The Writing is Already on the Wall
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September 12th, 2026. On Thursday in the New Republic, conservative judge J. Michael Ludig published a dire warning to the Republican Party and to all Americans. In the piece, Ludig outlined how Republicans could refuse to seat elected Democrats in January after a Democratic victory in the 2026 midterm elections of November. The coming crisis, the piece says, would be the final battle for America's democracy. Ludig spelled out that Trump is fighting a war against America's democracy. While the refusal of Vice President Mike Pence to assist his power grab made it fail in January 2021, Ludig notes, today Trump and his Republican congressional allies are more determined than ever to take over the country.
Ludig focuses on the ability of House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican of Louisiana, to prevent the recognition of duly elected Democratic representatives on January 3rd. Johnson has the power, Ludig says, to remove the current House clerk, Kevin McCumber, and replace him temporarily with a MAGA loyalist who will refuse to list Democrats on the role of those elected to the 120th Congress. In this scenario, once Democrats are eliminated, they will have to get a federal court to order the temporary clerk to list their names. If a court does so, another crisis point will arrive if the clerk simply refuses to obey the order. Then it's possible the courts will stay out of the fight until the 120th Congress formally convenes and the Republicans vote not to seat the Democrats.
That vote would be reviewable by the courts, including the Supreme Court. But that review would take weeks, if not months, paralyzing the United States and leaving the country helplessly vulnerable to all the world's evil, as it would have been in January 2021 had Mike Pence not thwarted Donald Trump's plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election. And at that point, how would the current Supreme Court answer the question, is the United States of America a democracy in which we the people elect our representatives to the Congress and to the presidency, or is it not? As if to illustrate Ludig's warning, House Speaker Johnson told attendees at Trump's convention in Dallas on Thursday, we cannot and will not allow them to take the majority in Congress.
We're not going to do it. Trump's attempt to use the United States Postal Service to screen mail-in voting has recently had a test run. Yesterday, Jim Sachsa of Democracy Docket picked up a story from Jeff Berlue of the Tallahassee Democrat to report that the United States Postal Service rejected mailed ballots from Leon County in Florida because the words, return service requested, were only 0.236 inches from the election office's return address. They were supposed to be a full quarter inch apart. So the delivery of those mail-in ballots came down to a federal complaint about a spacing issue of 14 thousandths of an inch. It's ridiculous, Supervisor of Elections Mark Early told Berlue. But as Saxa notes, the rejection of ballots for such a petty flaw shows what will likely happen if the Supreme Court lifts the injunction blocking the Postal Service from implementing the new rules it has put in place since Trump ordered such interference in a March executive order.
On Thursday, September 10th, Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times reported that the Department of Justice, or DOJ, under Trump has sent threatening letters to at least 30 top election officials in the states, warning that those officials are currently under investigation and are subject to ongoing litigation, and so must not destroy any records relating to the 2024 election. As Corosaniti notes, the administration has sued 30 states for their voter lists and has lost 23 of the cases and one none. Trump has claimed to be the victim of voter fraud since the 2016 primaries, but has never produced any proof of his claims. In July, Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the Civil Rights Division in the DOJ, threatened state election officials with criminal prosecution if any non-citizens cast a ballot in their state, although it is already illegal for non-citizens to vote.
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