Donald Trump’s campaign strategist for his 2016 election win says: “I believe we will have a national emergency declared by late August,” ahead of the Congressional midterm elections due on November 3. “You will have enough evidence by mid-August to show that we have a massive problem” of election fraud, he tells me in an interview. Trump’s televised address to the nation on Thursday last week was the beginning of the process, he says.
The president declassified documents, which he claimed show “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure” revealed by the 2020 election.
These had been hidden, even from him, by a “deep state” conspiracy of US intelligence services, he posited.
Trump demanded that the Congress pass a bill called the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE, Act. The bill stipulates that all voters produce a passport or birth certificate to be eligible to vote. Democrats denounce it as an effort at mass disenfranchisement. The Brennan Centre for Justice at New York University estimates that it could block 21 million Americans from the ballot box.
Under the US Constitution, it’s the states, not the federal government, that run elections. The SAVE Act would force state governments to hand voter roll information to Washington.
Trump sent his Homeland Security Secretary, Markwayne Mullin, out the following morning to issue a threat to state officials: they could face prison time unless they followed the administration’s orders to remove non-citizens from rolls.
Elections are done by the states, as clearly outlined in the Constitution. If Red states want to opt out, they’re welcome to do that, but the Blue states (and most Red ones) are going to have their elections anyway, and they will count.
All the rest of it is just smoke.
The point is to force an constitutional crisis to allow the Supreme Court to rubber stamp the coup.
The Supreme Court has been fairly unpredictable, which is a problem for Trump, but the bigger problem is that they’ve been VERY predictable when it comes to a direct challenge to the Constitution. It’s one thing when it’s an interpretation of the an amendment, it’s another thing when it’s a downright challenge, like Birthright Citizenship.
I doubt the Supreme Court is going to just ignore the 22md Amendment.
Also, they will never allow anything that takes away their own power. Even in their blanket presidential immunity ruling they reserved for themselves the power to decide what counts as an official act.
The constitution is worth less than toilet paper without a Congress and a Supreme Court to uphold it.