Quick Disclaimer: This is entirely a thought piece tended to provoke debate, not a proposal I am currently suggesting
1st Corrupt Bargain
1824
No majority EC winner led to House vote of Adams over Jackson with Henry Clay throwing his votes in the House in exchange for getting named Secretary of State.
2nd Corrupt Bargain
1876
Electoral Commission gave disputed electors to Rutherford Hayes in exchange for his withdrawal of Federal troops from Southern States, mollifying Democrats who’s preferred candidate won the popular vote.
3rd Corrupt Bargain
2016?
These are our known known’s so far:
–Flynn and Manafort were directly on Putin payroll (via RT and Ukranian puppet)
-Bannon has close ideological ties to main Putin ideologues in international alt-right movement
–CIA confirms Russian intel hacked into DNC to embarrass Hillary Clinton to benefit Donald Trump
Our Unknown Known’s:
–Why Russia wanted Trump to win
Our Unknown Unknown’s:
–Direct ties to the hacking from Trump or his team
I would argue any of the Unknown Knowns or Unknown Unknowns are likely grounds for impeachment proceedings. I would also argue that the Known Knowns should’ve given American voters great pause before selecting their President, and should give electors that same pause today. Facing the December 19th deadline to make their votes, it is paramount for electors to throw this election into the House of Representatives to at least delay the certification of the President until these facts can be known.
This would then give House Democrats and Republican’s concerned about Russia an opportunity to negotiate with the Republicans directly for a solution to this impasse. Obviously, many of them have grave concerns about Russian influence on the foreign policy of the United States going forward and if this election hacking was related to it.
My proposal would be to select Vice President elect Pence in exchange for him nominating a mainstream Republican cabinet (think Petraeus/Romney/Chertoff not Flynn, Tillerson, or Sessions), staff free of alt-right or Putin sympathizers, and recommitting the US to all international alliances and agreements including NATO. Senate Democrats would also agree to his Vice Presidential choice (a mainstream conservative like Kasich).
Throwing the election back to HRC would split the country in half and raise legitimacy issues, even if I agree that it’s ridiculous the popular vote winner is not already President-elect. But it would invalidate the popular vote of the respective states Trump won. His electoral majority is legitimate, and not the direct result of hacking or fraud. That said, if Russian intelligence acted on his benefit with his consent, that is grounds for his dismissal as President. If they acted without his consent, he still has far too many close associations and sympathies with the Putin regime for this outcome to be good for the long term independence of the American electoral system and the long term influence of American power abroad. A majority of American electors are duly pledged to the Republican ticket, this solution preserves the intention of those voters to send a Republican to the White House within the constitutional framework of our republic. These other two examples demonstrate that while unusual, and in the case of the Compromise of 1877 morally repugnant, there is some precedence for this occurring in the past.
It is doubtful this would actually happen and is anything other than a hypothetical. And I am sure it presents as many problems as it purports to solve. But I am gravely concerned that a foreign government has successfully engineered a White House favorable to their geopolitical interests and ideological affinities, and not those of mainstream Americans in either party.
The first time Dad was arrested [following in his own revolutionary father’s footsteps] was using locks and chains to do a lock down sit down in the German Embassy to protest the election of Adolf Hitler as German Chancellor. He also got arrested laying down across Gratiot Avenue in Detroit to block scrap shipments to Japan in the early 30s. In each case, he told me, he was trying to prevent greed from leading to the deaths of millions of people. An economic marriage based on greed between Trump and Putin would not surprise Dad, were he still alive, at all with the caveat that Dad would likely have said that Putin is the better chess player.
And the potential for Secretary of State ExxonMobil certainly would be evidence in support of this.
But I don’t necessarily see how it works out in practice. Russia’s economy has been hurting for several years now, because the global price of oil has been low. It has been low because there has been a sudden and unexpected new source of oil– USA production from fracking. Saudi Arabia got pissed, and opened the spigots, driving the price down and making some of the US production unprofitable.
But the infrastructure is still there, and if the price climbs past a certain point, fracking production will increase again, and start the cycle over. That means that the US fracking–even if dormant– acts as an overall cap on the global price, which means Russia doesn’t have an easy way out, absent actual economic diversification.
Do you think Trump will try to kill the US oil production industry, in order to allow the global price to go up and benefit Russia?
or as former CIA chief, Michael Hayden put it : ‘ Trump is Russia’s useful fool.’
Fred Rich LaRiccia
Democratic electors support Kasich for President, Republican electors support Kaine for VP.
It may be a better scenario than the one I laid out, per the Washington Post’s Mike Cannon:
I don’t know if you can get any group of 232 Democrats to agree to do anything, but if you could get 200 Democrats and 70 Republicans, that would work as well.