Trump has already declared he has the authority to do anything and there’s been uproar over him since he took office. So we can discount both of these as factors.
This question is if Trump gives the order will people follow it, will those people be able to effectively stop mail-in voting, and will anyone be able to override Trump’s order in time to make a difference?
We can’t expect Congress or the Supreme Court to stop Trump. The Republicans will quietly support Trump tampering with the election and they control enough votes in both of these bodies to veto any override.
I don’t feel the governors of the affected states will be able to stop Trump. They’re not organized for this kind of resistance to the federal government. By the time they get organized, it’ll be too late to matter.
While the Post Office as a nominally independent organization, I think Trump will be able to pressure people at the top to follow orders. Most mid-level bureaucrats aren’t going to tell a President no.
Executive orders are an established means of the President carrying out his assigned role of executing the laws of the country. He couldn’t do his job without having the ability to give orders and set policy.
But there’s supposed to be a limit. Congress and the Supreme Court both have the ability to check the President if he uses executive orders to go beyond the role of his job and starts enacting de facto legislation.
Our problem right now is that a sufficient number of our current Senators and Justices agree with the current President’s agenda so they refuse to act when he goes beyond constitutional limits in carrying out that agenda.
There’s no reasonable way in which we can compel the current group to do their jobs and uphold the Constitution. We need to replace them with a different group of officials. Of course, one major part of the current group’s agenda is to prevent the voters from being able to do that.
Yes. They can provide many polling stations and many machines in R-leaning districts and — to force long queues — few machines in D-leaning districts. A federal judge recently allowed a law to expire, so now Rs will be free to install “monitors” in D-leaning precincts to intimidate and voters and provide false legal advice.
And these vote-suppression measures are unrelated to the pandemic. The pandemic offers great scope for new ways to cheat.
The Orange Genius is just the GOP’s “idea man.” Decisions to allow — or require — mail-in votes will be made on a case-by-case basis by GOP-aligned state officials based on whichever way improves their chances. Expect sudden last-minute changes in voting protocols, often on a district-by-district basis, all intended to fark up turnout selectively.
What legal authority did witnesses have to refuse to testify before Congress? None, except the fact that Scotus was unwilling to expedite a lawsuit compelling them to testify.
Trump and his criminal gang are free to commit pretty much any crimes they want. They control the FBI; they control the NSA, Pentagon, Homeland Security. Even if their hand-picked judges would eventually rule against them, justice delayed is justice denied.
DeWine did. He later changed it to a later date, and then changed it again to extended mail-in voting, but his initial order was just to cancel the election, without either of those measures. And even though a court ruled that he didn’t have that authority, he did it anyway.
A very important question indeed, and the evidence is inconclusive at best.
But what the Trump/GOP machine can do is introduce the specter of uncertainty. If they can demonstrably interfere with mail-in voting and Trump loses, he and his party can cry foul and contest the result.
If an authoritarian can rig an election directly, that’s ideal, but their backup plan is to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the outcome if they lose. Republicans are still well-positioned to execute procedural, technical warfare in certain cases.
You’re right, Mike. And this has really been the source of my concern all along. It’s why we have Trump in the first place. It’s why Trump dares Democrats and the institutions to stop him - because he and the GOP know that their base is consolidated and motivated.
Look at the ‘lock-down protests’ as they are dubbed. Who’s marching in the streets? It’s not the people who believe in science; it’s the ones who carry guns and believe in conspiracies. They have strong group identification and they have a palpable fear of a dangerous outside world. They live in a world in which they believe the existence of their tribe is threatened - that’s what you see up and down the socioeconomic scale in Trump Land. Of course it’s the top economic tier who’s playing on these anxieties and driving everyone else out into the streets with fear of an alien takeover, but the point is, it’s the right wing that is politically hyperactive; the rest of us are hoping they’ll just play by the rules. They won’t. From their perspective, they have every reason not to play the rules.
This. Times 1,000. There will be no uproar, except here and in a few newspaper articles.
Under the same authority that he does everything else: no one on the Republican side has the balls to stop him. That’s all the authority he needs.
Every time someone speaks up and says, “B-b-b-but the LAW!” <sputter, sputter> I just shake my head. There is no more law where trump and his Republican accomplices are concerned.
I would argue that Mitch McConnell is their real idea man and the de facto Prime Minister of the GOP. He is co-president, and it’s vitally important that the opposition (i.e. most of us) realize this. I understand that no such position exists by name, but it’s McConnell’s vision that has driven the party and driven the country into the arms of oligarchy.
The Orange Julius is an idea man, too. He gives vocal ideation to what McConnell and others probably toss about in closed-door conversation over a glass of Kentucky Bourbon. But more than ideation, Trump is the personification of who they are. Trump their personality. He’s an entertainer. He’s a shit oil salesman. Every movement, every revolution and counter-revolution, needs someone like Trump to act as a spiritual leader if nothing else. It just so happens that in this case, he has the power of the pen and the office.
As Garry Kasparov, Timothy Snyder, and a host of other scholars and just casual observers have pointed out, Constitutions are ideals on paper. They represent the land’s highest law, but that assumes that those who subscribe to its laws act in good faith. Constitutions require institutions in order to make them effective. It turns out that a constitution that aspires for democracy and stable self-rule is the most challenging and most difficult kind of constitution to live by. It’s rather easy for a leader or a group of leaders to declare that he faces challenges that the constitution does not address, that there are clear and present dangers that the constitutions ideals do not shield us from, necessitating exceptions and extra-constitutional solutions. The nation of laws must be composed of people who value impartiality and equal protections and justice under the law, and it only takes one major faction to reject that proposition, unfortunately.
