Tag Archives: Donald Trump

Tomorrow’s US midterm results could have serious consequences for constitutional rights and the health of democracy in the United States

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Tomorrow’s midterm elections in the United States will see voters cast ballots to elect members of the House of Representatives and a third of the membership of the Senate. James Cleaver analyses the state of the campaign, explains the potential consequences should Republicans regain control of either chamber (or both), and draws our attention to some of the key individual contests.

The United States will hold its midterm elections tomorrow. At the federal level, all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 out of 100 Senate seats are being contested. There are also a large number of significant state-level races taking place across the country.

Understandably, much attention has been paid to what these elections might mean for President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda or for attempts to reinstate abortion rights across the country following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Yet these midterms will have other constitutional ramifications, from the health of the United States’ democracy to the composition of its judiciary.

House of Representatives

The most visible work of the House of Representatives in the current Congress has been undertaken by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. The committee has reviewed documents, interviewed witnesses, and held nine public hearings about the events leading up to and including 6 January. Most recently, it has subpoenaed former President Donald Trump, although he is unlikely to ever testify.

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The anatomy of democratic backsliding: could it happen here?

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The term ‘backsliding’ has been coined to describe the phenomenon by which leaders who come to office within a democratic framework, only to attack some of democracy’s core features when in office. Stephan Haggard and Robert R Kaufman outline some of the key features of ‘backsliding’, discuss how and why it can take hold, and whether there are warning signs that such a process could happen in the UK. 

During the presidency of Donald Trump, American democracy suffered the most serious challenge it has faced since the country’s Civil War. Trump and his administration inflamed divisions that jeopardise the rights of women and minorities; attacked the press; defied oversight; sought to stack the judiciary and law enforcement agencies with partisan loyalists; challenged the integrity of the electoral system, and ultimately stoked a violent challenge to the democratic transfer of power. These threats were different from conventional forms of democratic reversion, such as the coup d’etat. Instead, they reflected a more insidious process that has come to be known as ‘backsliding,’ in which illiberal leaders rise to power within a democratic framework and attack core features of democracy from within.

Because the United States occupies a unique position at the heart of the international system, backsliding there commanded worldwide attention. But the United States was hardly alone. In a new study, we identified at least 15 other countries in which duly-elected democratic governments recently moved along similar paths. Not all of these paths lead all the way to autocracy; in the United States, democracy survived the Trump era badly damaged but intact. But depending on the metric used, more than half of these cases slid into ‘competitive authoritarian rule’: systems in which elections persisted but were manifestly rigged. Notably, although many of the failed democracies we examined were weakly institutionalised at the outset (for example, Bolivia, Ukraine, and Zambia), others such as Hungary, Poland, and Venezuela were once considered relatively robust democratic regimes.

These cases raise the question of whether similar adverse developments could occur in other seemingly stable democracies. Could they perhaps even happen in the UK? 

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The 2020 US presidential election: nine lessons

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As reported in the latest issue of Monitor, the US presidential election raised even more constitutional issues and questions about the US system of elections than many anticipated. Colin Provost and Nadia Hilliard of the UCL Centre for US Politics discuss how the election was administered, and the roles of the judiciary, Electoral College and social media in the process.

The US presidential election of 2020 has been perceived by many observers as one of the most important elections in American history. A highly polarised electorate turned out in record numbers in the middle of a pandemic and for the first time, the incumbent president refused to concede after a clear result, while pushing a steady, yet unsubstantiated series of claims about voter fraud and voting irregularities. Given the highly unusual set of circumstances surrounding this election, it is worth considering how well US institutions performed with respect to the conduct of a free and fair election, and what lessons should be learned for future electoral cycles.

1. States can run elections smoothly.

Although federal laws that are harmonised across the states might seem to make more sense for national elections, the US Constitution allows each state to set its own election laws, as long as they are in compliance with the 1965 Voting Rights Act and other relevant, federal legislation. Keeping that in mind, it is important not to understate the fact that, on average, the states performed well in terms of administration of this election. Despite the pandemic, millions of people were able to vote and perhaps more importantly, a large subset of those people were able to vote by mail, so that they would not have to put their health in jeopardy by waiting in long – and often cramped – queues. Ultimately, those votes were all counted, even if a victor could not be declared until 7 November —five days after election day.

