White House Chronicle

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Democratic Graybeards Detail Tools Trump May Use To Negate Midterms

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After two long, dark years, there is an optimism afoot among Democrats, many independents, and a few old-school Republicans that the clouds will part and the sun will shine brightly again on Nov. 4.

Most votes in the midterms will be counted, and Democrats believe the House will have flipped Democratic with a decent majority. They are daring to hope that the Senate, too, will be theirs. The Trump presidency, its opponents hope, will be firmly marked “lame duck.”

Better, they hope the years of Trump raging, as they see it, outside of his constitutional authority and acting illegally, will be over.

It is fantasized that he will be trussed and restricted from authoritarian governance; that his claims of having a mandate will have been repudiated.

But Trump isn’t a man who takes reversals easily. So there is widespread fear that he will find some way to negate the results of the Nov. 3 ballot, and that Nov. 4 will see him crowing, declaring victory, and being more determined than ever to act as an authoritarian.

Two of the most revered and admired members of the hierarchy of the Democratic Party, Tim Wirth, who represented Colorado for 12 years in the House before entering the Senate, and Richard Gephardt, who represented Missouri for 26 years in the House and rose to become majority leader, have been studying the emergency powers they fear might be used to obstruct the midterms.

The Democratic graybeards state: “Over the past several months, we have been examining the structure of presidential emergency authorities, particularly Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs) and related to continuity of government provisions. These authorities have existed for decades. What has changed is the context in which they might be used.”

It is these documents, and how they might be used with new intent by Trump and his allies, that alarm the senior Democrats.

They point out that the cadre of Trump loyalists who supported his claim that he won the 2020 election are seeking ways to overcome the Democratic victory in the midterms.

Wirth and Gephardt state: “Actors involved in efforts to contest the 2020 election remain active and are again discussing the use of a national emergency to justify federal intervention in election administration.

“At the same time, federal law enforcement has been used directly in relation to contested election processes, and the president has called for federal control over aspects of voting while describing domestic opponents in terms that go well beyond ordinary political language.”

Wirth and Gephardt wonder if “taken together” these developments raise the question of “whether emergency authorities of uncertain scope, capable of rapid implementation and subject to limited oversight, could be brought to bear in a domestic political context before Congress or the courts can respond effectively.”

Clearly, the former members of Congress believe the administration will find pretexts to either subvert the vote, challenge the result, or set aside the entire election on emergency grounds.

The first moves are underway to limit mail-in voting and not to count mail ballots that arrive after Election Day. Before Congress, the SAVE America Act will impose what its opponents say are excessive voter identification requirements, including proof of citizenship, supposedly to prevent non-citizens from voting. No evidence that this is a problem has been produced.

Trump has added to the uncertainty in one statement, suggesting that his administration is so successful that no election is needed. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt walked that back, but the intimation lingers.

My belief is that in no way will there be a smooth transfer of power if the Democrats win the midterms, and that the full apparatus of emergency powers could be employed to negate the result.

The president has produced an extraordinary convulsion in the country, and it is unlikely to be corrected as easily as by the midterm elections.

Trump, who can widely be inconsistent in what he says, even in the same speech, remains consistent in his claim that the 2020 election was fraudulent. No evidence of this has ever been found despite exhaustive investigations, but he remains firm on that allegation.

He will at least make that claim about the midterms if the results go against him.

Of course, a lot happens in a single month of the Trump administration, and there are seven months until the elections.

What is certain is that if the Democrats triumph in the midterms, Trump will use every tool of the executive to frustrate the new Congress. A wild elephant is a dangerous creature when antagonized.

The Political Architecture of Britain and America Under Attack

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On both sides of the Atlantic, political and business retaining walls are being torn down in the belief that they are of no structural importance. Messing with the political and business architecture is likely to have grave, and possibly terrible, effects on democracy and prosperity.

In the United States solid, political orthodoxy, which has served well for so long, is under attack in the Congress and on the hustings.

A more advanced attack is underway in Europe than the United States, but it is a harbinger nonetheless of bad things that can happen here. The commonalities outweigh the differences.

In Europe, Britain has embarked on one of the great, avoidable debacles of history: the decision to leave the European Union. It will destabilize Europe, almost certainly lead to a breakup of the United Kingdom, and leave the British Isles vulnerable and impoverished, clinging to the tatters of its “sovereignty.”

To bring about this state of affairs, the British had to take aim at the very architecture of the English Constitution: the collection of rules and precedents that has flowed since Magna Carta and is enshrined in the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty.

Now the Conservative Party is bowing to the result of a referendum, a decisive result nonetheless, that will withdraw from Europe without a debate or vote in the House of Commons. A referendum in Britain — there have only ever been three, and all have been on Europe — denies representative government, created over the centuries, as the only system of government: the fundamental political architecture.

In the United States, the political architecture is under threat because we fail to revere it. A book by Richard Arenberg and Robert Dove, titled “Defending the Filibuster: The Soul of the Senate,” outlines one way that the structure is facing the wrecking ball. For 34 years, Arenberg worked in the Senate for such Democratic political giants as George Mitchell, Carl Levin and Paul Tsongas. Robert Dove served twice as Senate parliamentarian and was on Republican Robert Dole’s staff. They argue that the political architecture in the Senate is under attack from the ceaseless, ugly partisanship and that the filibuster, a minority guarantee to a say, may be swept away.

Arenberg told me that the filibuster, always used sparingly and seldom invoked, has been abused in recent years to such an extent that a change in the Senate rules could sweep away this unique tool of whichever party is in the minority to be heard. If that happens, he said, a situation like the one in the House would prevail, where the majority holds sway without regard to the minority, more like a parliamentary system.

Other threats to the structure of American democracy abound. Many of them have been enunciated by Hedrick Smith, a distinguished documentary filmmaker and former New York Times correspondent, in his book “Who Stole the American Dream?” He points to gerrymandering and special interests and their money as threatening the retaining walls of the American democracy.

Worse, maybe, on both sides of the Atlantic, is the growing conservative rejection of trade as the basis not only of prosperity, but also of foreign policy stability.

Brexit is the willing destruction of Britain’s largest trade arrangement and an equivalent reduction in its influence in Europe and, by extrapolation, in the world.

In the United States, Hillary Clinton has pusillanimously turned her back on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade pact that she helped write. And Donald Trump has declared his intention to trash almost all our trade treaties, which, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, he claims have been written by idiots to favor our competitors.

Most worrying is the way the U.K.’s Conservative Party and Republicans, silenced by Trump’s candidacy, here have accepted this rejection of traditional conservative bedrock: prosperity through trade. Institutionally, they have been quiet, so quiet.

The threat to good governance in Europe and America, combined with the prevailing economic heresy, poses a serious threat to the West and must have its enemies in Moscow and Beijing doing a happy dance. They know that if you knock down enough retaining walls, the structure will be weakened to the point of collapse. The wrecking balls are already at work.

For InsideSources