But whether partisan Republicans in Congress would follow the Supreme Court -- or any legal framework -- as opposed to muscling Trump's appointment to a second term, is not a given. Not when, as the Amherst College law professor Lawrence Douglas said, the nation's most fervent partisans seem to be operating under diverging assumptions and principles.
"Maybe the binary that we are drawing between law on one hand and politics on the other doesn't entirely describe the gravity of the situation that we are confronting right now," he said. "Rules presuppose certain presupposed normative understandings. And once these normative understandings erode, I'm not sure that rules are really in the position to solidify or reinforce them."
"This discussion makes me nervous. I assume it makes all of us nervous because it drives home how quickly we can spiral into this dynamic in our current polarized and existential political culture, in which there are no effective legal structures that are going to govern if we get into some of these kinds of disputes," NYU's Pildes said. "This discussion drives home the more uncertainty there is beyond Election Day, the more rules are changed at the last minute, whether by courts that think they are doing things in good faith and are worried about protecting the individual right to vote of a few thousand people who didn't get the ballots they requested for absentee voting and the like; the more that opens up all of the capacity to destabilize the result..."
"Maybe the binary that we are drawing between law on one hand and politics on the other doesn't entirely describe the gravity of the situation that we are confronting right now," he said. "Rules presuppose certain presupposed normative understandings. And once these normative understandings erode, I'm not sure that rules are really in the position to solidify or reinforce them."
"This discussion makes me nervous. I assume it makes all of us nervous because it drives home how quickly we can spiral into this dynamic in our current polarized and existential political culture, in which there are no effective legal structures that are going to govern if we get into some of these kinds of disputes," NYU's Pildes said. "This discussion drives home the more uncertainty there is beyond Election Day, the more rules are changed at the last minute, whether by courts that think they are doing things in good faith and are worried about protecting the individual right to vote of a few thousand people who didn't get the ballots they requested for absentee voting and the like; the more that opens up all of the capacity to destabilize the result..."
"You can see from this discussion how quickly those kinds of changes can become the excuse for kind of blowing up the whole election. And that's part of what I am taking away from this whole discussion."
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