Article 4 Section 4
Roy Cohn’s most famous apprentice never admits defeat. Donald Trump never let go of losing the presidency to Joe Biden in 2020. He loves getting even, even for imaginary slights. Even if it takes time. Trump got even for his 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner roasting five years later by winning the White House in 2016. He tried (and failed) to get even for losing in 2020 by inciting a mob assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, with claims that he’d been robbed. He means to get even today by throwing the 2026 elections into chaos.
If Republicans lose control of the U.S. House, Trump will claim victory anyway. He will shout that the elections were flawed, rigged against him. One need not be clairvoyant to see it. He’s broadcasting his plans.
David Graham games out how it might go this morning in The Atlantic. Trump goes from claims of vote tampering to ordering troops to seize voting machines. He invokes the Insurrection Act, etc., in Graham’s war-gaming (gift link):
Trump and his allies will have before them less an orderly set of instructions than a buffet of options. Some of these options will go untested, or amount to nothing. But elections are a game of margins. Only a handful of Senate seats and a few dozen House races may be seriously contested, thanks to maps drawn to guarantee safe seats for one party or the other. Of those, some may be very close. In 2024, 18 House races were decided by fewer than 10,000 votes. Democrats won 11 of those.
Election experts Graham consulted “used words like nightmare and warned that Americans need to be ready for ‘really wild stuff.’ ”
“If you are not frightened,” Hannah Fried, the executive director of the voter-access group All Voting Is Local, told me, “you are not paying attention.”
Still, elections are decentralized and locally controlled. But Trump is not only laying the groundwork for establishing competitive authoritarianism, he and Republican Party accomplices across the country are working a smorgasbord of angles ahead of 2026 for ensuring GOP control in D.C. and in the states no matter what voters’ preferences.
In this “game of margins,” Republicans are changing registration rules and vote-counting deadlines. They mean to limit voting methods and voting days. And by redrawing congressional districts mid-decade at Trump’s request, they mean to give Republicans even more seats in Congress disproportionate to their public support. Trump may have no presidential power over elections, but the authoritarian holds the threat of his retribution over Republican state officials he would consider disloyal for not snapping to attention and saying, “Yes, sir, how high?” Trump is repeatedly musing about running for a prohibited third term in 2028. He’s plowing the earth for his MAGA cult and planting seeds to make such an attempt seem legal.
Red states are already preparing for the U.S. Supreme Court to drive the last nail into the coffin of the Voting Rights Act. Section 2 permits creation of majority-minority districts to protect the voting power of minorities. Voiding Section 2 would “open up the floodgates” for drawing racially skewed districts, “if not in time for 2026 than certainly for 2028,” Politico reports:
“Many states across the South are already licking their chops to try and prepare to racially gerrymander maps as quickly as possible,” said John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. “It is clear that there is a consistent and dramatic need for laws to be in place to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment and ensure that the racial gerrymandering or racial discrimination at large is not permitted in this country.”
Read the details at the link.
North Carolina Republicans filed their controversial Voter Information Verification Act (VIVA) days after SCOTUS heard arguments in Shelby County v. Holder in February 2013. They passed it just over a month after SCOTUS ruled to weaken Section 5 of the VRA. Don’t think other GOP-dominated states don’t already have legislation sitting in drawers to take advantage of a SCOTUS ruling in Louisiana v. Callais that guts VRA Section 2.
The GOP’s nationwide assault on voting rights and fair representation over the last 15 years means that Americans in many states now are effectively, if not actually, denied the “Republican Form of Government” (small-r) guaranteed to each state in Article IV Section 4.
The Supreme Court has demurred since 1849 on the issue of whether the federal courts can hear cases brought under the Guarantee Clause. They’ve treated the clause as nonjusticiable, just as the Roberts court did the issue of partisan gerrymandering in 2019 (Rucho v. Common Cause). For now, that leaves the GOP-controlled federal Executive and Legislative branches in charge of enforcing that Section 4 guarantee. Meaning the Guarantee Clause is no guarantee at all.
Attention is political currency. Maybe it’s time for Democrats to make that dead issue a live one ahead of 2026. Maybe it’s time for some enterprising Democrat Attorney General with top-notch social media skills to sue the U.S. government over the Guarantee Clause. So what if the clause is obscure? Make a very public stink, win or lose, over the East-Wing-like demolition of our government’s mechanisms for heeding the voice of We the People. (Looking at you, NC AG Jeff Jackson. Maybe you and some buddy AGs. )
We exist now in an attention economy. There is no reason to not make a public show of demanding the United States uphold its constitutional obligations. I have no idea how that would work or how a credible case might be brought, but it’s the kind of attention-getting stunt Jackson is very good at and revels in. Democrats want to see Democrats fight Trump’s demolition of the Constitution.
As consultant friend in D.C. observed, he’s in “fight on the beaches, fight in the cities, fight on every hill and foothill mode.” Me too.
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Is this a private fight, or can anyone join?
No King’s One Million Rising movement
50501
May Day Strong
Freedom Over Fascism Toolkit
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense