Is there a plan to deal with an unconstitutional act, such as nullifying electoral votes? If Pence had nullified some electoral votes and declared that the decision must go to the house of representatives, would the sergeant of arms of the senate have arrested the vice president?
Wither those much hallowed constitutional checks and balances … American democracy ultimately depends on the judgement of the Serjeant-at-Arms?
Seeing what the “Texas Taliban” has successfully done to women’s rights and what Florida plans to do next, and seeing the Right’s relentless efforts to overturn our democratic voting rights, I have to believe that it is only a matter of time before they are successful.
I hope not, but what would be done, by whom if this had occurred?
It has been abundantly clear to me that our traditional “checks and balances” are inadequate to address the obvious attacks on our US constitutional norms and practices. There is no “police force” in place that will come in and stop the nonsense. We are in for very dark times ahead, and I say that as an optimist.
The “system of checks and balances”, such as they are, were intended to ensure fair governance, i.e.that one branch of government does not have too much authority or influence. They do not and cannot correct for a party that ignores democratic norms or violates Constitutional directives any more than you can housetrain a puppy by reading instructions to it. The sad and disturbing fact is that a significant chunk of the electorate believes–with o evidence whatsoever–that the 2020 election was ‘stolen’ and that their candidate and party deserve to be in charge even if they have to lie, cheat, and engage in open insurrection, even threatening dissenting members of their own party for arguing otherwise.
Laws, even the Constitution (which is not as “perfect” of an implementation of democratic principles and practices as many people loudly profess) are only as good as the people enforcing them. When an entire party decides that such laws no longer apply when it interferes with their objective and have sufficient support to openly violate them, you have a rabble, not a “nation of laws”.
Stranger
I don’t believe there would be any reason in law to arrest the Vice President. I’d bet even the Senate Rules have nothing in them that apply to coups. The easiest step would be to force Pence to step down from the office. That would have put President Pro Tempore Patrick Leahy, a Democrat, in charge and life would go on. If Pence didn’t yield to pressure, the House would have impeached him that afternoon. My second bet is that the Senate would vote to convict, again making Leahy President of the Senate. If they didn’t, then we’d be in the middle of an actual coup and all speculations are equally worthless.
Sixty votes are required to convict in the Senate. Are you going to find ten GOP senators to vote ‘against’ their own party? I’d like to think that they would do so in such an extreme circumstance but the available evidence says otherwise.
The larger question is what happens if the election is not certified by inaugueration. The current President cannot remain in office past 20 January, so you have an interregnum (interpresidentnum?). Does the Speaker of the House step into the role? Does the current President declare himself the interim President until certification can be completed? The assumption is that a fair election will be conducted and the legitimate results accepted; if those conditions are violated, laws and norms are out the window.
Stranger
Yes, good luck with that.
So, what would be done?
In your basic banana republic, the guy in charge calls out the army to begin shooting people, presumably beginning with the guys who staged the coup.
We don’t have any true evidence on that. We do know that Mike Lee and Lindsey Graham told Trump that that he was behaving like a Roman emperor with lead poisoning. We do know that all the Republican congressional leaders denounced the January 6 idiocy at the time, only reversing themselves later when it was moot.
You have to remember that the Republicans, outside of Greene and her ilk, aren’t actually crazy. They act the way they do because they want to keep getting elected. An actual coup as a minority party doesn’t give them a future. McConnell knows that and even Graham knows that and Pence understood that to the point where he made himself a pariah.
When you start with a coup attempt by actual Republican leaders, you’re in uncharted territory in this country. Anything might happen. That “anything” is one of the reasons no sane Republican will allow it to happen.
Correction: 67 votes are needed. Where will you find 17 Republicans willing to destroy their future in the Republican just to save democracy? At the time, the two Georgians were not yet sworn in and so 66 votes would have been needed but 18 of them would have had to be Republicans. I think maybe two votes could have been found. But if two Republicans defect (maybe Romney and Murkowski) they could have voted 50-48 to overrule Pence.
