The Liz Cheney thing, where a reliable conservative is being stripped of leadership for saying Trump lost the 2020 election, and various other events has led me to believe that Trumpism has taken over the GOP permanently, and I now predict this:
Come 2022 and 2024, there will be cases of Republican-controlled state legislatures and apparatuses of state simply refusing to accept, acknowledge, and certify election results where Democrats are the winner.
Agree or disagree? And what happens then?
A very distinct possibility - I’d put the odds over 50% that it’s tried at least somewhere. The party is all-in on the big lie, and they’re not rearranging the rules on certification for shits and giggles. This is going to happen.
As for what happens, it’s a matter of what doesn’t happen. If there isn’t widespread open rebellion against it, then we will have given permission for much darker forms of authoritarian overreach.
I said immediately after January 6-20, we were anywhere from 4-8 years away from the potential end of American democracy, and I am as convinced of that now as ever. I don’t think this is a threat to American democracy, either; I think Western traditions of liberal democracy are under attack. These movements rarely stay within the borders of one country.
Lawsuits. Lots and lots of lawsuits. (Not making any predictions on outcomes and whether they become relevant, just the factual statement that these will be present regardless.)
I would also note, though, that it strikes me as limiting to just keep an eye on the next four years. I mean, it seems unlikely that Republican legislators are just going to go, “we ignore this massive majority of Democratic votes just because we feel like it, so the winners are only Republicans across the board.” It’s probably going to take the right set of spin-able circumstances to get them to pull the trigger, and that may not happen for years, especially since those states are Republican dominated to begin with. I’m not willing to put down any odds for specific time frames, so I have to think you’d need to watch out as long as those laws are on the books.
And if I’m wrong, and some Q legislature does try to just pass all Republican votes and ignore all Democratic ones, well, see my first line.
They don’t need to ignore all of them. They just need to ignore enough in a few critical swing districts to steal power.
I have no idea what happens then.
Then I think you agree with me.
They just need enough activists to shout and scream, enough people who are confused and scratching their heads, and enough people who just want to unplug and get away from it all. It’s apathy that kills good things.
Perhaps. I don’t agree with the thing you wrote after that. I think the specific set of circumstances is just “Trump runs in 2024” and “Republicans win the house in 2022”, both of which I think are more than likely to happen.
Well, someone more or less said exactly what I did, but better:
Great article:
The short answer is that the matter would go to the courts. The clear rule of law says that state legislatures cannot overrule the will of the voters. But if the vote isn’t officially certified, there is no official will of the voters. There are laws stating that elections must be certified by certain dates, but there a dearth of precedent around what happens if they don’t. And given the Trump administration’s stacking of the lower courts and the wildly conservative imbalance on the Supreme Court, it’s not clear that the outcome would favor the preservation of democracy. Nor is it clear that the matter would be resolved in time to prevent civil conflict–or, in fact, that Republicans in the state or federal legislative branches would honor the Court’s authority should it side against them.
That paragraph stuck in my mind as well. Is “there is no official will of the voters before certification by the legislature” a preexisting, legally recognized thing? It seems sound on first glance, but I’m hesitant to instantly declare that it’s one of those “Founding Fathers never thought the government would be dishonorable” loopholes without making sure.
As for the last sentence, well, it’s kind of like some of the speculation of well, what if Trump ordered the arrest of all Democratic congresspeople: if it gets to that point, there is no law anyway, and anyone can just do literally whatever they want.
The end result would be, I think, a splitting up of the US, much as the answer to “what if Trump actually succeeded in nakedly stealing the election?”
Ah, so you’re saying that you don’t see how it’s possible for it not to happen in the next four years? I’m not sure I completely agree, but I could be underestimating the boldness of the revolution, I dunno.
Well, yeah. A democratic society only exists as long as its people want it to. If half the country doesn’t want democracy, it’s over.
The article’s description of the Supreme Court as “wildly imbalanced in favor of conservatives” is hard to take seriously considering that that same SCOTUS voted 7-2 against Trump in the Texas election lawsuit.
Let me guess - if the Court were 6-3 in favor of liberals that author wouldn’t describe it as “wildly imbalanced” for the left; in fact, he’d probably only describe it as “only a 6-3 majority.”
I do agree.
