It is becoming clearer and clearer the Republicans have a strategy to install Trump in the White House, regardless of the election results. If no candidate in a presidential election reaches the required 270 electoral votes, the U.S. House of Representatives is tasked with electing the President. To do this, each state delegation is awarded a single vote. Since there are 50 states, any candidate who garners 26 votes will be elected president. Given there are currently more ‘red’ states than ‘blue’ states just based upon politics, not population, the ‘red’ states would most certainly win this contest. And in this election year, that would mean Trump would be elected.
This idea was floated in 2020 but never got off the ground and Mike Pence, finally, stood up to Trump and did his constitutional duty along with a handful of other local election officials. However, since that time, at least 70 confirmed Trump election denialists have been elected to positions in which they will be responsible for certifying election results – or not. If some, or all, of these individuals choose to refuse to certify election results they do not agree with or like, it could easily cause enough chaos in the system such that by the constitutional deadline, there is no certified election winner – and, the choice for president moves to the US House.
Who is currently Speaker of House? – Mike Johnson, a man who worked to help Trump overthrow the election the last time. Given what we’ve seen of Johnson to date, does anyone really believe he will do his job per the Constitution? I am willing to bet huge sums of money that ‘God’ will instruct him to do otherwise and force the election of Trump, regardless of the actual vote count. He will be convinced he is doing ‘God’s will.’ The last election was a practice run for this scenario. This time they will be playing for keeps.
If this scenario were to play out, another interesting twist is that the Senate would then get to choose the Vice President and given that Harris would probably have the next highest (probably the highest) vote count, it is likely she could very well be elected Vice President (if she were foolish enough to accept the job). But think about this. Given the recent Supreme Court ruling giving a sitting president virtually unlimited immunity for ‘official’ acts, there would be nothing to keep Trump from having Harris jailed or assassinated immediately after taking office. If you think that is too far-fetched to happen, you just keep thinking that.
Even if Trump failed to take that kind of drastic action, he could (and most probably would) completely marginalize the Senate choice for Vice President. He could, in fact, task that individual with, for example, going to Antarctica to count and tag penguins or any other task to keep them out of the way. He will have virtually unlimited power to circumvent the intentions of the Founding Fathers. As I said in my previous post, the U.S. Supreme Court and the current U.S. House of Representatives are setting Trump up to make John Gotti and Viktor Orban look like amateurs. Trump aspires to be like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un and President Xi Jinping and rule with an iron fist. And thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court and a host of MAGAified Republicans, he may get his wish.
When Biden was still in the race, the Republicans thought they had it in the bag and the ‘throw it to the House’ scenario was not their primary strategy. They understood it would be far cleaner to just win the electoral college outright. However, now with a highly energized Harris in the race, there are many Republicans who are very aware that an outright win will be a lot harder to achieve. That is why I think the ‘throw it to the House’ strategy is now the primary goal of the MAGA machine.
We can only hope the Democratic Party has lined up an army of lawyers to fight the upcoming battles. We can further hope the U.S. Supreme Court will not want to so openly and so blatantly undermine American democracy as to allow the Republican plan to succeed. However, given their recent and obvious ‘MAGAfication,’ it is extremely worrisome they will just throw the entire country under the bus.
We can then gather up all the copies of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights, and two hundred and fifty years of history and throw them on the fire, grab some marshmallows and make smores because that is all those documents will be worth at that point.
