Here's how to prevent a 2024 Trump campaign
Now that Donald Trump has gone full Lukashenko in his now-violent plot to retain power, we have to ask whether this time, finally, the nation will muster the collective will to hold him responsible for his malfeasance. The future of American democracy may depend on how the question is answered.
This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.
Even before Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6 to disrupt the joint session of Congress that had convened to certify Joe Biden's Electoral College victory, Trump had committed a variety of fresh federal and state criminal offenses in his hour-long telephone conversation with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on January 2. In the call, the sitting president of the United States pressured Raffensperger and Ryan Germany, the secretary's general counsel, to "find" him enough votes to overturn Biden's win in the state.
As two recounts and a signature audit have confirmed, Trump lost Georgia by precisely 11,779 ballots. Nonetheless, Trump made it clear toward the latter part of his talk with Raffensperger that he wasn't just asking for an outlandish favor. Rather, he was making a demand, and serving notice in his official capacity that both Raffensperger and Ryan could face federal prosecution if they refused to comply.
Don't accept this interpretation of the conversation from me. Take it from Trump himself. Trump has acknowledged on his Twitter account that he made the call, and the Washington Post, which broke the story, has published a complete transcript of the conversation, in which Trump was joined by White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and several lawyers, including prominent conservative attorney Cleta Mitchell.
The Washington Post has also released the complete audio recording of the conversation and you can listen to Trump's own words:
"That's a criminal offense," Trump can be heard saying, accusing Raffensperger of reporting false election results. "And you can't let that happen. That's a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer.… And you can't let it happen, and you are letting it happen. You know, I mean, I'm notifying you that you're letting it happen. So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state."
Realizing the need for action, two Democratic members of the House of Representatives—Ted Lieu of California and Kathleen Rice of New York—have written FBI Director Christopher Wray, asking for a criminal investigation into Trump's threats. Citing two federal statutes and a Georgia law, Lieu and Rice wrote that they believe Trump has "engaged in solicitation of, or conspiracy to commit, a number of [federal and state] election crimes."
Lieu and Rice might also have added treason and sedition to the list, but they drafted their letter before Trump supporters rioted at the Capitol.
Unfortunately, there is still little chance that Trump actually will be prosecuted for the phone call. Federally, as Biden's inauguration approaches, Trump can be preemptively pardoned for any crimes, either by resigning and permitting Mike Pence, as his successor for the few days remaining in the lame-duck period, to do the honors or by issuing a pardon to himself. And as for Georgia, no one should expect an indictment as long as the levers of state government remain in Republican hands.
There is another way to hold Trump accountable, however—by means of a second impeachment.
The goal of a second impeachment would not be to remove Trump from the White House, unless, of course, he somehow manages to pull off a coup d'état before January 20. The goal would be to disqualify Trump from ever holding federal office again.
Under Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution, judgment in cases of impeachment extends to both sanctions—removal from current office and disqualification from holding future office. Since Trump reportedly has floated the idea of running for president again in 2024, a second impeachment would be designed to deal a death blow to another Trump campaign with hearings in the House and a trial in the Senate focused on the "high crimes and misdemeanors"—the phrase used in Article II of the Constitution to define impeachable offenses, along with treason and bribery—that Trump committed in his first term in office. Impeachable offenses, moreover, are not subject to the pardon power.
A second set of impeachment articles returned against Trump could allege a bundle of serious crimes in addition to the phone call to Raffensperger, ranging from obstruction of justice in connection with former Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election to conspiracy to defraud the United States by subverting the entire 2020 election.
Nor would the fact that Trump was no longer president legally bar a second impeachment. In 1876, the Senate conducted an impeachment trial of Secretary of War William Belknap even though he had resigned before the House voted to impeach him for financial corruption. Although the Senate failed to muster the two-thirds majority needed to convict Belknap, a majority of senators found him guilty. His impeachment trial lasted nearly four months and featured more than 40 witnesses.
While Richard Nixon escaped impeachment via resignation, the current House and Senate would not be bound by Nixon's example. Both chambers would be free instead to follow the Belknap precedent in the case of impeaching a former president, as several leading constitutional scholars indicated in interviews with the Washington Post in 2019.
If he were faced with a second impeachment, Trump wouldn't get off as easily as he did the first time around. He would still have to be convicted of an impeachable offense by a two-thirds Senate majority, but as Amherst College professor Austin Surat argued in a USA Today column published January 4, only a simple majority vote would be needed for disqualification. The National Review's Kevin D. Williamson has also called for a second impeachment.
The bottom line is that Donald John Trump, our 45th commander in chief, must be brought to justice by any legitimate means. With the House in Democratic hands and with enough Republicans in the Senate fed up with Trump's sedition, a second impeachment is not only possible—it is a necessity.
Bill Blum is a retired judge and a lawyer in Los Angeles. He is a lecturer at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication. He writes regularly on law and politics and is the author of three widely acclaimed legal thrillers: Prejudicial Error, The Last Appeal, and The Face of Justice.
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Here's how the rest of Trump's desperate effort to stay in power will play out
Donald Trump isn't about to concede the presidential election to Joe Biden. Not now, and seemingly, not ever.
Anyone who has followed Trump closely knows two things about the man that make it relatively easy to anticipate his next move. The first is that, ideologically, Trump is a fascist who has no regard for democracy. The second is that, psychologically, he is a malignant narcissist who suffers from a toxic stew of narcissism, paranoia, antisocial personality disorder and sadism. As a result, it is virtually impossible for him to acknowledge, much less accept, failure.
