This post is timely, given the recent selection of J.D. Vance as Trump’s VP.
J.D. Vance said that he would not have certified the 2020 election results if he were in Pence’s place.
As Trump’s VP pick, he has about a two-thirds chance of being the President of the Senate when the 2028 election results are certified. If the Democratic candidate wins that presidential election, it doesn’t seem implausible that he’ll refuse to certify the election results.
The Electoral Count Act was overhauled after January 6 to give the VP a less ambiguous and discretionary role in the certification process. But there’s reason to think Vance could maximally adversarially exploit any remaining discretion or ambiguity. Or worse, he may not even respect the law. After all, Vance has previously said that there are cases in which the president should defy the Supreme Court[1]
Vance has once “called on the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into a Washington Post columnist who penned a critical piece about Trump.” It could be reasonable to conclude from this that the freedom of the press might be at risk.
To make matters worse, Vance is young. He’s not even 40 yet. He graduated from Yale Law School, so he’s extremely smart. He has a lot of time, and a lot of competence, to achieve his antidemocratic aims.
Trump is approaching his 80s. Optimistically, Vance may have made his antidemocratic statements to (successfully) get Trump’s attention and advance his career, and those ideas will retreat after Trump’s death, taking the Republican Party back to the ideals of people like Mitt Romney and Nikki Haley. But it’s not obvious that this will happen. Trump’s example may instead empower more politicians domestically and abroad to challenge democratic institutions and accumulate power, as we already started seeing with Bolsonaro in Brazil.
Many countries have voted themselves out of a real democracy. Turkey, Hungary, Russia and Venezuela have all done so in recent decades. The base rate isn’t that low.
For non-Americans: this claim is legally incorrect, and very worrying coming from a likely future VP. It directly counteracts Marbury v. Madison, regarded as “the single most important decision in American constitutional law,” which asserts that the Supreme Court has the ultimate power to interpret the Constitution. If the President and the Supreme Court disagree on something, the Supreme Court’s opinion is the only legal one.
This post is timely, given the recent selection of J.D. Vance as Trump’s VP.
J.D. Vance said that he would not have certified the 2020 election results if he were in Pence’s place.
As Trump’s VP pick, he has about a two-thirds chance of being the President of the Senate when the 2028 election results are certified. If the Democratic candidate wins that presidential election, it doesn’t seem implausible that he’ll refuse to certify the election results.
The Electoral Count Act was overhauled after January 6 to give the VP a less ambiguous and discretionary role in the certification process. But there’s reason to think Vance could maximally adversarially exploit any remaining discretion or ambiguity. Or worse, he may not even respect the law. After all, Vance has previously said that there are cases in which the president should defy the Supreme Court[1]
Vance has once “called on the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into a Washington Post columnist who penned a critical piece about Trump.” It could be reasonable to conclude from this that the freedom of the press might be at risk.
To make matters worse, Vance is young. He’s not even 40 yet. He graduated from Yale Law School, so he’s extremely smart. He has a lot of time, and a lot of competence, to achieve his antidemocratic aims.
Trump is approaching his 80s. Optimistically, Vance may have made his antidemocratic statements to (successfully) get Trump’s attention and advance his career, and those ideas will retreat after Trump’s death, taking the Republican Party back to the ideals of people like Mitt Romney and Nikki Haley. But it’s not obvious that this will happen. Trump’s example may instead empower more politicians domestically and abroad to challenge democratic institutions and accumulate power, as we already started seeing with Bolsonaro in Brazil.
Many countries have voted themselves out of a real democracy. Turkey, Hungary, Russia and Venezuela have all done so in recent decades. The base rate isn’t that low.
For non-Americans: this claim is legally incorrect, and very worrying coming from a likely future VP. It directly counteracts Marbury v. Madison, regarded as “the single most important decision in American constitutional law,” which asserts that the Supreme Court has the ultimate power to interpret the Constitution. If the President and the Supreme Court disagree on something, the Supreme Court’s opinion is the only legal one.