The federal government doesn’t have the power to do a lot of stuff but the current administration does it anyway. It is a slender reed.
There are things the federal government isn’t supposed to do but can if they’re bold enough and nobody stops them.
And then there are things they can’t do even if they want to.
“Cancelling an election” is the latter. There’s no mechanism by which they could do so. States hold elections on a schedule established by the Constitution and the state constitutions. Trump could say “We’re not doing an election, I’m just gonna stay president forever,” and the response from all 50 secretaries of state would be “The Constitution and our state constitution require us to hold an election, so we’re holding one”. Under the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, Congress’ role in certifying the election is purely ceremonial and they have no authority to disqualify electors or alter the result.
Congress has the power to change the date when the election occurs, but no such effort would get 60 votes in the Senate and it wouldn’t change the fact that Trump’s term ends on 1/20/2029 whether a successor has been elected or not. Anything beyond that would require a constitutional amendment (which is not going to happen) or would result in a civil war when blue states start deciding that if the federal government has abandoned constitutional order then they no longer have any obligation to ackowledge federal sovereignty.
Or not all of them say that, and some states support him, and we have civil war again, which gets back to my earlier point. It isn’t happening without war.
Trump won’t cancel the election. But Republicans could certainly pull the aforementioned elector slate swap they tried in 2020. They’ve learned from last time.
How effective is your mail-in ballot if the results of the actual count are disregarded?
Nope.
Ok, so Trump refuses to debate or campaign, loses the election or leave Washington, and uses the whole of the Federal government to attack his opponents. Now what?
Good for Ted Cruz and I hope other prominent Republicans follow suit. His own party gearing up for a “normal” election forces Trump to make his play for continued power openly. He’d much prefer to threaten, obfuscate and keep everything in chaos right up until the last minute.
But if Ted, Rubio and MTG are running spirited and hostile campaigns, it will suck up all the attention that Donald craves while he tests the system to the max.
Quiet, Piggy:
Isn’t ‘piggy’ one of the Nazis’ favorite names for Jews? He must have been talking to Herr Miller shortly before.
Marco Rubio is Secretary of State (and acting National Security Advisor). Doesn’t that keep him busy enough that he doesn’t have time to organize a campaign?
That Act was signed by President Biden, and was effective as of December 29, 2022. Who has been taken to court since then? Did it stop subsequent Trump shenanigans?
There were no shenanigans because the ones they tried in 2021 wouldn’t work anymore, and weren’t necessary anyway since Trump won the election.
That’s not to say there won’t be different shenanigans, and I wouldn’t be shocked if there were the next time a Republican loses the election for POTUS, but it won’t be the same as before.
Trump may have won because of those types of shenanigans, y’know. Did those tricks come to a complete halt after the Bill was signed? If not, was anybody prosecuted?
And just an oft-repeated reminder: Bills and laws do not prevent crimes. They merely make it possible (but not always probable) to prosecute said crimes.
He did not because they did come to a complete halt. And wouldn’t have been necessary anyway. As a reminder, the tricks we are talking about were what they were trying to use to overturn election results during the certification of electoral votes, and the spurious objections Republicans were making.
Which isn’t relevant. This law changed the procedure for how votes are counted and objected to. Per the previously-linked Wikipedia article:
Any objection made by senators or representatives during the counting of the electoral votes must be made in writing and signed by at least one-fifth of the senators and one-fifth of the members of the House of Representatives. Previously, an objection required the signatures of only one member of each chamber.
The law also limits the grounds for an objection to one of the following:
- The electors of a state were not lawfully certified
- An elector’s vote was not “regularly given”
So they just don’t have the opportunity to try to derail things during the confirmation like they did before. Again, I’m not saying they won’t try something different, but they can’t try what they did before, because the law has changed to prevent it.
Maybe, but Miss Piggy just seems to be one of his go to insults for women.
That’s an article from 2016 about something he said back in 1996.
"And he called this woman ‘Miss Piggy.’ Then he called her ‘Miss Housekeeping,’ because she was Latina
Misogyny rather than antisemitism. Isn’t he just so progressive.
It makes sense, though
We all know every accusation he makes is a confession. There’s no doubt he’s a pig in multiple senses of the word
We don’t want him back any more than you want him.
Now you’ve got a civil war on your hands.
It does invite (not BEG! You know who you are) the question of whether he has the ability to ignore the occurrence of one.