“Trump is a co-conspirator in Michigan’s 2020 false electors plot, state investigator says”

Detroit News:

Michigan prosecutors consider former President Donald Trump and some of his top aides co-conspirators in the plot to submit a certificate falsely claiming he won Michigan’s 2020 election, an investigator for Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office testified Wednesday in court.

Howard Shock, a special agent for Nessel, said Trump; Mark Meadows, who was Trump’s chief of staff; and Rudy Giuliani, who was his personal lawyer, are “unindicted co-conspirators” in Michigan’s false elector case. That means prosecutors believe they participated, to some extent, in an alleged scheme to commit forgery by creating a false document asserting Trump had won Michigan’s 16 electoral votes when Democrat Joe Biden had won them.

Shock’s testimony came on the sixth day of preliminary examinations in Ingham County District Court as Nessel’s office pursues felony charges against a group of Republican activists who signed the certificate of votes claiming Trump won….

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“A Distinct System for Presidential Succession on Inauguration Day: Getting the Most Out of Section 3 of the Twentieth Amendment”

Brian Kalt has this important new article, forthcoming in Cardoza Law Review (of which I was fortunate to read an earlier draft). Here’s the abstract:

The current presidential-succession statute uses the same line of succession for every conceivable situation. But there are many different types of potential succession scenarios. Succession need not–and should not–be governed by a one-size-fits-all approach.

Before the Twentieth Amendment was ratified in 1933, the Constitution authorized Congress to provide only for double vacancies during the term, when there already is a President and Vice President. Recognizing this gap, Section 3 of the Twentieth Amendment empowered Congress to cover inauguration-day double vacancies: at the outset of a term, when nobody is available to become President or Vice President in the first place.

Significantly, Section 3 gives Congress much more flexibility for inauguration-day double vacancies than Article II allows for middle-of-the-term ones. But Congress has never fully embraced its Section 3 powers: When Congress wrote the current succession law in 1947, it chose a monolithic system that ignored the distinctive needs of inauguration-day succession and left Section 3’s flexibility unused. The time for Congress to make full use of its Section 3 powers is long overdue.

Moreover, Section 3 has been largely neglected by scholars. The time for a full-length published treatment of Section 3 is overdue as well.

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“Trump’s New Legal Bills Are Hiding an $8 Million Mystery”

Daily Beast reports on a financial arrangement that may violate federal campaign finance laws. From my perspective, with all the serious threats facing American democracy, this particular story is not a high priority. (Maybe the media could devote some more attention to how the structures of electoral competition need to be changed, so that extremist candidates are not able to convert partisan primary victories into general election victories when general election voters would prefer a more moderate candidate from the same party.)

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“Biden, Trump will be on November ballot, DeWine says”

A more optimistic note on Ohio’s handling of the Biden ballot mess (h/t Derek Muller):

‘DeWine told 10TV that he doesn’t think anyone should worry.

“We’ve got some technicalities that are going on, but it’s going to get worked out so no one should really have any concern,” DeWine said. “They’re going to have a choice this November. They’re going to be able to pick one of these two to be our president.”’

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“Why Losing Political Power Now Feels Like ‘Losing Your Country’”

Tom Edsall in the N.Y. Times reviewing the social science on why it’s so hard to undo the emotional feelings associated with “affective” polarization. His column leads with Rachel Kleinfeld’s important work on this topic. I wish, however, Edsall had discussed the kind of institutional reforms to counteract polarization that Rick Pildes, among others, has been pursuing. Rick’s Dunwody lecture last week highlighted five institutional reforms that would mitigate the effect of affective polarization on the capacity of the country’s democratic system to engage in effective governance. As Rick said in his lecture (and I’m paraphrasing here from memory, as I was fortunate to be in the audience), if he could achieve just one reform in the effort to combat affective polarization, it would be to replace partisan primaries with the kind of nonpartisan primaries employed in Alaska as part of its “top 4” system with Ranked Choice Voting. This is why efforts, like the one currently underway in Arizona to adopt this kind of nonpartisan primary, are so important. Edsall ends his column on a negative note: “as long as Trump is the Republican nominee for president, and as long as the prospect of a majority-minority country continues to propel right-wing populism, the odds for reducing the bitter animosity that now characterizes American politics remain slim.” It would have been better, in my view, if he at least mentioned the most promising antidote for the problems of governance that affective polarization causes.

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