What If: Let’s say that in 2024, better-organized Trumpist shenanigans with the Electoral Count Act land the count in one of the Act’s many legal lacunae — the various ambiguities that legal scholars have been whining about since Jan 6 — such that the Supreme Court decides it can’t make a ruling, and Congress of course can’t get a fix past the filibuster, since neither party would want its base to blame it for accepting a fix whose outcome amounted to defeat for their candidate.
Despite threats from either side to hold competing inaugurations, Biden and the Joint Chiefs announce that given the legal uncertainty of the count, they will swear in the incoming Speaker as the acting President on Inauguration Day, in order to provide stability while Congress and SCOTUS hash out a solution.
Except… they never do. The Speaker-President serves a year, then another. They don’t appreciably screw up anything any more than any other President ever has. The midterm doesn’t meaningfully change the balance of power in Congress, and doesn’t make filibuster abolition any less of a hot potato for moderates. Growing resigned to the depressing reality, the Speaker-President promises to not run in 2028, and the already-has-been-creeping presidential election cycle starts earlier than it ever has.
The thing is, no one’s fixed the Electoral Count Act. And there isn’t any better play for either party to try. So they just run the same play over again, like two teams of football players who doggedly refuse to resign themselves to the truth that if they “just win their assignments this time”, the outcome of the play won’t be different.
The Speaker reassumes the Presidency in January 2029, promising that “this is an end to the shenanigans”. But for the next 3-5 cycles, this is how things continue. Eventually, either the Boomers and Boomer-like-Xers finish dying off, the GOP gets tired of minoritarianism, or the NIPVC passes its critical-mass state, and a whole new era of politics begins.
This is the story of how America accidentally became a parliamentary1 democracy for several decades.
Not saying this is gonna happen. But it IS one of the more hilarious and “more-stable-than-this-shit-we-have-today” outcomes of today’s frightful political moment.
If Democrats primary Sinema, then it needs to be with a Mark Kelly, not a Bernie. Look, she’s clearly goofy in the head, and can’t be trusted, but we also can’t let progressives screw this up for us. Arizona is NOT a blue state2.
And we also need to flip another seat, because any Kelly-esque Sinema replacement will at least share the same “gun-shy” weakness she does: Unable to commit to party priorities due to having had to posture theirself as a centrist.
Losing prescription drug reform from the infrastructure bill will hurt the most out of all the compromises we’re having to make. The only way to recover from it in 2022 and 2024 is to put up a messaging bill to dare the GOP to vote against.
NIMBY interviewees are hilarious AF. Try this out: Go to your local newspaper and find a story about some new proposed development moving through the local zoning board3. I guarantee you, at least one NIMBY commentator on the proceedings — an attendee, a local advocate, a Concerned Homeowner — will say something matching the following rubric:
“We4 don’t want to become the next [somewhat larger town within 20 miles which has grown in the past 20 years] or [an even larger town where supposedly the incipient evils that befell the first have metastasized into all the sins of blight and density ignorant suburbanites imagine of cities]!”
It’s utterly predictable, and hunting for their quotes is kind of like a grown-up version of “Where’s Waldo?” for us YIMBYs. Enjoy!
IE, where the executive branch is drawn from the leader of the legislature.
And even if you want to quibble by pointing to the scoreboard, the reality still remains that even blue Arizonans simply don’t have the appetite for the same things as the national party, and have an exceedingly tenuous grasp on a state still dominated by its GOP. Think of Arizona like Texas or Georgia, not Virginia.
You may have to watch it like a hawk for a few weeks. These stories are surprisingly hard to find among all the trite fluffery and ad-chum-laden-nonsense that passes for local coverage these days.
Meaning the speaker theirself and not, of course, a thoroughly-polled survey of public and local opinion.