In November, Joe Biden will win the general election. In December, the electoral college will cast its votes, and that vote will ratify the results of the general election. In January, Congress will certify the electoral college's votes. On January 20th, Biden will be sworn into his new office by a federal judge. At that point, he is the president. And the government and the country will proceed with its business.
Assuming the election results are as stated here, I don't see how that train of events can be derailed. If former president Trump refuses to vacate the White House premises, President Biden, in possession of the police powers of the Executive Branch, will have him forcibly bounced.
Incidentally, it occurs to me that the electoral college is useful during this season of anxiety, for ratifying the results of the general election and having its ratified results certified by Congress. Perhaps it's not absolutely necessary that there be an electoral college for this purpose; perhaps Congress could simply certify the general-election results of the states. But the college seems useful as a further confirmation. I'm reluctant to abolish it. If we're going to change the Constitution, let's get on with revising the 2nd Amendment.
Jim, I think you're right if Biden wins big. If it's a close one, things could get pretty sticky. Agree that the electoral college and Congress are a fail safe to guarantee smooth transition in that instance.
ReplyDeleteAnd questions of messing with the Constitution aside, I think the first orders of business need to be the virus and the economy
In 2000, the Florida House decided the vote counting was taking too long and it exercised its right to ignore the voters and appoint the electors itself.
ReplyDeleteThings the late Antonin Scalia written (there is no constitutional right for the general public to vote for president) emboldened the House leaders.
The Senate president from that year has since assured me the Senate was never going to follow suit. Both houses of the Lege were R then, as they are now. The quality of Senate leadership has declined since 2000. And the House's 2000 action is still on the books as precedent since it never had to be challenged in court (the Supreme Court having chosen to do what the Florida House thought the Legislature has the power to do). I assume many Florida Republicans still think it's a possibility.
So there is one possibility for turning red states blue, post facto.
Once it is clear that Trump has lost, I think his Republican office-holder toadies will abandon him like rats jumping off a sinking ship.
DeleteJim, We can hope. But as Anne's experience with a true believer on the other threat indicates, it may be a forlorn hope. Once Republican office-holders saw Trump embrace Purin and all his works and empty promises at Hesinki, they should have jumped. Instead, they "explained" and proceeded to suffer the insufferable.
DeleteJim, I think that you are optimistic. I read an interesting interview the other day, with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history Prof at NYU and expert on Mussolini and fascism.
ReplyDelete"Q: Let us assume that there is a presidential election in November and that Trump is defeated by Joe Biden. What happens next?
Authoritarian leaders do not experience defeat like other types of people. They are not normal people who would just give up the office and step down. Defeat is a form of psychological annihilation for a leader like Donald Trump. For men like Trump, authoritarians, their sense of self-worth is completely determined by adulation and having the power to bully people. It makes leaders such as Donald Trump feel good.
If authoritarian leaders feel that power is being taken away from them, they get very angry. They will do desperate things to prove to themselves that they are still loved. I would expect him to energize right-wing gun fanatics to create civil unrest because he wants to show the American people — his supporters — that without him being president the country will truly descend into anarchy. I would be very surprised that if Trump lost on Election Day to Joe Biden, he doesn't do horrible things. It is the only way that he can show himself, in his own fantasy world, that he truly is the savior of the country."
https://www.salon.com/2020/07/23/ruth-ben-ghiat-on-trump-and-the-bitter-american-truth-we-do-not-have-a-real-democracy/
Anne, yes, let's assume for the sake of conversation that, if/when Trump loses the general election in November, he will, at the very least, engage in sore-loser bluster-tweeting. And who knows, maybe that would incite some civil unrest.
DeleteI still don't see how that would derail the sequence of events I've outlined in my post. Whether or not there is civil unrest, all of the things I mentioned would certainly happen.
I don't know very much about Mussolini, but I don't believe Trump is as dangerous as Il Duce was. Mussolini had a will to power. Trump has a bottomless thirst to have his ego stroked. I don't think the two characters are comparable.
DeleteThere is one school of thought which says that he didn't particularly want to be president and his family didn't expect him to win until he had actually won. The run in 2016 was to boost television ratings for his TV show.
Nicolás Maduro is still in power after losing an election and being ordered to leave by no less than Mike Pence who promised to take something that was "on the table" and apply it to him. That's Venezuela, but... We've been acting a lot like a Third World country lately, except most of them handled Covid-19 better than we have. As of yesterday: Palm Beach County (pop. 2.4 mil.) 1,055 dead; Taiwan (48 mil.) 7 dead.
DeleteJim, I hope that the US will come through this and that Trump doesn't activate his heavily armed militia networkds to create mayhem before Jan 20 - he could then say that it's a national emergency and he can't step down during a national emergency. And in a national emergency, he could also activate military units, and all of the extra agency police and quasi-military forces that he sent into DC (some of which was illegal, but when did that stop him?)
