By by Andrew Egger, THEBULWARK
Yesterday, in a Bulwark Takes video, JVL and I were discussing Donald Trump’s ridiculous claim that the federal takeover of policing Washington, D.C. had turned the capital from “the most unsafe ‘city’ in the United States” into “perhaps the safest” in mere days, “and getting better every single hour.” The crackdown, JVL suggested, looked like a dry run for an even more consequential deployment later:
Maybe we do a little bit of this in Philly the week before the election, right? Try to dissuade people from maybe turning out to vote in the midterm elections. . . . I don’t see any reason why they couldn’t shave a couple tenths of a point in turnout off by doing this sort of thing—do you?
Old habits of mind die hard: In the moment, I wondered whether this analysis might be a touch too dismal. It was certainly clear that Trump has no intention of keeping his law-enforcement crackdown contained to D.C. But was there specific reason to believe he had an eye on using federal law-enforcement officers or National Guardsmen to meddle in elections?
It was as if Trump said: Buddy, I am SO glad you asked.
In a Truth Social post yesterday, the president launched the latest offensive in his forever war against mail-in and machine-tabulated voting. “THE MAIL-IN BALLOT HOAX, USING VOTING MACHINES THAT ARE A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER, MUST END, NOW!!!” He intends to put a stop to it. He’ll start, he says, with an executive order.
Disturbingly, there are reports that Trump discussed mail-in voting with Vladimir Putin at their meeting in Alaska. But let’s leave aside the intriguing question of why that conversation apparently prompted Trump’s outburst, and instead ask: On what authority does the president intend to meddle in states’ governance of their own elections? Well, let Trump give you the bone-chilling details:
Remember, the States are merely an “agent” for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.
In a sane world, it would probably ‘matter’ that these rants are utterly divorced from fact and law.
Trump’s claims that mail-in ballots and machine tabulation are rife with fraud are, as ever, utter bunk. (Amazingly, this post came on the exact same day that Newsmax agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $67 million to settle a lawsuit over the voter-fraud lies it spread after the 2020 election. My question to the White House press office about whether Newsmax should have settled went unanswered.)
But those tired old fraud claims are somehow even less outrageous than the genuinely insane précis Trump is offering for how election systems interact under our system of government. Under the U.S. Constitution, it is the states, not the federal government, that run their various elections. Electing their representatives is the states’ responsibility because those representatives serve under the states’ authority. And the Constitution is crystal clear about which part of the federal government is permitted to get involved:
The Times, Places, and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.
To this Trump scoffs: Well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man. He’s got an alternate reading. In it, states are just pencil-pushing functionaries to whom the president has delegated some busy work. And they’d better do it the way he tells them to if they know what’s good for them.
Back in the good old days (lol) of Trump’s first term, this sort of spasm of naked fascist desire tended to surface and then recede without leaving too much of a mark on policy. Today, who would be so Pollyannaish as to predict that’s what will happen here? The Constitution doesn’t carry its own guns. But the National Guardsmen do.
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