For all the headlines about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, no hard evidence has come to light, at least publicly, showing that President Trump or his team were involved. But suppose that such evidence did come to light — what would happen if it became clear that Trump or his advisers colluded with the Russians?1 This isn’t the only type of wrongdoing the investigations could uncover, but it’s among the most serious because it would cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2016 result. So, is there a process for dealing with a finding that in essence invalidates an election?
When it comes to presidential elections, the answer is: not really. The laws and processes around national elections have grown up in a piecemeal fashion over time, with state and local laws governing the administration of presidential elections. And the Constitution itself focuses more on ensuring stability than on administering elections. As a result, there aren’t clear procedures for how to handle questions of legitimacy after the fact — especially when those questions involve the presidency.
FiveThirtyEight dives deep into the whys and why nots, that the framers of the Constitution took into consideration when creating the document that is at the heart of our democracy.
However for the purposes of this post I will skip all of that detail and just get to the rather disappointing punchline:
In most of the historical cases, the main question was how the Electoral College votes would be allocated in each state. Once those have been cast, the case for questioning a presidential election or gauging which side really won becomes a lot more difficult. Of course, the Constitution does have one mechanism for undoing the results of an election: impeachment. That process, however, is focused on individual wrongdoing (or, through a separate process, inability), not electoral irregularities. In that sense, even if collusion revelations did lead to Trump’s impeachment and removal from office, the process wouldn’t really address the question of whether his election had been legitimate in the first place.
The lack of an established process for reviewing elections points to a larger issue: The structures established by the Constitution assumed a world in which the presidency and the Electoral College were not fully absorbed into a contentious national party system. That vision has long since been replaced by one in which presidential elections are national contests over policy agendas and ideas. The text of our Constitution has never been changed to reflect this reality. Instead, the Electoral College remains the final word on who gets to be president. When it comes to the possibility that the winning side colluded with a foreign power to influence the election outcome, the Constitution doesn’t offer much in the way of a plan.
This is probably something that Vladimir Putin understood better than your average voter.
There are no do overs in presidential politics.
Once into the Oval Office a bad president can be like an intestinal parasite latching on firmly, too far out of reach for easy removal.
Perhaps we can impeach Donald Trump, that does not mean that we can replace him with anyone better, or that we can stop the destructive policy decisions that he and the Republicans are putting in place as we speak.
We often hear that elections have consequences, and perhaps that has never been more true than the election of 2016.
Source http://ift.tt/2tsQueQ
