I DON'T THINK REPUBLICANS ARE READY TO GO FULL FASH YET

Should President Biden end his presidentrial campaign n favor of Vice President Harris? I'm not sure, but I don't think Democrats should be afraid to make the switch, as John Pfaff seems to believe:

Heritage is apparently already planning the legal fight to keep any possible Biden replacement off the ballot in battleground states. One win in one key state court, and the election is literally over. The replacement idea was always terrible, now it's clearly fatally toxic.

— John Pfaff (@johnpfaff.bsky.social) Jul 5, 2024 at 10:05 AM

Pfaff is alluding to this Rolling Stone story:

With Democrats increasingly unsure that Biden should remain the party’s nominee, the conservative Heritage Foundation is pledging to try to block the Democratic Party from replacing Biden on the ticket in key swing states.

In a June 21 memo, the Heritage Foundation astutely predicted that Democrats might wish to force out Biden “if he freezes at [the] debate.” Noting that “the mechanisms for replacing him on ballots vary by state,” the memo says: “There is the potential for pre-election litigation in some states that would make the process difficult and perhaps unsuccessful.”

But even a commentator who has learned not to underestimate the Republican war on both democracy and Democrats doubts that Heritage can succeed:

“I don’t put any credence into it,” Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project At UCLA’s Law School, wrote on Wednesday. “Joe Biden is not the party’s nominee now, and states generally point to the major party’s nominee as the one whose name is on the ballot.”

Also:

Edward Foley, who directs the election law program at the Ohio State University, tells Rolling Stone: “As long as we are talking about Biden dropping out before the convention, I can’t see any legal obstacle to the Democrats choosing any other alternative nominee that they wish, whether [Vice President Kamala] Harris or someone else. State law puts on the ballot whomever the party chooses as its nominee at its convention.”

Craig Holman, a governmental ethics lobbyist at Public Citizen, says that “the Heritage Foundation is trying to create a quagmire where none really exists.” He adds, “They’re just trying to muck up the process. I have no doubt they will file lawsuits if this does indeed happen, but I would expect the lawsuits to be very promptly dismissed.”

I'm usually a worst-case-scenario guy, but I agree with Hasen, Foley, and Holman -- this won't work and they're just trying to muck up the process. It's not only that Democrats have the clear legal right to choose their nominee however they see fit. It's that Republicans don't seem ready to go fully fascist yet -- they want to, but they don't have their ducks lined up.

Think back to the spring. The states of Alabama and Ohio were threatening to keep Biden off the ballot because their ballot deadlines occurred before the dates of the Democratic convention. Both states have Republican governors and solidly Republican legislatures. If the GOP really felt ready to reduce the Democratic Party to second-class status, workarounds wouldn't have been found. But a bill was signed into law in Alabama that resolved the problem, and then the same thing happened in Ohio. While the Ohio bill was pending, Democrats decided to hold a virtual presidential roll call prior to the convention that would meet Ohio's original deadline.

So it's all good. I think the same thing would happen if Demnocrats made a swap before the convention (and before the states' ballot deadlines). Republicans would waste Democrats' time and force the party to spend some money on lawyers, but Democrats would win the fight -- yes, even in the right-wing federal courts. We wouldn't have the spectacle of one major party keeping the other party's candidate off the ballot.

Republicans probably will try to wield power this way in a second Trump term, or in their next presidency if Trump loses, but they're not ready now. They probably fear that efforts to remove Democrats from ballots would lead to public outrage, at a time when they're out of power in D.C. and can't militarize the response to any protests at the federal level. (I find it hard to believe that the young lefties who do most of the protesting in America would demonstrate on behalf of Harris -- surely you remember the chants of "Kamala Is a Cop" -- but the GOP probably doesn't understand that.) Maybe they remeber the suburban moms of the original anti-Trump Resistance movement. Do they want to incur trhe wrath of those voters by keeping a woman -- a woman who's clearly angry at the hated Dobbs decision -- off the ballot? As long as we're still having elections, I doubt they'll take that chance.

Republicans are positioning themselves to rule as authoritarians soon, but for now they seem to want the public to think that they're coloring within the lines. Even the most radical Supreme Court (and lower court) decisions of recent years are framed, however implausibly, as consistent with the Constitution. The Republicans on the court still want the public to believe nothing's really changed. Republicans aren't ready to say, "We rule. Resistance is futile." That moment could arrive in January, but we're not there yet.