How many Republicans have had Enough?

[ZiprHead]

'I wish you the best': US military adviser resigns after Trump's controversial photo op at church

A Department of Defense adviser has resigned, effective immediately, from the military's science board, citing what he believed to be a violation of conduct from Secretary of Defense Mark Esper.

In his resignation letter to Esper, which was obtained by The Washington Post, James Miller Jr., who served as the US undersecretary of defense for policy from 2012 to 2014, recalled that he swore an oath of office to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States" and "to bear true faith and allegiance to the same," similar to what the defense secretary had done before he took office.

"On Monday, June 1, 2020, I believe that you violated that oath," Miller wrote to Esper.

 

[lpetrich]

Will Trump leave office if defeated? - Vox

Imagine that it’s November 3, 2020, and Joe Biden has just been declared the winner of the presidential election by all the major networks except for Fox News. It was a close, bitter race, but Biden appears to have won with just over 280 electoral votes.

Because Election Day took place in the middle of a second wave of coronavirus infections, turnout was historically low and a huge number of votes were cast via absentee ballot. While Biden is the presumptive winner, the electoral process was bumpy, with thousands of mail-in votes in closely fought states still waiting to be counted. Trump, naturally, refuses to concede and spends election night tweeting about how “fraudulent” the vote was.

We have a foretaste of that:

Donald J. Trump on Twitter: "There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone....." / Twitter

Donald J. Trump on Twitter: "....living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one. That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote. This will be a Rigged Election. No way!" / Twitter

Both tweets are followed by a ! in a circle, then this link: Get the facts about mail-in ballots That is the warning that has recently made Trump so distraught.

One day goes by, then a few more, and a month later Trump is still contesting the outcome, calling it “rigged” or a “Deep State plot” or whatever. Republicans, for the most part, are falling in line behind Trump. From that point forward, we’re officially in a constitutional crisis.

Amherst College law professor Lawrence Douglas has written a book: Will He Go? by Lawrence Douglas | Twelve - "Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020"

In it, he considered how Trump would react to losing the upcoming election, especially if he loses by a narrow margin.

 

[lpetrich]

Vox had an interview with Lawrence Douglas about his book and its scenarios.

Foremost among them is the fact that we have a president of the United States who has pretty consistently and aggressively telegraphed his intention not to concede in the face of an electoral defeat, especially if that electoral defeat is of a very narrow margin. And it looks like it probably will be a narrow margin.

A narrow margin in certain "swing states", like in 2016, PA, MI, WI.

The other concern is that if we do fall into an electoral crisis and we start seeing the kinds of challenges to the results that we saw back in year 2000, during Bush v. Gore, then we could really see a meltdown because our contemporary political climate is so polarized.

There aren't any laws or Constitution features for handling such a thing -- we would have a Constitutional crisis. He also notes how willing the Republican Congresspeople are to enable him.

We saw that in the impeachment proceeding, where it was really astonishing that you have Mitt Romney as the only Republican voting in the Senate to remove the president. And it was only, what, eight years ago that Mitt Romney was the standard-bearer of the party in the national election.

It’s a pretty disturbing erosion of democratic norms.

The issue could end up in Congress, and given that the Democrats have a majority in the House and the Republicans in the Senate, that's likely to put them at loggerheads. That may mean no President on Inauguration Day 2021. Vice President Pence would then become President.

Would the Supreme Court help?

But it’s very misleading to think that it was the Supreme Court that settled the 2000 election. It really wasn’t the Supreme Court in the decision Bush v. Gore that ended things — it was Al Gore. Al Gore, for the good of the country, decided to accept the Supreme Court’s ruling. I’d say it’s impossible to imagine Trump doing anything like that.

Besides, if it did intervene, I’m not sure that Congress would abide by a court ruling. Because so many experts [here and here] say the Court really doesn’t have jurisdiction to resolve an electoral dispute once it hits Congress.

If Trump loses big, then it will be much easier. It's a close loss that's the problem. Especially with lots of mailed-in ballots. Trump has denied the legitimacy of every mailed-in vote but his, it seems.

Imagine a swing state like Michigan. Imagine the November 3 popular vote appears to go to Trump by a small margin. So he declares that he’s won Michigan. And Michigan defines the margin of victory in the Electoral College, so he declares that he’s been reelected.

Well, as these write-in ballots and these mail-in ballots are counted in the next days, there’s this phenomenon that we’ve seen in the last several elections called the “blue shift.” It tends to be the case that mail-in ballots break Democratic. It’s typically the case that mail-in ballots come from urban areas, which are predominantly Democratic in their voting patterns.

 

[lpetrich]

Has anything like this nightmare scenario happened in the past?

We came very close to having something like this happen back in 1876. There was this Hayes-Tilden election, in which three separate states submitted competing electoral certificates to Congress. Congress was likewise divided between House Democrats and Senate Republicans, and they couldn’t figure anything out. It was a total stalemate. They eventually jerry-rigged a solution, but that solution only worked because Samuel Tilden, the Democratic candidate, agreed to concede.

Again, I don’t see Trump doing that.

Given what a sore loser he is, and given how much he craves the glory of the Presidency, I agree.