The last election

I read an article the other day by Thom Hartmann. It was possibly the most terrifying thing I’ve ever read, and I once read an entire book about human parasites.

If you’re unfamiliar, Thom Hartmann is a radio host, author, and political commentator. Back on March 12, 2020, he wrote an article about how President Donald Trump was going to attempt to steal the election. He wrote that Vice President Mike Pence would refuse to certify swing state votes and throw the election to the House, which would then keep Trump in office whether he legitimately won or lost the election.

At the time, Democratic strategists thought Hartmann had lost his marbles. The plan he proposed was insane, something that could never actually happen in a functioning Democracy.

Then, 10 months later on January 6th, 2021, Trump tried to do the exact same thing Hartmann had predicted. The only reason the insurrection failed was because Pence grew a conscience somewhere along the line and was unwilling to follow the plan. He nearly got publicly lynched for his efforts.

President Joe Biden made the news this week because in an Oval Office interview with Evan Osnos of the New Yorker, he said that Trump will contest the results of the 2024 election if he loses. I’m not entirely sure why this warranted an article; it’s a bit like interrupting the evening news to announce that water continues to be wet. Of course Trump will contest the 2024 election; he still hasn’t conceded defeat in the last election, and many of his more delusional supporters believe he’s still secretly the President (although they also hate everything Biden is doing and don’t see any kind of conflict between those two thoughts).

If Trump secures his party’s nomination — which seems incredibly likely — and loses to Biden, he’ll obviously try to steal the election again. The only question is, what will that look like this time?

In his article “The new secret plan on how fascists could win in 2024,” Hartmann lays it all out.

First off, Hartmann says, the Republicans will need to make sure they’re in control of the House of Representatives when the next president is certified on Jan. 6, 2025. What if Democrats win back the House later this year? No worries; Speaker Mike Johnson will simply refuse to swear a few of those Democrats into office, citing voting irregularities that must first be investigated.

Would Mike Johnson do such a thing? Sure, he’s done it already. He delayed swearing in Tom Suozzi, who won George Santos’ former seat, presumably to maintain enough Republican votes to impeach Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas last month. As Hartmann points out, there’s nothing illegal about these delays; they’re just completely immoral.

These actions would keep Johnson in charge of the House, allowing him to reject any Electoral College certificates of election that don’t swing the way he wants them to; he’ll simply claim there are vague problems with the certificates that must be investigated.

Hartmann points out that the whole reason Trump wanted Johnson as Speaker was because he was the one who organized the 138 House members who voted not to certify Biden’s win in January 2020. Folks like Congressman Thomas Massie are already planting the seeds for the idea that the House has the final decision on election certification; he posted on Twitter that “Maine, Colorado, and other states that might try to bureaucratically deny ballot access to any Republican nominee should remember the U.S. House of Representatives is the ultimate arbiter of whether to certify electors from those states.”

This is all laying the groundwork for a nightmare scenario in which even if Biden wins the electoral college vote, a Republican-controlled House simply refuses to certify the results from several states so that he doesn’t clear the 270 vote threshold; at that point, the election is up to the House, and each state gets one vote.

The majority of Americans live in Democrat-controlled states, yet the majority of the states themselves are Republican-controlled. As of now, 26 state delegations are controlled by Republicans while Pennsylvania’s delegation is about 50/50, meaning that in this scenario, Trump wins by 26-23.

This complete subversion of the ideals our nation was founded on is perfectly legal, by the way. And who’s going to stop it? The Supreme Court?

Right now, Hartmann’s argument may seem ludicrous. But if you had told me on Jan. 5, 2021, that domestic terrorists would attempt an insurrection at our nation’s Capitol the very next day, I wouldn’t have believed that either.

Obviously, I hope Hartmann’s dead wrong in his prediction, and I’m sure he does too. But as we approach the 2024 Presidential election, we need to be aware that if we’re not careful, there’s a non-zero chance that there won’t be a Presidential election in 2028.