2. US electoral institutions are resilient.

The institutions of election administration proved to be resilient in the face of baseless allegations of voter fraud and voting irregularities: those allegations were many, and continue to be made. In a normal election year, post-election lawsuits are practically non-existent, but in 2020, the Trump campaign filed dozens of lawsuits across several states, nearly all of which have been found to be lacking in merit, while tweeting inaccurate information about the election and its results. Georgia senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler suggested that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger – the state official in charge of overseeing elections and certifying the results – should resign after not finding evidence of electoral fraud in that state. Additionally, President Trump invited the leadership of the Michigan legislature to the White House, apparently with the goal of getting them to nominate different electors to the Electoral College that formally votes in the new president than those selected by the Michigan Democratic Party. The only legal basis for this occurring is if one believed that Joe Biden did not clearly or lawfully win the state, even though his margin of victory was in excess of 150,000 votes. Finally, a large number of Trump allies in Congress, the media and elsewhere supported these actions, implicitly or explicitly. Despite all these challenges, the votes were counted and certified by all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

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Executive Orders in the Trump presidency: a short introduction

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nigel-bowles

Since Donald Trump’s term as US President began in January his use of Executive Orders has been high profile and highly controversial. In this post Nigel Bowles explains what these are. He writes that the constraints upon their use are contestable, contested, and contingent, but that to be effective they must at a minimum be competently and intelligently drafted. Trump’s ‘immigration ban’ order fell short of this standard.

Whatever else President Trump might yet contribute to academic and popular understanding of the power of the United States presidency and the rule of law, he has already reminded the world that the occupant of his office has the institutional means to disrupt settled orders of public policy, to scorn norms established by predecessors, and to breach customary standards of presidential behavior. At the second and third of these three activities, President Trump excels. But his talents in these arts will not help him craft a productive presidency in a system of coordinate governing institutions. For that, he will need a sense of purpose, a feel for power, and a recognition that he is as obliged as any other citizen to comply with legal and regulatory requirements. Unless the President quickly comes to appreciate those qualities’ importance, the cost to his professional reputation within Washington and beyond is likely to be high. The first month and more of his noisy administration indicate that his standard mode of organisational leadership is caprice. That is no basis for government in any system, especially one such as that of the United States which sets high institutional barriers against those who show disdain for the customary rules of political coalition-building.

Despite his advantage in having Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate, the President has chosen not to engage on legislation with those majorities but instead to rely upon unilateral moves. He has spent precious capital on quotidian and querulous hectoring via his Twitter account, including using that platform to denounce public institutions and those committed to pursuing the public good for being the people’s ‘enemies’. Such behaviour might in the short-run please his political base, but is unlikely to advance his broader purposes (whatever they might prove to be).

A more established unilateral option is that of the issuing of Executive Orders, instruments of presidential authority with considerable potential effect. In issuing such orders, presidents have the opportunity to alter both policy content and the politics of that policy. Here, presidents can and may exploit the advantage of their office’s singularity. They can by their decisions do what individual senators, representatives, and federal judges cannot. They may, as Kenneth Mayer has written (pp. 4–5), change policy’s content and its administration, reorder executive branch agencies, and set out what they will and will not understand by those provisions that Congress writes into law.

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Monitor 65: Testing constitutional times

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The latest issue of Monitor, the Constitution Unit’s regular newsletter, has been published today. The issue covers all of the major UK constitutional developments over the past four months, a period that has included the High Court and Supreme Court rulings in the Article 50 case, the unveiling of Theresa May’s Brexit plan and the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, plus much else besides. The front page article is reproduced here. You can read the full issue at this link. 

monitor-65-coverPolitics remains fast-moving. Its unexpected turns have raised fundamental questions about the constitutional order, in the UK and beyond – including the rightful place of voters, elected legislators, governments and judges in political decision-making – as well as the media’s role in questioning those decisions.

Here, Brexit remains the dominant preoccupation. The previous issue of Monitor reported how ‘ministers have repeatedly insisted that they are in charge of the Brexit negotiations and that to reveal their hand to parliament in advance would weaken their negotiating position’. A lot has changed since then.

Following rulings by the High Court on 3 November, and Supreme Court on 24 January, ministers had to accept that they require parliamentary approval to trigger Article 50; at the time of writing, the European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill has now passed through the Commons and awaits scrutiny in the Lords (see page 3). Even before the bill’s introduction, the government had conceded (in December) that its Brexit plan would be published prior to triggering Article 50, and (in January) that this would include a white paper – commitments necessary in order to see off potential Commons defeats. With help from the courts, parliament has rediscovered some of its teeth.

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