Trump also faces the prospect of being prosecuted for a variety of state and federal felonies upon leaving office. And while he can avoid federal jeopardy with a pardon, to do so he would either have to resign and permit Mike Pence, as his successor for the duration of the lame-duck period, to do the honors or undertake the legally dubious step of issuing a pardon to himself. Even then, he would remain exposed to the ongoing probe conducted by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance into allegations of tax, business and insurance fraud under New York law.
How, then, does a fascist and a malignant narcissist who faces jail stave off defeat? Having lost both the popular vote and, more importantly, the tally in the Electoral College, and after being rebuked by numerous state and federal courts, including the Supreme Court, Trump is moving to his next option—staging what would amount to a coup d'état, invoking the complex provisions of the 12th Amendment, when Congress meets in a joint session on January 6 to confirm the winner of the presidential race.
That there will be an attempted coup is no longer a matter of speculation. In an appearance on "Fox & Friends" on December 14, Stephen Miller, perhaps the most deranged and malevolent of Trump's senior advisers, openly declared the administration's plan to overturn the election results in the upcoming joint session.
A gambit under the 12th Amendment is a long shot, to be sure, but so was Trump's initial presidential bid back when he descended the escalator at Trump Tower in June 2015 to announce his first campaign and stigmatize undocumented Mexican migrants as "rapists" and drug traffickers. It behooves us, then, to take Trump and Miller seriously.
Ratified in 1804 in the aftermath of the hotly disputed election of 1800 (which ultimately seated Thomas Jefferson as the nation's third president), the 12th Amendment modified the procedures that govern the Electoral College. And while the 12th Amendment itself was modified by the 20th Amendment (which moved up the presidential inauguration from March to January), its basic provisions remain intact.
Of particular relevance to Trump's machinations, the 12th Amendment stipulates that after the electors of the various states (there are 538 of them today) cast and certify their votes for president and vice president, their ballots are transmitted to the president of the Senate. Under the Constitution, the president of the Senate is the vice president, currently Pence.
The president of the Senate's role thereafter is ministerial and mandatory. Under the terms of the amendment, the president of the Senate "shall," in the joint session, "open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted; The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President," provided—and this is the key to appreciating the impending coup—that such person receives a majority of the electoral votes.
But what happens if the Electoral College vote count is disputed? To understand what occurs then, we have to toggle back and forth between the 12th Amendment and a statute passed by Congress more than 130 years ago—the Electoral Count Act (ECA) of 1887. Under the ECA, if a single member of both the House and Senate signs and submits a challenge to any state's electoral votes, the joint session must immediately go into recess to allow each chamber to meet separately and debate the merits of the objections. To be sustained, objections require the support of a majority of the members of each chamber. Absent a majority, the objections fail.
It's all but certain that when the joint session convenes on January 6, objections to the electoral votes cast in the swing states of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania indeed will be lodged. Republican Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama, one of the zaniest of the GOP's bloated stable of right-wing fanatics, has announced that he will file an objection. Alabama Republican Senator-elect Tommy Tuberville, the thick-headed former college football coach, has suggested he will join Brooks.
A drama not seen in this country since the election of 1876, when alternate slates of electors were sent to the Senate on behalf of Democrat Samuel Tilden and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes (the eventual winner), will then ensue.
Reminiscent of 1876, alternate pro-Trump slates of Republican electors have met in several swing states, and plan to send their votes to the Senate in time for the joint session to back up the objections that will be raised by Brooks and Tuberville.
Both the 12th Amendment and the ECA address a doomsday scenario in which no candidate wins a majority in the Electoral College, whether because of the presence of alternate electors or for other reasons. In that event, the task of naming the next president is transferred to the House. The House then conducts a "contingent election," but with each state delegation getting one vote rather than each representative casting individual votes. Since Republicans will hold 27 House delegations in the next Congress, Trump would emerge victorious.
Fortunately, a contingent election in the House is highly unlikely. Because the Democrats control the House, and several Republican senators, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have recognized Biden as president-elect, the Brooks and Tuberville objections, even if backed by alternate electors, are destined to fail, as their objections will be subject to an ordinary majority vote in each chamber. In addition, to date, no votes cast by rogue pro-Trump electors have been certified by state governors or officially by any state legislatures, as required by the ECA.
But even that won't necessarily end Trump's attempted coup. According to press reports, Trump is considering advice offered by Michael Flynn to declare martial law to force a new election in the swing states that voted for Trump. Flynn, the disgraced retired Army lieutenant general and former national security adviser whom Trump pardoned in November for lying to the FBI, has been promoting the idea of martial law on Twitter and on right-wing media.
In any other era, Flynn would be dismissed as a caricature straight out of "Dr. Strangelove." The trouble is, we're living in the increasingly treacherous waning days of the Trump era, dominated by a fascist and a malignant narcissist desperate to remain in power.
Trump's coup will fail, but not before leaving a lasting stain on American democracy.
Bill Blum is a retired judge and a lawyer in Los Angeles. He is a lecturer at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication. He writes regularly on law and politics and is the author of three widely acclaimed legal thrillers: Prejudicial Error, The Last Appeal, and The Face of Justice.
This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.