Here’s some hard-core Constitutional phun! You’ll have to bear with me — this is worth it.
First: Yes, I know Trump can’t unilaterally cancel or postpone the election. That’s not happening. But it doesn’t need to. The GOP can file lots of lawsuits after the election to discredit and/or delay results. If they did so, they’d argue that X outcome isn’t conclusive until the courts have finally ruled. If they did, what would follow is a period of maddening uncertainty: definitely about particular results, potentially about all results, depending on the specifics of the lawsuits. But rather than recite all these mumbo-jumbo caveats, I’ll just say “no election*”, with an asterisk to remind you that I don’t mean it wasn’t actually held. It will be.
This paragraph is the cartoon version, which WILL NOT happen — but I need to spell it out in order to get to the real point… In the coming election, every Member of the House is up for reelection this year — so if there’s no election*, as of Jan 3 there could be no House. None. The Senate has some complicated stuff going on that I can’t entirely figure out, including two special elections, one of which will be held on a different date, I think. But of the 33 Senate elections this year, 22 are for seats held by the GOP. If there’s no election*, that means the GOP could be reduced from a 53-seat majority to 33 seats, whereas the Dems’ 45 seats would be reduced to 33. (I know 22 + 12 != 33. Someone else can solve that mystery.) Mitch McConnell might not have much to say about this because he’s running for reelection — so, if there’s no election* he wouldn’t be a senator. IOW, the Dems could conceivably gain the Senate majority. Trump would still be pres and Pence would still be veep for a few more weeks, from Jan 3 through Jan 20, when their term expires. Pelosi would be out of the picture (remember, no House), so next in line would be the Senate’s Speaker Pro Tempore…Charles Grassley, who isn’t up for reelection. But a Dem-led Senate would try to elect a new SPT, who’d then have a fairly serious claim to the presidency. 😹
Here’s the meat: That kind of cartoon outcome is completely ridiculous, so: yes, I know, NO. But these dynamics are less ridiculous than you might first think. If Trump and the GOP try to bury some or all election results in litigation, they can hardly argue that fraudulent / fake / etc ballots only involve the presidency — the litigation would apply up and down the entire ballot. If those lawsuits aren’t uniformly, conclusively, and resoundingly resolved by Jan 3, the indeterminacy would also infect the House and Senate elections. And, potentially, which party holds the majority in either chamber.
Will Grassley become president? NO — so put that out of your mind right now. But: If Trump didn’t like the results and it were entirely up to him, he’d probably argue the entire election was BS. However, it wouldn’t be entirely up to him. Instead, lawsuits would be filed by various fractious arms of the GOP, almost certainly on a state-by-state basis — say, because State X had ~liberal mail-in ballot laws or because of some other ginned-up BS. The GOP wouldn’t challenge results where they won, would they? And the same applies to the Dems: they’d only challenge states where they lost. But what exactly “lost’ means is slippery. It’s likely that, in some litigated states, the balloting results would be mixed: for example, Trump loses but GOP House and/or Senate win, etc, etc.
I’ll focus on the GOP here. In their cases, the lawsuits might seem haphazard, but their aims would be strategic. They might pay lip service to “Trump really won,” but it’s more likely that the decisive, pragmatic aim would be “Biden didn’t win” — not because anyone serious believes he didn’t, but because (a) saying so would cast doubt on his legitimacy and mandate, and (b) it could deny the Dems critical gains in the House and Senate: “You don’t actually have the majority, so…” Dem suits would be different, but would share some strategic aims.
If these kinds of dynamics erupt, they could cause a complete meltdown in Congress and put excruciating pressure on the federal judiciary — not just to “legislate from the bench” but, in effect, to elect from the bench. The Roberts court would try to walk a fine line between kicking the can down the road (say, with Kavanaugh leaking his memos) and desperately needing to resolve this endless judicial loop. This would ensure that no one ever again sees the federal judiciary as impartial.
For many murky forces around the world, this kind of total political catastrophe in the US would smell like napalm in the morning. That means there’s a widespread, open incentive to drive this kind of BS with botnet mayhem about “fake election results,” “fake Congress,” “judicial corruption,” etc, etc. Cleanse your mind of the idea that this is all Putin — it isn’t. And ultimately it doesn’t matter who it is, because we’ll never know and can’t do much about it. It could be a confluence of quasi-GOP and/or quasi-Dem actors, Russia, China, Iran, miscellaneous basement trolls and nihilists, and who know who (or what) the f*ck else or why. But the net result would be full-scale “Constitutional” chaos: Dems shouting that the GOP doesn’t “really” run the Senate, and the GOP shouting that Dems don’t “really” run the House, or vice versa. If Biden “really” wins, x>30% of the US won’t really believe it and countless botnets will rant on social media and by SMS that Trump is the “real” president; if Biden loses, it’ll be a variation on that, but with more street activists and fewer botnets.
Welcome to 2021. 👍🏼