to give, and many things will, when the time
comes for casting, canvassing, and certifying the ballots. Anything is
possible, including a landslide that leaves no doubt on Election Night. But
even if one side takes a commanding early lead, tabulation and litigation of
the ‘overtime count’—millions of mail-in and provisional ballots—could keep the
outcome unsettled for days or weeks.
“If we are lucky, this fraught and dysfunctional election
cycle will reach a conventional stopping point in time to meet crucial
deadlines in December and January. The contest will be decided with sufficient
authority that the losing candidate will be forced to yield. Collectively we
will have made our choice—a messy one, no doubt, but clear enough to arm the
president-elect with a mandate to govern.
“As a nation, we have never failed to clear that bar. But in
this election year of plague and recession and catastrophized politics, the
mechanisms of decision are at meaningful risk of breaking down. Close students
of election law and procedure are warning that conditions are ripe for a
constitutional crisis that would leave the nation without an authoritative
result. We have no fail-safe against that calamity. Thus, the blinking red
lights.
“‘We could well see a protracted postelection struggle in
the courts and the streets if the results are close,’ says Richard L. Hasen, a
professor at the UC Irvine School of Law and the author of a recent book called Election
Meltdown. ‘The kind of election meltdown we could see would be much worse
than 2000’s Bush v. Gore case.’
“A lot of people, including Joe Biden,
the Democratic Party nominee, have misconceived the nature of the threat. They
frame it as a concern, unthinkable for presidents past, that Trump might refuse
to vacate the Oval Office if he loses. They generally conclude, as
Biden has, that in that
event the proper authorities ‘will escort him from the White House with great
dispatch.’
“The worst case, however, is not that Trump rejects the
election outcome. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a
decisive outcome against him. If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his
Republican allies play the part, he assigns them, he could obstruct the
emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College
and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether
there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that uncertainty to hold on to
power.
“Trump’s state and national legal teams are already laying
the groundwork for postelection maneuvers that would circumvent the results of
the vote count in battleground states. Ambiguities in the Constitution and
logic bombs in the Electoral Count Act make
it possible to extend the dispute all the way to Inauguration Day, which would
bring the nation to a precipice. The Twentieth Amendment is crystal clear that
the president’s term in office ‘shall end’ at noon on January 20, but two
men could show up to be sworn in. One of them would arrive with all the tools
and power of the presidency already in hand.
“‘We are not prepared for this at all,’ Julian Zelizer, a
Princeton professor of history and public affairs, told me. ‘We talk about it,
some worry about it, and we imagine what it would be. But few people have
actual answers to what happens if the machinery of democracy is used to prevent
a legitimate resolution to the election.’
“Let us not hedge about one thing. Donald Trump may win or lose, but he will never concede. Nineteen summers ago, when counterterrorism analysts warned of a coming attack by al‑Qaeda, they could only guess at a date. This year, if election analysts are right, we know when the trouble is likely to come. Call it the Interregnum: the interval from Election Day to the next president’s swearing-in. It is a temporal no-man’s-land between the presidency of Donald Trump and an uncertain successor—a second term for Trump or a first for Biden. The transfer of power we usually take for granted has several intermediate steps, and they are fragile.
“The Interregnum comprises 79 days, carefully bounded by
law. Among them are ‘the first Monday after the second Wednesday in
December,’ this year December 14, when the electors meet in all 50 states
and the District of Columbia to cast their ballots for president; ‘the 3d day
of January,’ when the newly elected Congress is seated; and ‘the sixth day of
January,’ when the House and Senate meet jointly for a formal count of the
electoral vote. In most modern elections these have been pro forma milestones,
irrelevant to the outcome. This year, they may not be.
“‘Our Constitution does not secure the peaceful transition
of power, but rather presupposes it,’ the legal scholar Lawrence Douglas wrote
in a recent book titled simply Will He Go? The
Interregnum we are about to enter will be accompanied by what Douglas, who
teaches at Amherst, calls a ‘perfect storm’ of adverse conditions. We cannot
turn away from that storm. On November 3 we sail toward its center
mass. If we emerge without trauma, it will not be an unbreakable ship that has
saved us.
“Let us not hedge about
one thing. Donald Trump may win or lose, but he will never concede. Not under
any circumstance. Not during the Interregnum and not afterward. If compelled in
the end to vacate his office, Trump will insist from exile, as long as he draws
breath, that the contest was rigged. Trump’s invincible commitment to this
stance will be the most important fact about the coming Interregnum. It will
deform the proceedings from beginning to end. We have not experienced anything
like it before” (The Atlantic).
CNN Analysis: Trump's threats and actions bring America to the brink
ReplyDeleteUpdated 4:19 AM EDT September 24, 2020
President Donald Trump's refusal on Wednesday to guarantee a peaceful transfer of power if he loses to Joe Biden in November is leading America towards a dark place during a year of incendiary political tensions.
Trump's intransigence, included in his latest assault on perfectly legitimate mail-in ballots on Wednesday, posed a grave threat to the democratic continuum that has underpinned nearly 250 years of republican government.
