Sure, Republicans. Just Let Harris Pick the Next President.

Sure, Republicans. Just Let Harris Pick the Next President.

Two memos that surfaced this week show how serious the GOP has become about subverting U.S. elections. 

By Jonathan Bernstein

September 22, 2021, 8:30 PM GMT+9

It wasn’t a one-off.

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.

Here’s the most important question right now in U.S. politics: Should the 2024 presidential election be determined by the choices of voters in the several states, with pluralities in each state determining the electoral votes from that state, and the candidate who receives the most electoral votes chosen in that fashion winning?

Or should Vice President Kamala Harris just pick whomever she wants to win? Perhaps herself, if President Joe Biden doesn’t run and Harris is the Democratic nominee.

Two documents about the Republican plan to subvert the 2020 election went public this week. And yes, it was a Republican plan even more than it was a Donald Trump plan, as can be seen from the nonsense-filled memo from Republican lawyer John Eastman from last winter that outlined a scheme for then-Vice President Mike Pence to throw out valid electoral votes.

For explanations of the memo’s legal absurdities, see the analyses by law professors Derek Muller here and Jonathan Adler here. Perhaps more to the point are reports that Republicans such as Utah Senator Mike Lee and former Vice President Dan Quayle believed the whole thing was nonsense — indeed, they join the ranks of Republicans who stood up to the Trumpy side of the party and, collectively, managed to preserve democracy.

So far.

Because we all know what happened after efforts to subvert the 2020 election failed. The Trump faction has systematically worked to eliminate those who didn’t go along while doing its best to convince Republican voters that all of this is a necessary defense against Democratic conspiracies.

That’s where the other document comes in: It turns out that at least some of those claims were debunked within the Trump campaign and White House early in the process — indeed, before Trump allies took those false claims public.

No wonder that Republicans were so ready to falsely claim fraud in last week’s failed vote to recall California Governor Gavin Newsom that they accidentally posted an analysis based on election returns … before the election happened and the votes were counted.

The bottom line is that the dominant faction of the Republican Party tried, through a combination of public lies, attempts to bully people into improper use of office, and, yes, mob violence, to overturn a presidential election. And it appears that this faction will become more dominant within the party. At the presidency level, we don’t know when Republicans will again lose an election, but it will happen sooner or later, perhaps with a Republican in the White House and with Republican majorities in Congress. It’s not at all clear what will happen then.

The good news? There isn’t much. Yes, some of the Republicans who rallied for the republic and the rule of law after the 2020 election will still be in place in 2024. It’s at least possible that others will take their responsibilities seriously, no matter how partisan they otherwise may be. That was, after all, the case in 2020. The Republicans who defied Trump and his allies were in many cases solid, even rabid, partisans — but it turned out that they did not, when push came to shove, betray their oaths of office. Perhaps that will be true of others in the future, even those who are cheering on subversion now when it’s not directly on their watch.

And it is at least possible that if Trump leaves the scene, the threat will recede. This problem didn’t begin with him, and there were more than a few regular Republicans who were eager to jump on the bandwagon. But Trump is more brazen than others, and that may give license to some who wouldn’t act on their own. It is, after all, in the nature of political parties to seek control of the government, so it’s not surprising that when given the opportunity, many party actors turn out to feel few constraints from the rule of law other than practical ones. Perhaps without a party leader who apparently has no feel for democracy and the rule of law egging them on, the party would go back to having only some unhealthy impulses, rather than having those impulses dominate.

Perhaps. But that’s not a lot to hang the hopes of the nation on.

It is good to know that election law experts are working on ways to make it harder to overturn election results. Rick Hasen, a legal scholar who has worked on these issues for years, has an important new draft paper out about the dangers of election subversion and some potential remedies. And Hasen’s new Free Elections and Free Speech Center is hosting a conference this Friday with an impressive — and bipartisan — group of scholars and political actors. (The conference is virtual; registration available here). In other words, election subversion is on the radar in a way that it wasn’t five or 10 years ago. If we were taken by surprise in 2020, even if we shouldn’t have been, we won’t be in 2022 or 2024. That might help. But right now I’m not sure it will.

1.  Sarah Kreps and Paul Lushenko at the Monkey Cage on U.S. drone strikes and other counterterrorism efforts.

2. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Andrea Gabor on the pressure on school boards. I strongly agree with both of her suggestions about how to strengthen them.

3. Fred Kaplan on Biden’s United Nation speech and Biden’s actions.

4. Jamelle Bouie on pragmatic liberals and the more moderate Democrats they’re trying to deal with.

5. And Alyssa Rosenberg on Monica Lewinsky.

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