Read the original article: How Hard Is It to Overturn an American Election?
And so it has come to this: The president of the United States is trying to overturn the results of a national election he unambiguously lost with a combination of petulant whining, spiteful and flailing executive action, and magic.
No, it’s not ultimately going to work, at least not if working is defined as allowing President Trump to maintain power in the face of expressed voter will.
But it is working better than I would have believed possible: in undermining confidence in American democratic processes, in damaging President-elect Joe Biden’s ability to govern in the short term, and in raising questions in the minds of the faithful as to whether Trump’s defeat was real.
The president’s gambit starts with his refusal to concede an election that is significantly less close than the one he won four years ago and which he declared a “landslide.” There exists no law or rule that compels a president to acknowledge the legitimacy of his defeat—or even the fact of it—except in the very limited sense that he has to vacate the office. The attempt to continue occupying the White House after noon on Jan. 20, after all, would certainly constitute trespassing and might even constitute sedition to the extent it was intended illegally to hold power. (“If two or more persons … conspire to overthrow … the Government of the United States … or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.”)
So yes, the president is allowed to sulk. He is allowed to be the sorest of sore losers. He is allowed to once again display before the entire world the complete triumph of ego over patriotism, of self-interestedness over public-spiritedness, within his heart. There is, actually, nothing to do about it if he wants to play it this way; there is no way to stop him. And in and of itself, it’s not even a particularly grave problem. It is certainly sad that the United States has a president who so completely fails the basic tests of honor and decency. It would be lovely to see him just once rise to some occasion, any occasion. But it’s hardly a surprise that he can’t or he won’t or he doesn’t want to. He is, after all, Donald Trump.
The bigger problem than the president’s refusal to concede the race is the toleration of that refusal by the overwhelming majority of congressional Republicans. Yes, a few senators—Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse—have congratulated Biden, and a few others have said that Biden should have access to transition resources and intelligence briefings.
But the Republican leadership in both houses of Congress have played along with the president’s obstinate refusal to face reality, pretending that there are still important questions about the integrity of the vote to litigate and resolve. “Let’s not have any lectures, no lectures, about how the president should immediately, cheerfully accept preliminary election results from the same characters who just spent four years refusing to accept the validity of the last election and who insinuated that this one would be illegitimate too if they lost again—only if they lost,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on the Senate floor. “Until the Electoral College votes, anyone who is running for office can exhaust concerns in counting in any court of appropriate jurisdiction,” he said in response to a reporter’s question.
Let’s leave aside the obvious factual problem with McConnell’s words: Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, in fact, promptly accepted the preliminary results of the 2016 election. Clinton did not launch a spree of frivolous lawsuits in an attempt to overturn them. Nor did Obama delay the beginning of the transition of power; indeed, he met with Trump at the White House immediately following Trump’s apparent victory. McConnell knows all this, so arguing the matter is pointless. He is providing cover fire for the president’s refusal to engage reality. And the president is capitalizing on the opportunity that McConnell and other congressional Republicans are providing.
This is where the matter goes from being one of mere personal petulance on the part of an incumbent who lost his bid for reelection into something more menacing. Because Trump is using state power to frustrate an orderly transition of power. Over the past few days:
- The administrator of the General Services Administration, Emily Murphy, has refused to “ascertain” (in the language of the law) that Biden is the “apparent” winner of the election, thus blocking transition funding and preventing certain other transition activity from beginning.
- Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Nov. 10 publicly stated that “[t]here will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration,” before chuckling and then stating that all the votes would be counted and the State Department would be ready for any outcome on Jan. 20. When Fox News anchor Brett Baier asked that evening whether Pompeo had been joking, the secretary did not answer in the affirmative but reiterated that all the votes weren’t counted and that the department would be ready for whatever happened.
- The president-elect is still not receiving intelligence briefings. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) issued a statement on Nov. 10 saying, “ODNI follows the statutory direction provided in the Presidential Transition Act, which requires ascertainment of the candidate by the administrator of GSA prior to supporting a potential presidential transition.” The statement goes on: “ODNI would not have contact with any transition team until notified by the GSA administrator.”
- More generally, the Washington Post reported on Nov. 9 that “[t]he Trump White House on Monday instructed senior government leaders to block cooperation with President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team.”
- The White House has even gone so far as to instruct agencies to continue preparing its annual budget proposal—which does not come out until February.
- According to the Daily Beast, “the White House Presidential Personnel Office (PPO) is [also] still in the process of vetting candidates for job openings in various parts of the federal government, positions that the White House intended to fill by early next year.
- Attorney General William Barr sent a memo […]
Read the original article: How Hard Is It to Overturn an American Election?