"Well, we're going to have to see what happens. You know that I've been complaining very strongly about the ballots and the ballots are a disaster," Trump said, when asked if he could commit to the peaceful transition.
"(G)et rid of the ballots and you'll have a very ... there won't be a transfer, frankly. There'll be a continuation."
The President's comments risked not only dealing another blow to an election in which he has been trailing and has incessantly tarnished, but could send a signal to his supporters about how to react if the Democratic nominee prevails in 41 days. That possibility is especially dangerous given this past summer's racial and social unrest -- which burst forth again on Wednesday evening after police said two officers were shot in Louisville, Kentucky, amid protests about the failure to charge officers in the death of Breonna Taylor, an unarmed Black woman.
Trump's near simultaneous warning on Wednesday that he thinks the election will end up being decided by the Supreme Court also raises the risk of a constitutional imbroglio likely to be worse than the disputed 2000 election.
His rhetoric escalated as he yet again politicized the effort to quell the pandemic by threatening to override regulators on the question of whether a newly developed vaccine would be safe in a highly irregular move. Taken together, his anti-democratic instincts and prioritization of his own political goals amid a national emergency show he plans to allow nothing -- not the health of Americans, the sanctity of US elections or the reputation of the Supreme Court -- to prevent him from winning a second term… (CNN).
And his comments poured gasoline on an already inflamed nominating battle to fill the seat of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg while threatening to drag the court further into politics in a way that could shred its legitimacy among millions of Americans.
ReplyDeleteTrump's latest attempts to create uproar came amid new efforts to subvert the traditional mechanisms of government for his own gain -- in what has become an almost daily ritual.
There were new signs of his rejection of the sound science needed to confront the worst public health emergency in 100 years. Trump is advancing a fake reality that Covid-19 is dying out at a moment when alarm bells are ringing about a possible winter second wave. CNN also reported that Dr. Deborah Birx -- the coordinator of the coronavirus task force who is a globally respected public health professional -- is the latest government expert to become increasingly marginalized by a White House that trades in lies and political expediency rather than the national interest.
The revelations from inside the West Wing, which came a day after the United States recorded its 200,000th death from the pandemic, show how the White House effort to end the crisis has been systematically repurposed to service Trump's hopes of a second term in one of the most self-serving but dramatic manipulations of presidential influence in modern memory.
Trump has spent years weaponizing executive power for his political and personal gain: he was impeached, after all, for trying to get Ukraine to interfere in the election, and he's driven professional, qualified officials who challenge his own warped view of reality from his administration.
But there is a sense, which becomes more palpable by the day, that he is driving America to a dangerous place in the weeks leading up to the election, and that the most tense and divisive days for many years could be ahead, as he tries everything in his power -- and beyond it -- to stay in the White House.
Trump takes fresh aim at the fairness of the election
Even before Trump's destabilizing remarks, Washington was already on edge, given the raised stakes of a looming election and the sudden vacancy on the Supreme Court, which is promising the most confrontational confirmation battle in years -- even by the standards of previous struggles of high court nominees.
Trump is well within his rights to nominate a replacement for Ginsburg -- a move that will enshrine an unassailable conservative majority, potentially for decades. There is also nothing to stop the Senate Republican majority from seeking to confirm the person, notwithstanding clear GOP hypocrisy after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to confirm then-President Barack Obama's third nominee in a presidential election year.
But the President's suggestion that the Supreme Court could be called in to adjudicate the election threatens to trigger new fury over the nominating process. If a candidate is installed in the coming weeks it will raise the possibility that a new justice who is recently beholden to the President for a lifetime appointment could be called upon to rule on his political fate in a clear and obvious conflict of interest.
Given this administration's hair-trigger tendency to resort to questionable legal action, and record of accelerating cases to the Supreme Court, the possibility of a bitter aftermath to the election looks very real.
"I think this will end up in the Supreme Court and I think it's very important that we have nine justices," Trump said, referring to the election and his false claims that mail-in voting, which is attractive to many Americans amid a pandemic, is a corrupt Democratic scheme.
The President said it was better that a ninth justice was on the bench before the election, "because I think this scam that the Democrats are pulling, it's a scam, this scam will be before the United States Supreme Court and I think having a four-four situation is not a good situation if you get that"…(CNN).
It was stunning to see a President be so frank about an apparent scheme to invalidate his election duel against Biden if he does not emerge as the winner of the Electoral College. Trump's repeated assaults against good governance, constitutional tradition and respect for the norms and the customs of the presidency can often appear arcane and may not mean much to Americans mired in a pandemic, facing massive job losses and have kids stuck at home because school is closed. And the President's defenders often accuse the media of taking his statements too literally.
ReplyDeleteBut the experience of Trump's past actions and his incessant attack on the election leave little doubt he is serious about his threat to launch an unprecedented attack on US democracy to stay in power if Biden wins. If he were to succeed in such an attempt, the United States would suffer historic damage to its long-resilient political system…” (CNN).