Some Republicans are still entertaining the cockamamie idea of gerrymandered legislatures ignoring the voters and hijacking their states’ electoral votes for Trump. Even Trump’s legal team reportedly is considering the scheme as a last-ditch effort, the Huffington Post reported on Thursday, November 12, 2020:
“According to The Wall Street Journal, the far-fetched plan involves positioning Republican-controlled state legislatures in states Biden won like Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia to ignore their voters and appoint pro-Trump electors who would then swing the Electoral College in Trump’s favor and install him in office for another four years,”
(Read story here.) Some prominent Republicans, like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, openly support the idea, but most are just refusing to openly disavow it, which is bad enough.
This isn’t a new idea; it was discussed among nervous Democrats before the election. The details are complicated, but the concept is based on the fact that under the Constitution as it was written in 1781, before there were political parties, the Founders envisioned presidents being elected by “electors” appointed by state legislatures. “Constitutionally, that is an accurate argument,” Keyleigh McEnany, Trump’s press secretary (and a Harvard Law grad), said on Fox News.
She’s referring to a method of electing presidents that had gone out of fashion by 1824 and was last used in 1832. She’s ignoring the later-enacted constitutional amendments, federal statutes, and state laws that delegate the election of electors to the people. She’s arguing for the complete disenfranchisement of the 78 million Americans who chose Biden over Trump.
The notion that an election in which 150 million American voters participated can be overturned by a handful of gerrymandered legislatures that are deeply unrepresentative of the voters of their own states is profoundly anti-democratic. Lawyers of both parties have condemned it as “dangerous.”
The danger isn’t so much to America — it’s easier said than done (see Vox article here), and it isn’t going to happen — as to the Republican Party. Millions of Americans were already afraid of the GOP because of its anti-democracy tendencies, including its efforts to keep them from voting. That explains the huge turnout in this election. Now, they’re making themselves look even more like a totalitarian party led by a charlatan who openly aspires to become a dictator.
This is frightening even to many Republicans, as shown by the fact that Republican candidates in general did better than Trump, most of them winning re-election while he went down to defeat.
It’s legitimate to request recounts, when the law allows, and to file lawsuits to enforce election laws and contest election results in court, to the extent and in the manner the law allows. But this scheme isn’t legitimate, and talking about it will reinforce the fear many people already have that voting another Republican into the White House will run the risk of not being able to vote him out. The mere hint of a possibility that we could lose control of our government to a belligerent minority is terrifying and instantly evokes comparisons to 1930s Germany.
The GOP won’t do itself any favors by getting behind a scheme that is the stuff of tyranny and dictatorship. That will only frighten away more voters. In this op-ed (here), conservative TV personality and commentator Ashley Pratte argues it’s time for the GOP “to acknowledge that it lost its way” under Trump and “to grow a collective spine and disavow this nonsense before more people disavow the party.”