President Trump will address the nation this evening at 9 pm Eastern. He may cover several topics, but reportedly the main focus will be elections. News outlets are preemptively assuring readers that our elections are wonderful. CNN: “The upcoming speech is just the latest example of his election obsession.” Reuters: “The Republican president could use his televised speech … to again press his false claim that he lost his 2020 reelection bid to Democrat Joe Biden due to massive fraud.” And so on.
Assuming the President focuses on elections, what will he say? The obvious answer is that he will promote the SAVE America Act. Time is running out before the Democrats (presumably) take control of the House in January, and passage becomes impossible. So I expect he will try to rally public support behind that popular legislation.
The most intriguing suggestion I have seen comes from Glenn Reynolds, who wonders whether Trump will announce that he is invoking the Guarantee Clause of the Constitution:
The Guarantee Clause (U.S. Const. art. IV, § 4) states: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government….”
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Presumptively…votes must be counted honestly to qualify as republican government.
So, might Trump say that he is implementing certain election integrity measures via Executive Orders? The idea may not be as farfetched as it sounds:
The Constitution simply says that “the United States” shall guarantee states a republican form of government. It doesn’t say how, or what process is involved, or how the duty/authority is allocated within the United States government. Many people will argue that the president should execute laws passed by Congress for this purpose, but it doesn’t say that. It says “the United States.” Plausibly, in acting to protect a republican form of government — as defined above — the President would be executing a policy laid out in the Constitution, and would not require policy from Congress to authorize his action.
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So if President Trump announces that we have uncovered massive electoral fraud — as he almost certainly will — and that he is dispatching huge numbers of federal election watchers to oversee voting and counting in areas where fraud has occurred, he would be acting directly under a power that the Constitution has vested in him. For a state to have a “republican form of government,” it must have meaningful elections, and elections that are rigged are not meaningful. Stopping them from being rigged would be protecting a republican form of government.
One can only imagine the blowback from Democrats, should Trump make such an announcement.
I don’t think it is likely, but if Trump wants to go big on election security, invoking the Guarantee Clause would be a way to do it.
