Why do you need a hundred? Can’t you get the same effect by packing the court with five lackeys in a nine member court?
Not at all. Some could defect. Consider that none of Trump’s 3 appointees were even willing to take up the Texas election challenge, for instance.
By packing in 100 lackeys, you guarantee judicial victory on everything.
I’m not advocating this, just saying, it is the direct-est, simplest and easiest path to total tyranny the Constitution affords.
If you can find five lackeys loyal enough to vote your way after they get appointed, how do you find a hundred?
IMO, the real problem is that the popular idea of what the Constitution contains is completely wrong. It’s a framework for the law; it’s not supposed to comprise detailed answers about every possible eventuality. Nobody went through it clause by clause and brainstormed all the possible ways some rogue actors could use it for insane ends.
Nor does Congress go down these roads. The 25th Amendment, e.g., was clearly written to provide a pathway if the president were to fall ill or get shot. They didn’t debate whether acting cabinet heads got to vote if a rogue president were to get into a screaming match with the vice president. Writers of fiction exploit these loopholes to write a thousand books based on what if scenarios, but they get paid to do so, and a thousand people looking for loopholes can always find more than the original small group of writers did. (That’s also why no complex computer code can ever be secure.)
It’s not fair to blame the law for not anticipating events that never happened before in history. Most of the time, when people say “you should have known,” they’re smart only in hindsight. Another thousand alternate scenarios lurk out there they never thought of.
Congress has to proceed under the assumption that the country will run according to law. The OP’s scenario is silly. No government ever writes into law the proper legal steps to take when a coup is being attempted. Coups are by definition outside the law. Their workings cannot be anticipated, nor can which actors with what powers are involved.
People scream today about the size of the federal code, and the length and complexity of a bill. Imagine how bloated the law would be if every possible contingency tried to be identified, accounted for, and blocked. The whole internet wouldn’t be large enough to contain the glurge.
The Constitution doesn’t suck. (Mostly.) The law doesn’t suck. (Mostly.) The courts don’t suck. (Mostly.) We the People, well, we mostly have not the slightest idea of what we’re talking about most of the time. The million threads here on what’s been happening is proof enough of that. Bunches of non-lawyers jabbering about the law while never having read an actual law in their lives.
I get it. These are critically important issues and people want some grounding and certainty about the possibilities. Just remember that Trump and QAnon pulled exactly those answers out of their asses and millions of Americans leapt upon them, clutching them tightly and refusing to let go.
Sorry, Virginia. There are no certainties, there are no answers, and no one can predict the future. We’ll just have to deal with it as it comes.
If Democrats hold majority at next Pres election, what prevents them from rejecting Electors vote and winning rejection based on majority in both houses?
The fact that we’re better than that. I’m far to the left of the Biden wing of the party, yet I have no desire to subvert democracy in the pursuit of “winning.”
I have no desire to disenfranchise Republican voters, but instead want it to be easy for everyone to vote, regardless of party affiliation, with as minimal hurdles as possible. If the feds have to step in to accomplish this (and from what I’ve seen, they do), so be it. If we have long lines in the rural areas, fix it. If we have long lines in downtown Atlanta, fix it. If early voting helps people vote, extend it. If weekends happen to help Republicans more than Democrats, so what, it helps people vote, so do it.
Even though we’re in power at census time, I have no desire to gerrymander districts, but instead want to use this power to create fairly distributed districts through algorithms or some other unbiased method.
With all of the above said, I’m perfectly fine with threatening to do all of the above, but solely in the pursuit of giving the Republicans the choice. Either agree to legislate fairness in a hard to overturn fashion at the federal level or live with 10 years of us abusing the power. Ideally, through amendments, but I am aware of the difficulties involved. Most democrats seem to want democracy more than power, or what @ThelmaLou said.
I mean, of course it sucks. There’s that whole 3/5 of a person thing. And we’ve needed tons of bread-and-butter amendments because the founding fathers got a lot of obvious things wrong. The runner up to the presidential election is the vice president? Really? And honestly, parliamentary governments seem generally more moderate and more stable that the mess we have.
