As the presumptive Democratic nominee for president,
former vice president Joe Biden tweeted a warning on April 24 that he expected that
Trump “is going to try to kick the election [and] come up with some rationale
why it can’t be held.” The Trump campaign responded by accusing Biden of
engaging in “incoherent conspiracy theory ramblings” and describing Trump’s
poll-leading opponent as “out of touch with reality.”
Trump himself confirmed Biden’s warning in a tweet of
his own last week [July 30] that repeated the president’s unsubstantiated
warnings about mail-in voting and suggested delaying the Nov. 3 election. “With
universal mail-in voting (not absentee voting, which is good), 2020 will be the
most INACCURATE, FRAUDULENT election in history. It will be a great
embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly,
securely and safely vote???”
Constitutional law scholars were quick to point out
that Trump, as president, has no authority whatsoever to delay the election:
the date is set by Congress, as the first Tuesday after the first Monday in
November. Historians were equally quick to point out that the United States
held the presidential election in 1864 as scheduled, with the nation engaged in
civil war.
On Capitol Hill, Republican members of Congress for
once found that Trump had gone too far. Trump’s enabler-in-chief, Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, used an interview with a home-state television
station to bat away any possibility of an off-schedule election. “Never in the
history of the country, through wars and depressions and the Civil War, have we
ever not had a federally scheduled election on time, and we'll find a way to do
that again this November 3, ” McConnell told the interviewer from Louisville’s
WNKY.
Steven Calabresi, a law professor at Northwestern
University and a co-founder of the Trump-loving Federalist Society, went so far
in an op-ed for the New York Times as to label Trump’s
suggestion “fascistic” and grounds for impeachment. Calabresi, who defended
Trump during the impeachment, called for Trump to relent from the suggestion or
resign.
Several other Republicans followed McConnell’s example
by similarly rejecting any likelihood of a delayed election, including the
House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy. Those assurances are, to be sure, welcome, but
they are not enough. Trump’s strategy is to sow doubts about an election that
he is now on a path to losing, badly. Recall that even after winning the
presidency by an Electoral College majority, Trump claimed, without any
evidence, to have lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton only because of
illegal voting by illegal aliens.
Right now, Republicans need to be contradicting and
correcting Trump’s lies about what are actually the minuscule risks of fraud in
mail-in voting: only 143 prosecutions for mail-ballot fraud out of more than
250 million ballots cast in mail-in voting over the past 20 years, according to
an article by Igor Derysh in Salon. With no evidence,
Attorney General William Barr told the House Judiciary Committee that there was
“a high risk” of fraud in mail-in voting in this year’s election, but he
refused to endorse Trump’s suggestion that the election will be rigged. “I have
no reason to believe it will be,” Barr said in reply to a Democratic lawmaker’s
query.
It is a commonplace observation among democracy
advocates that the critical test for an emerging democracy comes not in the
first election, but in the next — when the in-power party faces the
reality of yielding power to the opposition. On that issue, the United States
has a fairly good record but with a few blemishes. John Adams used the Alien
and Sedition Acts to put some of his opponents in jail after winning the
presidency in 1796. The New York Times’s Peter Baker noted,
in a news analysis, some examples of sore losers in U.S. history: Andrew
Jackson accused John Quincy Adams of gaining the presidency in 1824 on the
strength of a corrupt bargain with the third-place candidate Henry Clay;
Democrats mocked Rutherford Hayes as “His Fraudulency” after the Republican
emerged as the winner after the disputed 1876 election.
To opposite effect, however, Al Gore, as the popular
vote winner in 2000, stoically accepted the Supreme Court decision that cut off
the recount in Florida. “While I strongly disagree with the decision,” Gore
said in a televised address the next night, “I accept it.”
Whatever grousing there may have been about elections
in U.S. history, never until now has a sitting president
or a former president used the prestige of the office to fuel doubts about
results after or much less before they are known. “I have never seen such an
effort to sow distrust in our elections,” Michael J. Abramowitz, the president
of Freedom House, a nonpartisan organization that promotes democracy around the
world, told the Times’s Baker. “We are used to seeing this
kind of behavior from authoritarians around the globe,” Abramowitz added, “but
it is particularly disturbing coming from the president of the United States.”
Trump’s advisers have their work cut out for them in
trying to convince Trump of the reality of what seems now as his likely defeat
on Election Day. For the country’s sake, perhaps they can persuade him to leave
quietly after the results are counted, but that may be too much to hope for.
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