Well, ultimately, it would be up to the guys with guns, to decide who they were going to shoot them at.
If the rules have broken down so badly that shooting people actually becomes likely, then it doesn’t matter what any of the rules say. The guys with the guns make the decisions. So, whoever commands their loyalty will likely win. That may or may not be the person who is “supposed” to be President under the law, but as I said above, by the time this becomes an issue, the laws no longer matter.
We might wish it to be otherwise, but it never has been.
We do, actually, based on the fact that only seven GOP senators voted for impeachment after the insurrection, and two of the three up for re-election have decided to retire from the Senate. The GOP has aggressively gone after Republicans who have dissented to the point of politically lynching Liz Cheney despite the fact that ideologically she is about as far right as it is possible to be and still make some claim to supporting democratic norms. I would not put any amount of money on Republicans who actually want to be re-elected standing up against their party.
They may not be ‘crazy’ but they’ve been railroaded and winnowed into a fearful bunch of syncopates who openly supported what is arguably the most openly corrupt and inept presidential administration in history even when it is against the stated interests and ideals of their party. Lindsay Graham has waffled back and forth in his support for Trump but when push comes to shove he has come to heel like a well-trained Bichon Frise. McConnell is more independent—and to a certain extent, willing to even speak up against Trump when he is really irked—but at the end of the day, Mitch McConnell is doing what is best for Mitch McConnell regardless of the long-term fallout, and that means courting Trump and his backers and worshipers. It seems apparent that a lot of Republicans would be just fine with a coup as long as it leaves them in power. When you have Dan Fucking Quayle lecturing Vice-President Mike Pence on Constitutional obligations and democratic norms (according to Peril; I don’t think Quayle has come out and confirmed it but Woodward is a careful journalist, not likely to throw out errant speculation like Seymour Hersh) then the GOP is upside down by every measure. But it is become exactly what Newt Gingrich has made of it from his shadowy perch advising the last generation of GOP notables how to use language and semantics to influence and persuade the public of their righteous cause.
I stand corrected. Good luck digging up those upstanding Republicans because the party is doing its best to not just purge them from the ranks but even from the living memory of party notables. When they attack John McCain (and inexplicably go after his widow to censure her from the party for no material gain) for his legacy of not being Republican enough, what it means to be a Republican has been doublethinked into meaninglessness. What it means now to be a member of the GOP is to toe the line to what ever the leadership—themselves flouncing before Donald Trump—says is today’s inviolate truth, regardless that it contradicts what they said yesterday. It’s not an ideology; it is just servile cultism with the patina of being “The party of Lincoln”.
Stranger
I believe the point of the matter, as described above, is “They want to be re elected.” If the coup succeeds, they want to be on the winning side. Many of their constituents are in awe of Trump. If it fails, they would still be re elected by those constituents.
I yield to no one in my proclamation of Republican evil, but what makes most of the party dangerous is that - unlike Trump - they are not crazy even while saying crazy things. Mitch McConnell on his worst day is not going to back a coup to overturn the government, and especially not to re-elect Donald Trump, and double especially at a moment when he certainly thought the party would win one or both seats in Georgia, thereby giving him control of the Senate again.
I repeat that the evidence from January 6 is that no one in the party, except the objectively small number of actual crazies, supported the idiocy in the moment. They were as surprised as the rest of us that the mass of the public didn’t rise up in fury and attack them with pitchforks. They couldn’t have known that on January 3, and the evidence is that no one expected Pence to follow Trump’s plan (1), so his doing so would have also surprised them. McConnell is too wily to think that a coup would ever stand. Only the thoroughly crazy would do so and there aren’t more than 30 of them in the Senate.
Once you add crazy to a hypothetical nothing can ever be ruled out so, heck, we could be living in a theocratic dictatorship by now if. But the at-the-time in early January evidence doesn’t support that.
