The Constitution is “highly suspect”?
I need to go find the article but there are a couple of electoral college voters trying to get the others to vote for another republican instead of Trump. Maybe Pence. The thinking is that as long as the presidency still goes to a Republican, both sides will accept it.
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Are you saying there wasn’t a TON of fake news in the last 6 months of this election?
If so, reality disagrees with you, and we’ll see about the Russians. Time will tell there.
I wasnt talking Russian propaganda. I was talking about the Russians actually tampering with the vote. Which is very unlikely.
It’s not impossible, just highly improbable and should be given no serious consideration until and unless evidence is presented. If three or four years from now, no evidence has been presented and there are people still staying the Russians rigged (or at least significantly influenced) the election, then you’ll just be starting to establish parity with the determined stupidity of the birthers, who not only operated for the last eight years in the absence of supporting evidence, but in defiance of counter-evidence. For now, your attempt at claiming equivalence is bullshit.
It’s actually not suspect at all, it’d be electors doing what electors are constitutionally defined as being able to do. What’s technically improper is referring to Trump as the “President-Elect”. That title should only attach after the electors’ votes have been collected and a winner certified. He’s at most the presumptive President-Elect until then, and even that’s arguably premature.
I think you can make an argument that the Revolutionary War was a civil war, since at the time plenty of Americans supported the status quo. Most Americans really hate this argument, but I think you need to define “civil war” relatively narrowly to exclude it. You can make a much weaker argument that the English Civil War in the 1640s included America. The colonies were new and minor at the time, but they weren’t completely isolated from the conflict, and they were certainly part of a country which was in a state of civil war.
1640s
1770s
1860s
Roughly every 100–120 years, and about the same if you include the Wars of the Roses as civil wars of the anglophone world. We’re due.
Originally Posted by Waymore
“It is impossible. Fake news and Russian propaganda is to Trump haters what the birth certificate was to Obama haters. Anybody who latched on to either theory is childish.”
Except that the former could be (and was) dispelled by a single document.
A lot of posters fighting the hypothetical. It’s a hypothetical people!
Given the hypothetical I cannot see how Congress could not certify it. Their job is clearly laid out:
There really is no option for them to do anything other than count the votes as they are and report them, unless there is reason to believe that some of the votes are false. Reporting an incorrect vote would not happen.
Would the public accept a result that was constitutionally valid by the rules of the game that did reflect the will of the people as they saw it? Democrats have before and are going to again this time. There would be grousing and death threats against “faithless electors”, calls to change the system so that such could not occur in the future, but end of day life would go on and the result would be accepted.
Backtracking (from Civil War) faster than the Trump Transition Team (from “Lock her up”).
Well, if Clinton gets in this way, and it would be perfectly legal though some of the electors might have some minor penalties in their home states, then every time she made a misstep, no matter how trivial (or indeed imaginary, existing only in the claims of FoxBart), there’d be a massive chorus of “I told you so!”
To avoid that, you might be better off just keeping Trump.
The alt-right is scared. There’s a forum I occasionally check, someone went on there today & said that Trump has already planned to withdraw & made it sound quite believable. It’s obviously very possible at this point that Trump will not be POTUS.
The first 15 replies were complete disbelief, some of them were acting worse than the liberals on election night, lol.
Invoking a power that has never been used in the country’s history would certainly be suspect.
The Constitution says two things about Electors. The first is that they can’t be a Senator, a Representative, or a “Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States”. The second is that the state legislatures shall decide how to appoint Electors.
To me, that says that the state legislatures can set conditions on the appointments and the Electors have to comply with those conditions. And that can include being appointed on the condition that you will vote for a particular person.
If that was true, there’d be no such thing as a so-called “faithless” elector. I get that the electors are supposed to vote as the legislatures direct, but there’s no explicit rule that says they have to. Such a rule would make the elector role meaningless; they may as well just let the state legislature mail in something along the lines of “The state of Georgia casts its 16 electoral votes for president for X, for vice president for Y”, cosigned by the president of Georgia Senate and speaker of its House.
Right. The reality is that only a couple of states mandate a faithful elector, and they have legislated that the vote is otherwise void. 29 states have nominal civil penalties (e.g.- fines) for faithless electors but no legal mandate, and 21 have no penalties at all, but those include the couple that void such votes – the electors in all the rest of them can, in theory, vote how they please.
What will actually happen is something else again, but those are, in fact, the ground rules.
The operative word there is “can.”
Interesting bit about what the states can do regarding requiring how electors vote is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. States can, and so far 10 states and the District of Colombia, together worth 165 electoral votes have, each pass a bill that states that all of their electors are required to vote for the national vote winner, to take effect when enough states sign on that equal 270 electoral votes of greater.
Would be nice if enough additional states did that which they can do.
Given the Op, the Congress certifies Clinton as the president elect after counting the EC votes on January 6.
Inauguration day is Friday January 20. That means perhaps the House wait all the way until Monday January 23 to begin a Congressional investigation with some Republican Representative being ready to introduce articles of impeachment by week’s end.
Nevermind that the Senate does not have the votes to convict. The Senate does have the power to subpoena witnesses and jail those who do not cooperate under their inherent contempt power, up to the end of the then current Senate term.
It may be intended that the role of the Elector is meaningless. The role of the Elector may be to simply deliver a vote in the same way that another public official might be directed to serve a warrant. There’s nothing in the Constitution that says the Elector is suppose to make the choice.
Is that an established fact? No. But the opposite view isn’t an established fact either. The court system has never issued any rulings on whether Electors are supposed to have personal discretion in who they vote for.
My view at least has historical precedent to back it up: it’s the way we’ve been electing Presidents since 1789. I’ll grant that some Electors have cast independent votes but only a handful and only symbolically. The Electors have never actually chosen the President; they’ve always rubber-stamped the choice that was made by the general election.
Accepting your hypothetical, that President-Elect Trump suffers the worst case of faithless electors in our history, and enough of them defect to Team Clinton to give her 270+ votes in the Electoral College, I imagine the Republican-held Congress would just refuse to certify the vote. After that, they’d pick the President and Vice-President themselves, and they’d pick Trump-Pence.
It doesn’t take a well-organized militia to shoot a Democratic Congresswoman in the head, or blow up a federal building, or even assassinate a President-Elect*.
- please note, I’m not advocating any of these actions, just noting that they are possible for lone individuals to undertake.
If electors have the constitutional right to vote as they wish than that’s the rules of the game. It should be accepted. Unfortunately, people like to undermine the legitimacy of the rules of the game for short term political gains. How ironic.