This morning, about thirty seconds after the horrific jobs and GDP numbers dropped, the president sent us all haring off after another incendiary tweet.
And just in case anyone failed to be distracted, he pinned it to the top of his profile. Subtle!
At the risk of engaging with an internet troll, no, shut up, we are not delaying the election. Congress fixed the date of elections on “the Tuesday next after the first Monday in the month of November,” and only congress can un-fix it. Moreover, unless the voters return them to office, the Constitution says Donald Trump and Mike Pence’s terms are up on January 20.
According to the Presidential Succession Act, if the president and vice president are unable to serve, then the Speaker of the House takes over. But without elections, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and every other member of the congress would be out of a job as well. In that case, the Senate President pro tempore, i.e. the most senior member of the majority party, would step in. Currently, that person is Iowan Chuck Grassley, who has been in office since corn was domesticated. (More or less.)
But of the 35 senators up this cycle, 23 are Republicans and 12 are Democrats. So if all them exited the scene at once, control of the chamber would shift to Democrats, making Vermont’s Patrick Leahy the President pro tempore, since he’s been in office since maple syrup was invented. And if Leahy became President pro tempore on January 7 when senate terms expire, that would put him squarely in the line of presidential succession on January 20 when the Constitution kicks Trump and Pence to the curb. Which is … probably not what President Lulz had in mind.
Yes, if you feel like feeding the trolls even more, you can postulate about governors filling the seats between January 7 and January 20. But why waste the pixels — it’s never going to happen.
The real issue is that the president just dominated yet another news cycle with false claims about the security of remote voting, preparing his supporters to dispute the results if Biden is the winner. Trump’s Republican allies get to appear reasonable by comparison, furrowing their brows as they insist that the election must go on as scheduled, and Trump gets a pass on his lies about the safety of voting by mail during a viral pandemic.
“I don’t think it’s a particularly good idea,” Sen. Lindsey Graham said this morning when cornered by CNN’s Manu Raju.
“I wish he hadn’t said that, but it’s not going to change: We are going to have an election in November,” said Sen. Marco Rubio.
“Election fraud is a serious problem we need to stop it and fight it,” Sen. Ted Cruz stated, without offering evidence. “But no the election should not be delayed.”
Other senators described the president as making a hilarious joke at the press’s expense.
“I think that if you guys take the bait he’ll be the happiest guy in town,” Sen. Kevin Cramer told Raju. “I read it. I laughed I thought my gosh this is going to consume a lot of people, except real people. And it was clever.”
Except HAW HAW, multiple members of Trump’s cabinet are treating this as a serious suggestion. Yesterday Attorney General Bill Barr testified that he knew foreign governments would engage in wholesale counterfeiting of mail-in ballots because “that is just common sense.”
And this morning, in testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a Harvard Law grad who pretends he never read the Constitution, professed to be unclear if voting would be allowed to go on as scheduled. “In the end, the DOJ and others will make that legal determination,” he told Sen. Tim Kaine.
Because it’s all fun and games until John Yoo barfs out a memo saying that actually Article II gives the president the right to declare a national emergency and cancel elections. That train is never late.
Republicans openly challenge Trump’s tweet on delaying election [CNN]
Your Most Paranoid Pandemic Election Questions, Answered [Medium]
Elizabeth Dye (@5DollarFeminist) lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.