(1) The counterargument is that Pence would have made up his mind earlier and already conveyed that to McConnell and other Senators. Who in this scenario would have agreed in advance to a coup. Don’t buy it for a second.
Black people have lived under a dictatorship in American for centuries. They really only obtained freedom in the last half century or so, and still face a lot of struggles.
I bring that up because look at what laws the pro dictatorship crowd passed to keep black people oppressed and servile.
- no voting rights
- no rights to freedom of assembly (in Jim Crow states, blacks could only assemble in groups of more than 5 or so if it was a work or religious meeting I believe)
- no rights to free speech
- no rights to own guns
- discouraging literacy and education (educated people are harder to oppress)
- violent state sponsored terrorism and private vigilante terrorism
- no capacity to have any real political, business, judicial or social capital and influence
- no rights to travel freely
- no protections from unreasonable searches, no protections from being forced to self incriminate (due to torture)
I’m sure there were endless other things that were done (like engineering a social system to enforce a sense of inferiority), but the point is that things like the ones above are designed to keep people helpless and isolated so they’re easier to oppress.
IMO the problem isn’t even the Capitol, but 50 states with 50 different sets of rules, election boards that can succumb to pressure, and (in some states) decisions made by secretaries of state, which are political positions. Disenfranchisement and election certification are problems long before the Capitol gets mobbed. The Supreme Court isn’t defending voting rights, either.
Pence certified the results, since the vice president is also the president of the Senate. He certified results involving himself, which is a conflict of interest; suppose a vice president decided they would “hang on” to power? (I doubt that would be at all legal.)
What you’re talking about here doesn’t describe a dictatorship. A dictator isn’t accountable to anyone other than himself. The Ancient Roman Consuls who were elected among a very similarly limited franchise were not the same thing as dictators, in fact the Romans had the actual word dictator to differentiate. In the Roman Republic’s system of laws, the highest magistrate–the Consuls, were limited by the fact there were always two of them, often (not always) selected from two separate “factions.” They additionally had to get Senatorial approval for many of their actions. They could additionally be vetoed in some of their actions by the Tribunes. The Dictator, had unlimited imperium and could not be vetoed by the Tribunes except in very limited circumstances–legally, unchecked absolute power. That is what made a dictator, and it is largely still how the word is used today.
Dictatorship has never been defined based on how limited a franchise or how representative a government is, it’s about an officer that has no legal checks on its authority (the one major check the Romans had is dictatorships were typically granted for specific reasons, at the conclusion of its purpose the dictator was obliged to resign, with a maximum term of six months–note that Sulla abusing this paved the way for the end of the Republic and Julius Caesar used the office to effect the end of the Republic.) Every President of the United States has had significant checks on his authority, and thus were not dictators.
Even say, King George III, who still wielded considerable political power, who was an unelected monarch, and whose Parliament represented only a very narrow range of his subjects, could not be called a dictator–because his office had significant limits on its power imposed by Parliament and the courts.
Mitch McConnell maybe too wily to support a coup, but he’s just wily enough to make use of the churn created by it. McConnell himself doesn’t want an autocracy, and certainly not one with Trump as dictator as he is well served by the system as it is, especially given the likelihood of the Senate going back to the GOP in 2024, but while McConnell controls the Senate with an iron fist, his sway with the electorate and particularly Trump followers (because Trump has already told them not to trust McConnell) is far more tenuous, and ultimately the party and its candidates answer to their voters, not the Majority/Minority leader.
If polls are to be believed (and yes, caveats that we can’t trust polls to be absolute measures of public opinion) there are a thundering herd of actual voters would would have been just fine had the January 6th certification not occurred and the Electoral College votes had been selectively eliminated to give Trump a majority win. Even if you don’t think McConnell or GOP leadership agrees with this, it is still very concerning with what the party and elected representatives may do to pander to this base.
Stranger