I’m just so used to people praising the founding fathers, and so rarely bother to think about the details of the constitution. And now that I’m forced to do that, I am reminded again about what a really lousy legal foundation we have. We’ve been lucky for several decades. Maybe our luck isn’t holding.
How do you figure my scenario is silly when just yesterday half of the Republican House members did exactly that?
And yet 1/2 of all House Republicans just did exactly that.
Because your scenario posits that the Democrats would be the ones doing it.
To emphasize the point made by many of the previous posters, let me quote the constitution (actually, Amendment XI):
The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted;—The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed;
Where in this clause do you see any warrant for what 147 Republican members of the House and Senate did? What don’t they understand about “Shall then be counted”? Josh Hawley read the PA constitution and then made the elementary logical error of mistaking “if” for “if and only if” and apparently has not read the US constitution at all.
I would expect SCOTUS to shoot this down 9-0 instantly. At least I hope so.
An ideal constitution that has or had no chance of ratification is an unrealistic standard. The Constitution is actually remarkably good even though it is flawed. Of course, it can be improved over time with enough consensus.
Now, law nor foundations for law cannot be written loophole free. The morality of the people are an important component as well and this was recognized at the founding.
Loopholes or not, any system of government whatsoever (just like any system of finance other than direct barter) is held up only by the willingness of sufficient people to believe in it.
In this case, however, the “sufficient people” aren’t only the ones in Congress, but the ones in the country as a whole. If a Congress tried to pull that one without sufficient backing elsewhere, they’d be out on their ears. If both enough people in Congress and enough people in the country think the government should be overthrown and a dictator confirmed in office, then we’re screwed.
There’s still such a thing as an we-think-we’re-lawful-good Republican. And they don’t think overturning an election would be lawful. Proof: see all the ones who just refused to try to do so.
That’s also likely deterring some Republicans.
Was your title incorrect? I was pretty sure it said Democrats (well, Democracts, which is probably how Sidney “Fucking Loon™” Powell spells it, but still).
Ah yes, the old “why didn’t the Founders see the future?” slam. Would you care to devise a political system for the world of 2263? They lived in a world without political parties. They expected the best men to be given political power. They thought that what became the Bill of Rights was so obvious that it didn’t need to be put down in writing. They didn’t fail us: We the People didn’t live up to their standards.
As for parliamentary governments, look at Italy, or Israel, or France, or even the UK. Tell me how wonderfully stable they are. And moderate? Brexit was voted in by the people, not developed in Parliament. Just as Trump was voted in by the people, not a creation of Congress.
The People Suck. That’s a slogan I’d agree with. We all should.
Pardon them for domestic terrorism, then offer them a job.
This is why the Founders assumed we’d ammendment the thing to hell and back, not just 17 times in the hundreds of years since the first 10 changes they made.
Well, they sure made it as hard as hell to do so.
Well, we havent established any such precedent. This was a crazy trump & Giuliani idea, not backed up by law or the Constitution.
In fact, the framers of the Constitution did engage in extensive discussions about ways rogue actors could use it for insane ends; check the Federalist Papers. They didn’t always do a great job of it.
For instance, George Mason was fervently opposed to the Presidential pardon power, because of the risk that a criminal President might use it to pardon himself or his co-conspirators. The majority opinion held that that his concern was silly, because any President who tried a stunt like that would certainly be immediately impeached.
Maybe while we’re pulling down all these Confederate statues, we could replace some of them with statues of George Mason.
Certainly people in the late eighteenth century knew what political parties were. The framers of the Constitution hoped that their new nation wouldn’t have them. They assumed that any two people who would come close to being elected President would by definition be such noble public servants that they would have no trouble working together in the same Administration.
Basically, even granting that they were trying to create a republican government system for which history offered little precedent, there was a considerable naivete there.