DeleteMy husband, who did 6 years in the reserves, has assured me that if Biden wins and Trump refuses to leave, it's possible that the military would refuse his orders and escort him away from the White House on Jan 20. He says everyone in the military takes an oath to the constitution not to the Commanding Officer who is the president. I have no clue about the complexities involved if he declares a National Emergency because of civil disruption caused by himself.
Trump hates Pelosi even more than he hates Biden. If the election is still on hold because he deliberately sabotaged it, apparently come Jan 20 - if nobody had been declared the winner - the Speaker of the House assumes the role of acting President. He might concede to Biden simply because of his hatred of Pelosi.
But this all assumes that he will lose. I'm not truly confident that he will lose. His minions in DC will begin blocking access to the COVID data now that they have wrested control of it away from CDC, he will declare victory and note that the stock market is back to its highs, and the people will say, Yay - we need four more years of this great manager.
Jim, if you are interested in educating yourself about Mussolini and several other authoritarian rulers in the world, I will again recommend Madeleine Albright's book - "Fascism: A Warning".
DeleteShe spends part of the book in an overview/summary of fascism. She also gives one chapter each to several profiles of authoritarian rulers - Mussolini and Hitler, yes, but also current rulers. Putin, Erdogan, etc. And she points out the similarities between these people and Trump. The book was published in 2018, so her profile of Trump is based largely on his campaign.
And,once again,I recommend Timothy Snyder's book "On Tyranny". It is a really fast read - you would get through it a short evening. A break from plowing through multiple-volume histories and biographies.
The Prof from NYU doesn't call Trump a fascist, but does note that he has many of the character traits of authoritarians, including fascists.
I think that the first order of business (can be done the first week) is repealing ALL of the Orange A$$holies Executive Orders that have eviscerated protections of citizens' health, wealth, and sanity.
ReplyDeleteThis assumes Trump loses.
ReplyDeleteThere are a lot of monied interests invested in keeping him in office.
Trump plays to the deplorables and conservative evangelicals in rallies to keep them stirred up and motivated.
But in 2016, Trump made personal visits to big donors asking for money and endorsements. Fortune magazine ran a list of them.
One of these individuals reported to NPR that Trump seemed like a jerk, but after a meeting decided to endorse Trump. I can't find the story link, but the donor said Trump was personable, reasonable, and all the showman bluster was, basically, an act. I
Things may have changed in the past four years, but I can't see most of the One Percenters going for Biden. If nothing else, Trump is very good at identifying people who will be most useful to him and then figuring out what it will take to get them on board.
I'm sure Trump told this donor that he'd reduce his taxes so he could be richer. That sounded profound enough for him. Perhaps it was just a matter of one sociopath to another. The rich don't care about the USA or the rest of the world.
DeleteYah, that and slashing regs and making foreign policy decisions that favor their businesses.
DeleteMy beef with American capitalism isn't that it makes people rich, it's that it gives the rich disproportionate power and influence in government. Government should be setting the ground rules by which capital can exploit labor (and vice versa), but when elected officials need capital to get elected, things get skewed.
This is why I can't get too freaked out about Big Unionism buying legislators. Unions represent a lot of people making five-figure salaries and scraping dues together to buy a few votes to offset the ones their overlords control.
Why is it OK for the Walton family to rig elections with money, but not for a bunch of teachers or truckers?
In some ways, the subtext of this Dem convention was "we're for sale to regular people" more than any I've seen in a long time. Uncle Joe knows how to close those types of deals.
If Trump does lose, I doubt he will refuse to leave, though he will do his best as a lame duck to inflame his True Believers and create as much unrest as possible. He may refuse to attend the inauguration. He will do nothing to help his successor make an orderly transition, and will then blame any ensuing chaos on that successor's incompetence. The Clinton staffers, in a display of pettiness, stole all the W keys from the White House keyboards. One can only imagine what Steven Miller and his ilk might think of to leave behind in their desk drawers.
ReplyDeleteAs ex-president, he sure won't stop tweeting unless he is sent to prison, which strikes me as a very remote possibility. I expect he will grow nuttier, embracing ever more outre theories, and become a popular fixture in talk shows. Or even get his own show.
Or maybe he will be recovering from a serious case of Covid-19. Who can know?
DeleteMargeret, any rumors in New York about his brother's cause of death? They seem to be keeping that information as top secret the same way they are hiding his income taxes from public view.
DeleteHe talked about starting his own network if he lost the 2016 election. He needs an audience - something to feed his ego. So his own tv show on his own network?
ReplyDeleteThat sounds about right.
Delete