I think it’s the entire focus of Trump Republicans now. They understand they cannot win within the Constitutional framework of our representative democracy over the long term. They have turned their full attention and energies into how to wrest control away from impartial elections civil servants and run elections themselves. They understand they have very limited time to accomplish this because the demographics don’t favor them going forward. In short, they are desperate.
It’s why Liz Cheney being vocal about Trump’s lies scares the shit out of them and they are doing everything they can to squash her. Republicans’ traditional super power has always been their adherence to their understanding that they hang together or they hang separately. They’re already attempting to impose minority rule. How small can the minority get before the scheme won’t work? I’m sure McConnell and McCarthy would rather not find out.
Lawsuits, sure. But those are slow, and meantime, the country is in chaos. Chaos favors their goals. If we wait until “what happens then,” it will already be too late.
We had better figure out how to make damn sure that Trump Republicans lose, lose and lose big. We had better urge our lawmakers to pass the new Voting Rights Act. We had better be willing to call BS on those who continue to push the Big Lie and all the other lies. We will need to run the elections in 2022 and 2024 like 2020 on steroids. Support and praise Republicans who are willing to step away from Trumpism. A sane opposition party is to the benefit of the entire country.
We are already in the midst of a serious threat to our traditional way of governing that I think few yet comprehend. I think one of the most important things we can do is to make sure others understand just how significant it is.
My prediction: This is all overblown, most of the laws as written don’t actually do much that will have a significant effect on election outcomes. I think there will be close to zero, and possibly zero, attempts to just refuse to certify an election in a partisan way–in fact I think if we’re talking “clear Democrat wins” there will be zero certification bodies that outright refuse to certify their wins. Now some House or Senate race that comes down to a very small number of votes, I would say all bets are off, but there is a judicial process to adjudicate certification based on the laws of the state in question and the U.S. constitution, this is not an unheard of nor intractable problem unless we also end up with judges that are willing to ignore black letter law.
I think we’re dangerously close to one party rule. Once you give up the notion that the loser of an election has to accept the will of the people, then democratic rule is over. We’ll see how many Republicans who lose in 2022 fight it out in the courts and/or state legislatures. I’m guessing more than half of Republicans who lose will refuse to concede and there will be insurrections everywhere. Our great grandchildren may grow up where only Republican names appear on ballots and Congress will be as much a rubber stamp as the Chinese legislature is.
People assume that there’s an obvious bright-line boundary between an action that is unconstitutional and one that is not, and that if an action is unconstitutional, it will be declared thus by a rational and impartial panel of jurists, and that rule of law will prevail.
That’s not necessarily how these things work. Democracy often dies in a hail of turmoil, controversy, and confusion. People don’t realize that the opponents of liberal democracy have already broken through a number of barriers already. It’s now a question of whether they can penetrate the barriers that remain.
The thing is, I don’t think even the winner would declare that he has the ‘will of the people’ - a mandate - behind him. It has never been a prerequisite that the winner of a democratic contest win overwhelmingly; in fact for a liberal democracy to function as intended, it’s arguably better if the winner doesn’t make that assumption. The winner of the contest, despite winning, agrees to cooperate with the opposition and to at least attempt to find some common ground to pass legislation that appeals to a range of people beyond one party’s political interests.
By that same token, the losing candidate and party agrees to cooperate as well - first, by acknowledging that the results are legitimate and that they were indeed the losing candidate and that their opposition was the winning candidate. And while they don’t have to agree on what bills get passed, they should at least agree not to use procedure as a weapon.
Democracy depends on cooperation. Just like if you have two football teams, they have to agree on what the rules are and how scores are calculated and so forth, and the home team agrees that it won’t bribe officials and incite violent mobs to attack the visiting team on the field if they fall behind in the 4th quarter.
Wrong - there is still a law; there is still the power of the state. You would be on the receiving end of state power, and you would absolutely not be able to do as you want.
Good analogy. The problem is, in the right-wing alternate reality, Democrats are the ones bribing the officials and inciting violent mobs.
I tend to agree from the fact that so many GOP-held governorships and courts either threw out the cases or didn’t allow them to move foward in 2020. That said, there’s a lot of laws coming into being that are doing their best to make sure there’s no Dem victories in the first place. Which is why there needs to be a national movement to get out the vote in a huge way in 2022 so that there can be zero doubt that a Dem wins an election free and clear.