In July, the Democratic National Committee engaged some 600 lawyers to litigate the outcome, possibly in every state. No particular outcome of such litigations is needed to set off a systemic crisis. The existence of the litigations themselves is enough for one or more blue state governors to refuse to certify that state’s electors to the Electoral College, so as to prevent the college from recording a majority of votes for the winner. In case no winner could be confirmed by January’s Inauguration Day, the 20th Amendment provides that Congress would elect the next president. Who doubts that, were Donald Trump the apparent winner, and were Congress in Democratic hands, that this would be likelier than not to happen?
Seems to me that the largest problems are always predicated on Trump winning – because it is obvious that most of the people who support Trump would be inclined to not violently oppose an elected President – they didn’t oppose Obama despite dire predictions to the contrary made by people of generally ill-will. However, there is a consistent lack of attention to the real radicalization that occurs generationally when the anarchists/progressives/communists embrace a new kind of violence and it is shown to ‘work’ [not by building up a nation, which is the standard to which political methods should be held, but by shifting power from one faction to another regardless of the long term impact] and then those methods are later adopted by the ‘radical right’ or whatever they are being called today. If riots and BLM, systematic disruption, etc enter the window of effective ways to influence elections, as did slander and gossip and maligning (continuous baseless accusations of moral failings and personal weakness by the progressives led to Trump and his very methods), then we know what to expect in the next cycle.
Norm erosion is cool now though. As Corey Robin just wrote in the New York Review of Books
There are a few specific things Democrats could/need to do to more or less secure long term control of the government. 1) pack the courts; 2) get enough states to sign onto the national popular vote pact to make the popular vote the de facto determinant of the election; 3) pass legislation compelling states to redraw districts so as to have proportional partisan representation; and 4) add 2-3 new states (D.C and Puerto Rico of course; throwing in American Samoa would take some gall and be pretty amusing but I imagine a bridge too far).
Jeffrey Toobin and a few other progressive commentators have been arguing for these things. It’s likely that they would put even the senate pretty much out of reach for the GOP until either a major realignment or a massive backlash. I think the question is, would doing these things itself produce enough of a backlash to overwhelm a Democratic government that tries to these things?
The fundamental issue is that leftists never pay for their extremism. Vague “backlash” is silly. Literally, what important individuals will literally “pay” in a manner that really would be a deterrent. Can you spell out how that would happen?
In 1994 and 2010 they suffered backlashes: they lost congress. That’s the backlash I’m referring to. That’s the calculus going on right now in their heads over court packing. Will it seem egregious enough to either flip enough undecideds or increase differential turnout among republicans enough to take at least one house back in 2022.
If the electoral college doesn’t decide, congress does, but that’s with one vote per state delegation. It is highly likely that the Republicans would win in that situation. They control the majority of states even now with the large Democratic congressional majority.
Trump is the first President (or candidate for President for that matter) to ever say that the only election result he will view as valid is a victory for himself. And he says this as all polls show him trailing badly in both the popular and the electoral vote.
Meanwhile, he routinely demands that his Justice Department arrest his political opposition for treason as he leads mass rallies in chants of “lock them up.” This is too much for even Bill Barr to carry out so Trump hints that he may fire Barr and replace him with someone even more compliant. Some things may have to wait for a second term.
And the thing we are supposed to be shocked by in all this is that the Democrats are preparing for lots of litigation? Give me a break.
Unless your name is Dory, you should know by now that Trump is poo-talking New Yorker. He’s all bark and no bite.
No, Democrats in Washington DC are indeed preparing for a Trump victory.
Trump has used the IRS to prevent his opponents from legally organizing, he has also used the national security apparatus to monitor his electoral opponents. After that he pursued obviously dubious legal cases against his political opponents and a friendly and completely unprofessional judiciary has even let that go so far as to result in legal repercussions for some of them.
Oh he has also stymied at every turn any investigation into voting irregularities.
Right number of letters, but you completely misspelled “Obama”, his name doesn’t begin with T and end with P. But you described exactly what the Obama administration did in 2012 and 2016.
This current president, not so much
Hmm I wonder if that was Just A Question’s point.
Is Hillary in jail? (big disappointment BTW)
Trump is correct that Democrats commit massive fraud every election. I don’t think that’s enough to matter in this case, but in a closer election it would.
The bubble is strong with you.
Trump is an extraordinarily weak president and no one is afraid of him.
He will step down if he loses.
No one has been or will be locked up on Trump’s order.
Obama got a rodeo clown fired for wearing an Obama mask. Who has been fired for making fun of Trump?
Obama got him fired? Fake news.
Now do Greg G’s comment.
Sure. The person was fired because it was felt it might hurt Obama’s feelings. Obama could have said, “poking fun of the president is a time-honored American tradition,” but he didn’t.
In any case, point is that people were afraid of offending Obama, whereas no one is afraid of offending Trump.
If Trump wins we get some kind of violent unrest bordering on civil war sooner and the larger his margin of victory the less severe the violence but no matter what there will be widescale violence starting 11/4 and not ending before March 2021 in the best case scenario.
If Trump loses there may be some short term unrest but it mostly won’t come from the right but all that does is delays thing.
Once the dems take power they have 2 choices
1) work on unifying the country
2) Punish the deplorables who had the temerity to vote for someone not approved by the Deep State
If they choose 1, which I highly doubt they will then the hard left of the Democratic party will rebel continually pushing ever harder for revolution till they spark one.
If they choose 2 then they are going to become tyrants against the right and eventually the right will have no choice but to fight back
Either way we get a civil war of some sort, it is just a question of when and how bad
Unrest and civil war are two different things and there’s a lot of ground between them. If Trump wins, there may be another bout of riots and whatnot, but American society is well past the point where a bunch of random idiots with guns can wage war. The only way a civil war can happen is if the military itself were divided in its loyalty, which won’t happen in 2020.
If the composition of both houses of Congress stays the same as it is today, the House would re-elect Trump and the Senate would re-elect Pence. This counter-intuitive outcome happens because under the 12th Amendment, the House must give each state one vote when it elects a President, and right now 27 of the 50 state delegations to the House have Republican majorities. The Democrats have more total members but they are concentrated in fewer than half the states.
Now if the composition changes so that the House does elect Biden but the Senate re-elects Pence, then some new types of conflict arise. The existing Cabinet would very likely immediately invoke the 25th Amendment to declare Biden unfit and put Pence in as acting president.
Arnold, could you comment on this letter from economists?
https://sites.google.com/site/econagainsttrump/