What Would Happen if the President Refused to Leave Office
What happens if a president loses an election but won't leave the White Business firm?
President Donald Trump has suggested he would non take the results of the 2020 presidential ballot if he were to lose. Let's say he does lose and he refuses to leave the White House. What then? Nothing similar this has ever happened in American history, so information technology'southward difficult to know for certain. However, political scientists and historians told Alive Scientific discipline they're reasonably confident it wouldn't work.
In one scenario, assume that challenger Joe Biden wins by a wide plenty margin in enough swing states to put the actual election results beyond dubiousness. It's reasonable to wonder whether Trump, who has said that he could simply lose if the election were "rigged" against him, would e'er accept the results of an election he lost.
According to the 20th Amendment, if Trump loses the ballot, his term would end at noon on Jan. 20, 2021, at which fourth dimension he would officially pass his commander-in-chief authority to Biden.
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Even if he disagrees with the results, if Trump loses, he'd almost certainly be removed from the White House, according to Robert Shapiro, a professor and the former acting director of Columbia University's Plant for Social and Economic Research and Policy.
At that place'south no reason today to assume things will ever get to that bespeak. Trump might simply win the election, confounding polls for a 2d time after 2016. He might lose the election, then agree to exit office. And he might be able to hang on to his office by putting his thumb on the scales in the courts, equally he has said.
Trump's stated strategy is already unprecedented
Trump has repeatedly said in public that he expects to win the election through court battles (every bit opposed to victory at the polls).
This, on its own, wouldn't be entirely new. In the 2000 presidential ballot, Texas Gov. George West. Bush defeated Vice President Al Gore, not by conspicuously having the nearly votes cast in his favor, but by more finer fighting court battles post-obit a Florida result so hazy that — as Leon Nayfakh reported in the podcast series Fiasco — the true winner may have been unknowable.
That doesn't mean a court fight for the presidency is the new normal. Bush 5. Gore, the five-four Supreme Courtroom decision that ended the 2000 election, was supposed to be an aberration. The conservative majority that handed the election to Bush wrote that the doctrine they used should never be used as precedent. I of them, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, afterward wondered publicly whether information technology was a mistake.
And there are of import differences between 2000 and 2020.
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Kickoff, Trump has undertaken a tremendous (though not entirely successful) endeavour earlier ballot mean solar day to prevent people from voting in key swing states, co-ordinate to The Heart for Public Integrity and the former Republican speaker of the Texas House. GOP lawyers have fanned out across the country to make absentee voting more difficult and tried (thus far unsuccessfully) to toss out votes already cast.
2nd, though Gore was vice president to President Neb Clinton, who supported him, and Bush was brother to Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, neither man was president at the time they were fighting to overturn election results. If Trump uses a Supreme Courtroom challenge to win the ballot every bit he has suggested, he'll be doing it as the sitting president. And he will have personally installed three of the 9 justices who could determine the case.
And of course, neither Bush nor Gore threatened legal challenges earlier the election had actually happened. Only when a huge, decisive swing state came down to a few hundred uncertain votes did Gore fight for recounts and Bush fight to stop recounts.
Stealing an election is difficult
Trump has struck out into uncharted territory with his threats of a legal boxing for the presidency, Shapiro said. Only despite all the racket, Shapiro expects that the bodily winner of the ballot will become president.
"In the 2000 election, Florida was caught off-guard. Nobody knew that was coming," he said. "Everything that'due south going on right now, anybody knows is coming."
Ultimately, the bureaucracy of elections is across Trump's reach.
"Each of the country election bureaucracies are feverishly trying to complete the running of their elections and the counting of the votes. They know what's coming and they know what they have to do," he said. "These are election professionals who do vary in quality beyond states. … They take pride in making elections work. In that location'south no shenanigans among the actual ceremonious service vote counters."
And whatsoever shenanigans are attempted, at some bespeak they have to terminate.
Federal constabulary says that u.s. have to finalize their choices of electors on December. 8 of the year of elections. And on Dec. 14, the electoral college casts their votes — typically with each grouping of electors meeting separately in their own country. At that signal, Shapiro said, the matter is settled. If more than electors vote for Trump, he will get a second inauguration. If more vote for Biden, he volition exist the legal president-elect, beyond the reach of a court claiming.
U.Southward. presidential candidates have always accustomed election results
All the same, what if Trump nonetheless refuses to leave?
It'south worth saying again that while Trump has refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, he hasn't explicitly said he would refuse results even at this signal. And it would be a true first in American history.
Asked if any president had e'er hinted at refusing to have ballot results, Bruce Schulman, a historian at Boston University, said no.
"There is no such precedent or anything really like it," Schulman told Live Scientific discipline.
