Democrats have spent the last three years labeling former President Donald Trump and any other Republican who questioned the 2020 presidential election results as “insurrectionists.” But as their efforts to either imprison Trump or throw him off the ballot have shown, they are ready to do just about anything to ensure he can’t win a second term in 2024. But with President Joe Biden falling in the polls and Trump demonstrating that he could win, they need a backup plan if the courts won’t do their bidding.
As an article in The Atlantic last week made clear, they have one in mind. The only problem is that it involves Democrats doing exactly what they labeled as “insurrection” when Republicans half-heartedly played at doing the same thing in January 2021, when some of them voted not to certify the vote of the Electoral College that handed the election to Biden. And if Democrats win control of Congress in November, something that could happen even if Trump also wins the presidency, they could succeed where the GOP failed and overturn the election.
Democratic prosecutors and judges have imprisoned thousands of people for being present at the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Democrats also spent years labeling the efforts of Trump supporters to find a legal way to overturn the 2020 results they considered potentially fraudulent as another form of insurrection or even, in the case of the tainted Georgia prosecutions led by Fani Willis, a violation of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations statute that aimed at curbing mafia activity.
But anyone who imagines that the charge of hypocrisy will stop Democrats from doing anything they can to stop Trump from taking office hasn’t been paying attention to American politics for the last eight years. Having convinced themselves that Trump is an authoritarian threat to American democracy as well as a stooge of Vladimir Putin — with the Russian collusion hoax now being revived — it is inconceivable that even a clear defeat in the November election would prevent them from using every means at their disposal to overturn such a result.
Media and Lawfare Campaign
Since 2021, Democrats and their corporate media cheering section have been consistent in alleging that Republicans were going to attempt to steal the 2024 election. Indeed the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, which has now assumed the nature of a Democrat holy day — was the occasion for a series of articles in outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and New York magazine that centered on unhinged scaremongering about alleged plots for a GOP coup. That was the background for the Democrats’ Jan. 6 Committee dog-and-pony show, when blame for the riot expanded from the participants to more or less every Republican who voiced doubts about the count in a 2020 election in which the normal guardrails for voter integrity had been discarded during the Covid panic.
But as Trump and the Republicans have learned in the last year, the hyperbole about defending democracy wasn’t just disingenuous. It was also a matter of projection. Democrats have unleashed a far-ranging lawfare campaign aimed at throwing Trump off the ballot and convicting him on an array of bogus crimes. In New York state, a bizarre lawsuit has used a legitimate real estate transaction as the excuse for a case in which a partisan judge and legal system seeks to destroy Trump’s family business and confiscate his wealth in a manner reminiscent of banana republic proscriptions.
If Democrats didn’t blush at the use of such naked authoritarian tactics — New York Gov. Kathy Hochul even said the quiet part out loud when she assured other business owners that they needn’t fear being the victims of a similarly arbitrary prosecution because it could only be applied to Trump — what would prevent them from trying to overturn an election they lost to the former president?
They have good reason to fear a Trump victory. With Biden’s favorability ratings at a historical low for an incumbent seeking reelection and Trump leading him in the RealClearPolitics average of surveys of head-to-head matchups and in polls with third-party candidates included, the president is in big trouble.
How to Stop Trump
That’s the backdrop for a revealing piece in The Atlantic about how Democrats can stop another Trump presidency even if the voters choose him.
The excuse for doing so will be to assert the argument being made by Colorado when it tried to throw Trump off the ballot in that state: that his alleged status as an insurrectionist makes him ineligible to be president.
According to Atlantic staff writer Russell Berman, the key to overturning a Trump victory at the ballot box is for the Democrats to win back control of Congress, the odds for which, even in the event of a Trump presidential win, must be assessed as at least even. If they do, then the stage is set for a Jan. 6 rerun, this time with the Democrats voting not to certify the Electoral College results.
1988 was the last time Democrats accepted a presidential election loss without attempting to overturn the results. Since then, every Republican victory, including George W. Bush’s decisive 2004 win, has been questioned by both Democrat politicians and conspiracy theorists on the left. Indeed Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, who voted not to certify Trump’s win in 2016 and then treated Republicans who did the same four years later as traitors, said he might be willing to consider decertifying a Trump win in 2024 if that’s what will happen.
It’s true that some of the most notoriously partisan Democrats such as Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell told Berman that would be a bridge too far for them. But even discounting their unwillingness to show their hand this far in advance, it’s important to take into account factors that Berman didn’t even bother mentioning.
A Trump victory would almost certainly set off bloody riots in every American city in the manner of the “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter riots of the summer of 2020. If anything, the next round of left-wing violence might be even worse. But no matter how much America burns following a Trump win on Nov. 5, 2024, you can count on Washington to be swarming with angry leftists and liberals next January in a manner to put the “Stop the Steal” rally MAGA demonstrators of 2021 to shame.
The pressure on Democratic politicians to stop the Electoral College results from being certified would be far greater than the desultory protests that Trump supporters put together to head off a Biden presidency. The entire left-wing intersectional activist wing of the party will know that another Trump presidency could begin the process of rolling back the tide of woke control of the government and American society. That factor alone, along with the visceral hatred for Trump and his working-class fans, will generate the kind of mass demonstrations that will be impossible for Democrat members of Congress to ignore.
Constitutional Crisis
Should they vote not to certify the election that Trump had won, that would create a murky constitutional debate about what follows, but the effect would be the same as an Electoral College tie, addressed in the 12th Amendment, and would likely mean the election would be thrown to the House of Representatives for a decision.
There, each state delegation would have one vote to decide the presidency, something that has only happened after the 1800 and 1824 elections. The House would be limited in their choices to those who won Electoral College votes, but at that point, the result might be political chaos, since Electoral College members would have been free to vote as they liked.
There is also the possibility that the House wouldn’t be able to resolve the impasse before Jan. 21, when a president must be sworn in. In that case, the Senate would elect a vice president who would serve as president. There again, a Democratic majority could elect Biden or his running mate. But the wording of the 12th Amendment, which says that “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States,” raises the possibility of them choosing someone who had not been on the ballot, such as fantasy league options like Michelle Obama. Like virtually everything that would happen once the existing system failed to produce a result, it would also mean subsequent court challenges to resolve the meaning of the text, which, like the Democrats’ attempt to use the 14th Amendment to stop Trump, is something the courts have never fully adjudicated.
At this moment, it’s just one scenario that the political left is contemplating. But it would be foolish to dismiss the possibility of it becoming reality, especially when one considers the underhanded and authoritarian tactics Democrats have already employed to take out Trump in the courts.
Not unreasonably, Republican voters fear that should the current polling averages hold and a Trump victory actually happen, the Democrat Party and left-wing media would be willing to back any scheme that would allow them to retain power, notwithstanding their rhetoric about Republicans who challenged the 2020 vote. Democrats know the courts won’t let them get their way on preventing Trump from being on the ballot and worry that their bogus lawfare trials against him either won’t succeed in jailing him in time or will be ignored by voters who understand undemocratic behavior when they see it. If they do control Congress in January, the chances of them using that power to undo an election loss to Trump seems like the safest possible bet.