Not true. Executive orders have no legislative force. No matter what Trump orders, if the USPS fails to deliver mail-in ballots, they are breaking the law.
The USPS is technically an independent agency of the executive and are not directly under Trump’s control. He has been indirectly trying to coerce them to do certain things by threatening their funding. But he does not have the power to declare any USPS activity as legal or illegal.
The reason the witnesses refused was not because of Trump’s legal authority. It was because he had leverage over them, whether it was hire/fire authority, or a credible threat of individual lawsuits, or some threat to their personal reputation or interests. In that regard, the USPS is pretty well insulated from the executive.
An important caveat is that they did not compare vote by mail to elections conducted under the pall of a global pandemic. Still it should not be surprising that Trump is ignorant. It is just an ignorance that he shares with some of his political opponents.
He has the power to declare anything he wants to declare. He may not have the power to make good on that declaration, but let’s just say that he and Bob Barr declares mail-in voting illegal and that violators will be subject to federal prosecution for election fraud - an outrageous claim, but like the fact that it’s patently false will keep him muzzled.
Federal charges of vote fraud or vote tampering are not something that’s in the abstract; it’s a very real possibility in the minds of some voters. If you don’t think so, look up “The Marion Three,” a case in which then US attorney Jefferson Beauregard Sessions (Trump’s estranged former top prosecutor) brought vote fraud charges against black activists turned office holders. Sessions didn’t just attempt to prosecute the three black activists/office holders; he also used federal law enforcement to canvass the communities that voted for him, interviewed them, intimidated them, forced them to testify in some cases - likely under the threat of prosecuting for aiding and abetting in a conspiracy. Keep in mind this was in a state with a long and established history of using law enforcement power to discourage voting and locking people up on frivolous charges.
What’s keeping Bill Barr from communicating that threat in places like Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Nevada? What’s keeping other “monitors” from right-wing groups to selectively contest and interfere with poll workers as they take in voters? Yes, I know it seems like getting into some “These are the End Times” disaster porn here. I highly doubt we’re going to have martial law declared on November 1 and tanks rolling into Lansing and Madison. But let’s seriously consider examples that have some history behind them, and let’s all vote like hell so that the repudiation of Trump and the GOP is so great that they have no choice but to accept the outcome this time and agree to go back to K Street where they can spend the next 6 months coming up with their next series of antidemocratic ruses.
You didn’t answer my question. Executive orders must be issued pursuant to authority vested in the President by legislation or the Constitution.
So when the President issues such a hypothetical order, what legislation or Constitutional provision will he cite that gives him the power to direct the operations of the USPS?
And if he does issue such an order, how, exactly, do you imagine a dispute over it even reaching the Supreme Court, when any district court in the country will simply look at 39 USC § 202 and immediately enjoin the order throughout the country? You know, like the vast majority of other ridiculous orders he has given. There are five months until the general election. How quickly do you imagine that this supposed mustache-twirling cabal of Supreme Court justices are actually going to hear a case regarding post office policy so they can oMg cANcEl dEmOCrAcy!!!11?
President Trump is an absolute disaster and almost certainly senile, but neither he nor the Republican party has totalitarian power, and he doesn’t rule in a vacuum. Trump’s problem isn’t that he’s a dictator, it’s that he wants to be one but is spectacularly terrible at actually achieving it.
This constant and incessant fear-mongering in which people imagine usurpation of the electorate is quickly approaching asahi levels of incoherent blather. It’s no different than militia nuts insisting that Obama was going to round up people in FEMA camps during every election. Trump’s litigation record when it comes to his bumbling administrative orders has actually been dismal, and while he can bluster and fire people left and right, he has no actual ability, legal or otherwise, to effect cultural changes within the civil service. He’s just not that popular.
Do you see people staying home and wearing masks? Do you see private businesses and churches being ordered to close their doors? Do state constitutions give Governors the authority to issue orders like that? No, not explicitly. But we do give our executive officers broad authority to issue executive orders to deal with emergencies.
We expect that they will use that power responsibly and only to the extant needed to deal with a legitimate crisis. But not knowing what crises might occur, the power has to be broad.
And we expect that our courts and legislative bodies will do their job and will rein in any executive official who uses his power improperly.
We wouldn’t want a system where the President didn’t have the power to issue executive orders. The problem we’re have is not the existence of executive orders. The problem is that Donald Trump specifically is abusing this power and that the Republicans in Congress and in the courts are refusing to stop him from abusing his power.
For the record, I agree with you that tanks aren’t going to roll in Lansing and Trump won’t just shut down post offices.
Instead Trump and the right wing authoritarians will continue to do what authoritarians fighting against democratic institutions typically try to do: they will exhaust it, and he will wear it down over time. That’s the real danger. Not executive orders that actually result in shutting down the post office or voting by mail, but successive percussive attacks on institutions selecting from a vast array of dishes on his menu.
All of this is irrelevant. Executive orders can only direct the executive branch how to enforce law. Executive orders cannot make absentee voting illegal. Executive orders cannot make anything illegal or illegal, full stop. You will never see an executive order with verbiage to the effect of what shall be lawful or unlawful.
Now… can the executive branch abuse their broad powers and issue illegal orders? Of course. Can they get away with it? Often they can. But it’s important that we never get confused about who decides what is legal and what isn’t. It’s not the executive branch.
What legal authority did witnesses have to refuse to testify before Congress? None, except the fact that Scotus was unwilling to expedite a lawsuit compelling them to testify.