Twice, in 1824 and 1876, presidential elections have concluded in the House of Representatives after no candidate managed to secure a bulk of the electoral college, he pointed out.
In 1824, Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay and William Crawford all ran for the presidency, none won an balloter higher majority, and the House selected Adams as as president.
The 1876 congressional competition ended when Republican Rutherford B. Hayes promised congressional Democrats that he would end Reconstruction in return for their votes. That remains ane of the well-nigh pregnant events in American history, as The Atlantic reported. But in each case, the loser accepted the last event.
(The 1860 election, though it led to a civil war, did not spark whatsoever disputes about who had been legitimately elected President, Schulman noted.)
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A more relevant precedent, said Noah Rosenblum, a legal historian at Columbia University in New York Metropolis, may be the election of 1800, betwixt President John Adams (a Federalist) and Vice President Thomas Jefferson (a Autonomous-Republican).
"That election, as you may know, pitted the Federalists against the Democratic-Republicans, and the contest was fierce," Rosenblum said. "Each side expressed its sense that, if the other won, information technology would mean the end of the Republic. And the Federalists, who were in power, took action explicitly designed to weaken their Democratic-Republican opponents, including passing the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts under which they imprisoned Democratic-Republican newspaper editors."
In other words, democracy was on the ballot.
"Nevertheless, after the Federalists lost the (very close) election, John Adams peacefully stepped downwards in favor of Thomas Jefferson," Rosenblum said.
So a scenario where Trump refuses to accept a decided election effect would be outlandish, even by the rough and tumble standards of the 19th century.
But still, what if?
"You're talking almost the state of affairs where the vote has been counted, all legal challenges to the vote have been taken care of, the electors meet on the 14th and bandage their votes," Shapiro said.
The procedure then is clear.
"At that point information technology gets passed on to Congress [usually past Dec. 23] and certified in Congress on Jan. 6 by the [outgoing] vice president," Shapiro said. "Now, on the 6th, let's say that the House and the Senate accept that the new president of the United States is Joe Biden. At that juncture, if Trump doesn't want to vacate the White House, this is very easy."
In legal terms, there'south trivial Trump could do to hold on to power.
"Somebody swears [Biden] in as president. It could exist the chief justice of the Supreme Courtroom. Information technology could exist his grandmother. Every bit of Noon on the 20th [of January], he'southward the president of the United States. The entire Cloak-and-dagger Service reports to him," Shapiro said. "Donald Trump as the outgoing president has a contingent of Undercover Service. Biden goes to the White House and the Clandestine Service escorts Trump out. That'southward what happens. All the civil service of the government, every employee of the Us reports to Joe Biden at that juncture."
This story of a straightforward resolution comes with its ain assumptions: That the electors are able to vote and accept their votes certified; that institutions of the federal authorities — including Congress, with its whorl in certifying results — function as expected; and that the Undercover Service (too as other armed federal agents) follow the constabulary. At that place are places in the globe and moments in history where transfers of ability have broken downwards along like lines. But never before in the United states.
As Jonathan Gienapp, a Stanford University historian, noted in October, Trump's refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power calls the strength of American institutions into question. The constitution itself has no direct safeguards to ensure peace, and instead assumes that everyone involved in an election shares a delivery to abiding by the outcome.
"Nosotros have institutions that can be called upon to arbitrate disputes or deny unlawful usurpations of power, just the safeguards that will decide matters are more political than constitutional," he wrote. "It may fall to elected political leaders, as it did in 1876-77, to work out some sort of compromise. Or, if necessary, the people will need to exercise their fundamental right to assemble and protest in an endeavor to bring well-nigh resolution."
However, Shapiro said he expects America'south multi-century streak of turning over the presidency according to the rules to continue, if everything goes correct upwards until that point.
"That's the easiest scenario," he said. "I think the Surreptitious Service is going to report to the new president of the U.s.. The harder scenario is getting the agreed-upon vote count and the agreed-upon electors."
All that said, a recalcitrant Trump could do enough in the months between today and inauguration to make trouble for Biden, if Biden wins. Presidential transitions are tricky processes, Shapiro said. Thousands of political appointees across the federal government, from the NASA administrator to center managers at important federal agencies to cabinet officials, would take to be replaced as the Trump administration turned over to a Biden administration. Typically, approachable and incoming teams work closely on this. Just Trump could simply refuse to let Biden staff through the doors before inauguration, making the handover unusually hard.
In the end though, Shapiro said, it would happen — an entire transition conducted from a distance, unfinished until after inauguration would still be a transition. There would be a new administration, and the one-time administration would have to become away.
That is, bold the institutions hold together.
Originally published on Live Science.
Source: https://www.livescience.com/what-if-president-rejects-election-results.html
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