No. of Recommendations: 3
We have seem some remarkable things over the last few years. Don't bank on no more remarkable things happening.
True, but not everything that alarmists said were going to happen. And indeed, most of the worst of the things haven't happened.
The Administration isn't complying with low-level orders in individual cases...perhaps a lot of them, but they're not doing what people were really alarmed at: just rebuking the upper level courts and refusing to allow the judiciary to rule on matters of law.
The Administration is finding lots of ways to move money (and arms) around without going to Congress...but they're doing it the way they've done most of their stuff: dusting off the statute book and realizing that there's tons of "emergency" powers that legally give the President the authority to do a ton of this carp, as long as he's willing to spit in Congress' eye.
scenario: sift the voter registration roles for non-white sounding names. See what precinct those non-white sounding people vote in. See if that precinct skews Dem or GOP. If it skews Dem, dispatch a squad of storm troopers to the polling place, with a list of all the non-white sounding people that vote there. Then they approach every non-white looking person standing in line, demanding name and address. They find the non-white person on their "list", pull them out of line, and detain them for "questioning" until after the polls close.
If they did that, they'd almost certainly lose that election. It's so unbelievably transparent that a legal challenge would certainly be successful, and the court would probably order the election to be rerun. Even close Congressional elections are decided by thousands of votes. In order to have a chance of this succeeding, you'd need to flood that Congressional district with hundreds of LEO's removing thousands of people. No way that doesn't get lambasted in the courts.
Which makes it a stupid idea. A really stupid idea. Because this can only change the outcome in a close election (ie. one decided by less than a percentage point). If you try it, you're vastly more likely to have your candidate destroyed in court than the chance of the candidate actually winning the close election. IOW, you don't know whether the GOP candidate has won or lost the election during the time people are voting, so if you try this shenanigan you're far more likely to cost a candidate that would have won than flip an election they would have lost.
Note - I have absolutely no doubt that the Administration (and other Republican officials) will try to use their power in various ways, large and small, to try to favor GOP candidates. And I have no doubt that they will do so in ways that the Democrats believe are cheating, voter suppression, or election interference. But this type of naked election-rigging is such a phenomenally low-reward approach that it's not at all feasible.
