You seem to think this ISN’T the result desired by MAGA, Trump and Christian Nationalists like Speaker Johnson. The fact this might be the result in no way indicates they wouldn’t try it. It was already tried on 1/6/21 and failed. I don’t understand why you are so adamant they wouldn’t try again. If anything they have gotten more radical and hate America more today than they did back then.
I doubt this would succeed but that is no reason to think they can’t try it. I’m at least glad someone like Rep. Morelle is looking at this and planning ways to combat it just in case.
The U.S. would be less a hybrid regime and more a dictatorship. But members of the House would still go to work. The Republican Party would still exist. It probably would allow a number of Democrats to sit on the left side of the aisle, just as Putin allows some opposition members in the Duma.
Countries ruled by dictatorships sometimes collapse and balkanize. But usually things are not that dramatic for the average citizen, or even the average politician.
The likely result of DJT/MAGA successfully rigging or overturning an election would be a violent uprising or possible civil war. I won’t say 100% but I would say likely.
People who are as fat, dumb, and happy as Americans are these days are not going to rise up and overthrow a government in a civil war or violent uprising. Not all is puppies and rainbows here, but Russians didn’t rise up against Putin, Turks against Erdoğan, etc., and Russian, Turks, and others are in much worse shape than Americans.
I don’t think the Republicans have reached the point where they will just cancel elections or openly ignore the results. I feel their plan will be to allow the election to occur but then proclaim that the results weren’t clear. They will claim that many of the votes cast for Democrats were fraudulent and that Republican candidates actually won.
It’s not going to be overthrown, it’s going to collapse as states start seceding one by one. The west coast states will for sure. Illinois and New York will. New England will. Hell, Texas has been waiting for the chance for decades. What’s left of the US will be a rump made up of impoverished red states that have been relying on tax money from the larger states that have decided they don’t want to be ruled by a theocratic god-king.
Countries fall into authoritarianism all the time without falling apart or having violent uprisings. The USA in its current state is not in any way desperate enough to fall apart because one party becomes (more) authoritarian.
There was no mechanism for the thirteen colonies to secede, either, but if the federal government decides that the states are now its subjects instead of constituent partners, then the Union has de facto been dissolved.
And, what I’m saying is that, in the unlikely case where the events in the OP were to unfold, the US isn’t in bad enough shape that we’re going to have a civil war, which is what would happen if California or Texas decided to secede.
We wouldn’t be a democracy any more (at least temporarily, see Hungary), but things would basically continue on.
Ok, fine. And, just like Russia, Turkey, Hungary, various South American and African countries, as soon as the US falls into a dictatorship, all the people will immediately rise up and restore democracy, or, barring that, various states will immediately go to war with each other.
Anyway, this is veering off-topic and it’s all hypothetical anyway. Sorry for the hijack on my part.
This is pretty much what the article I linked in the OP is about and what Rep. Morelle is working to prevent. Switching the Clerk of the House to a partisan toady would be the easiest way to toss aside the supposedly fraudulent Democratic victories and install MAGA GOPers in those seats as is discussed in the linked article.
They did last time. The decision was unanimous. And I can’t imagine even Thomas or Alito deciding that the clerk of the House has the unilateral right to decide the winner of an election.
If we end up in this situation you will hopefully be shown to be correct. But I don’t think there is a guarantee it would play out this way. Yes, it is likely courts would say this can’t stand. But I think part of it would depend on when a new Clerk beholden to DJT made the fraudulent list of “new” members public.
Another problem would be, as I’m sure you noticed when you read the article I linked in the OP, this all largely depends on Johnson successfully getting a new Clerk approved by a majority of the House. If this doesn’t happen then it could be total chaos. To refresh your memory of what was mentioned in the linked article:
In normal circumstances, on Jan. 3 the clerk goes to the House chamber with the roll of newly elected representatives. Even though the people on that roll are not yet official members of Congress, the task of electing a speaker of the House is theirs. The winner of the race for speaker then swears in the rest of the members of the House, and then they can begin conducting legislative business.
But what if by Jan. 3, the House has not yet approved a replacement for the clerk? Which newly elected members get to cast that first vote for speaker?
“No one knows what would happen,” Brian Kalt, a law professor at Michigan State and an authority on House procedures, told me. “You could have votes on who gets to vote. That would be a huge mess. It would get very ugly.”
Note the part I bolded here. This is a situation that could take a while to sort out and is exactly the sort of thing SCOTUS and the other federal courts have been reluctant to wade into.