Ignorance

So earlier today the president tweeted (the placement of those two words together should tell us one of the major things wrong with politics in the 21st century) an idea he had in response to the complete mess of a Congressional primary in New York that featured voting by mail. If one primary could bring so many problems, what would a national election do? Some parts of the country have had mailed ballots for some time and so they'd probably handle it OK but if there's a large margin of error in, say, Michigan or Ohio, will we ever really know who won? Perhaps, President Trump said, we should consider postponing the election until we were sure we could conduct it safely and accurately.

While I share the president's dim view of the reliability and accuracy of an election with a large number of mailed ballots, his proposed solution is ridiculous. We held an election in the middle of a bloody civil war and we can hold one now. Plus there's not much chance the US Postal Service will solve in a few extra weeks the myriad problems that have been beyond its ken for decades. I saw several commenters suggest that President Trump was not really serious about the idea and knew it was unlikely to happen. He was more likely attempting to set the stage for which of his heirs or offspring might seek the Republican nomination in 2024: "They" stole the election in 2020 so we need to make that right this time! It's a dumb strategy and is more likely to weaken that hypothetical candidate that help them, but when we move outside the areas of self-promotion and infidelity we tax the president's faculties overmuch.

But the real ignorance came from the volume of people who viewed this tweet as a genuine threat to the Republic. My FB feed is filled with sage political savants -- or at least it has pretended to be for the last few years -- but it seems like none of them remember a single thing about their high school government classes. The election date is set by law and can only be changed by law and guess which branch of government handles laws (or used to, anyway)? The legislative one, one house of which is controlled by the opposition party. In conversation online I tried to be genteel about holding the idea that a Nancy Pelosi-controlled House of Representatives would assent to a delayed election but here I'll be plain: That's about as stupid as you can get without your brain activity falling below the level needed to sustain autonomic function.

And even if it were to happen it wouldn't matter. When a president's elected term ends he is no longer president and presidential terms end at noon on January 20 of their fourth year. It's in the Constitution, the document that so many people have claimed devotion and attention to and knowledge of in recent years. Even if President Trump convinced Congress to delay the election until after Inauguration day he would no longer be president because the Constitution says so. Fears of literally any other outcome are of less use than fears of being simultaneously struck by lightning and a meteor. The 20th Amendment doesn't explicitly cover such a scenario -- its creators weren't as smart as Facebook commenters -- but we'd probably have as an interim president the senior GOP Senator who was not up for election this year. I think that's Chuck Grassley but I'm not sure.

I understand why millennials and Zoomers don't get this: nobody's taught civics in school since Newt Gingrich mattered in Congress. But I've seen people my own age who lay claim to great wisdom and insight so misunderstand some of our government's most elementary features that they do all but wail and gnash their teeth over the chance that they will not be governed by a doddering plagiarist come 2021.

This whole daylong tempest reinforces my belief that one of the worst features of having Donald Trump as president has been his elevation of some of the least consequential and appealing elements of our national life -- not just as his supporters but as his enemies.