Perspective 141. Biden v. Trump: Nothing New?
So it is now clear that in November it will be President Joe Biden against former President Donald Trump. We’ve been there before. Is there anything in this election that is truly unprecedented?
Yes. For the first time in our history as a nation, there will be a major party candidate who has previously tried to seize the presidency illegally.
In perspective, no previous serious nominee for the presidency has ever been indicted for conspiracy to overturn the certified results of a federal election. Aaron Burr was charged with treason, but this had to do with some shady business in the Louisiana territory and not an attempted coup in Washington. And in any event it came some years after he had been a candidate for president.
Donald Trump has been indicted for his attempt to “impair, obstruct, and defeat the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted, and certified.”
Trump and his fellow conspirators came up with a brazenly open scheme for overturning the results of the 2020 election. They simply mobilized fake slates of presidential electors in seven states, forged documents of certification, and sent the false documents to Washington to be counted.
The idea was that the Vice President, presiding over the certification of the election, would simply choose to count the fake electors rather than the officially certified electoral votes from these states. Or he would declare the returns in dispute and send the matter back to the seven state legislatures, most of them with Republican majorities.
At worst, the election would be referred – as the constitution provides – to the U.S. House of Representatives, where Republicans controlled a majority of the state delegations.
Many of the electors on the fraudulent slates were told that the slates would only be submitted if the legal challenges to the votes in these states succeeded. Of course these legal challenges were uniformly rejected, often by Republican officials and judges. But Trump and his minions proceeded anyway, submitting the fake slates and demanding that the Vice President accept them on January 6. To add to the pressure, they organized a mob to march on the Capitol and intimidate members of Congress.
To his credit Vice President Pence refused to go along with the gag, despite all the pressure from the conspirators. “You’re too honest,” Trump reportedly lashed out at Pence, in what may have been one of Donald’s few and most honest moments ever.
In perspective, there is only one previous presidential election in which disputed slates of electors were a major issue: the election of 1876 (the subject, it happens, of my M.A. thesis back in the dark ages). But in this case, where three southern states were in the midst of disorderly transition from Reconstruction, the disputes were real because of competing arms of state government. The opposed electoral slates were not simply invented in order to overturn generally accepted and certified results.
One of the conspirators, the attorney Kenneth Chesebro, has pleaded guilty to the charges (in the parallel Georgia case) and has testified in the trials of fake electors. So far some 24 of the fake electors have been criminally charged.
But the prospect that the chief conspirator could actually be elected President in November, and dismiss the federal case against himself? Unbelievable!
If this happens, we could no longer claim to be a nation of democracy and of equality before the law.