Democrats are widely expected to win control of the House in November’s election. The Senate remains a tossup. But there is a nagging suspicion that Trump will somehow pervert the will of the people to ensure that Republicans retain their majority in the House and somehow steal the election.
Here’s his playbook: For starters, MAGAs will demonize the Democrats. Evoking Senator Joseph McCarthy, President Trump has already referred to Democrats as “hard core, godless Communists.”
Republican House majority leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) said, “The Bolshevik takeover of the Democratic Party is in full swing, and communism is on the ballot this November.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) posted, “The question before Congress is whether we will preserve our constitutional republic OR chart a fundamentally different course that leads us down the ROAD TO COMMUNISM.”
Trump will delegitimize eligible voters. He will scare them away from the polls by posting federal agents at their voting places or discouraging them by disparaging mail-in ballots.
But here’s the crusher: If the outcome is close, his minions can refuse to seat elected Democrats by reason of a yawning loophole in how congressional elections are administered. But beware! If Republicans try this one on the Democrats, and the Democrats at some point reverse positions, you can count on them to return the compliment next election. The bottom-line of such an action will be constitutional chaos.
The Constitution provides: “Each house shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members.” Those decisions are not reviewable by the courts. This leaves an opportunity for presumptive Speaker-in-waiting Johnson to deny Democratic members-elect their seats in the 120th Congress.
A losing House candidate may contest his or her election. The issue is decided by a simple majority vote. The new House can refuse to seat the winner while the challenge is pending. If things are close, Republicans may even temporarily hold a majority. Thus, even if Democrats only narrowly win a House majority, one or more defeated Republican candidates might try to deny office to their Democratic opponents. The Senate has its own rules for dealing with contested elections and normally seats the certified winner without prejudice.
We are accustomed to voters having final say, but this has not always been the case. Jeffrey Jenkins, a Professor of Law at USC Price determined there have been 601 election contests in the House between 1789 and 2002 — an average of around 5.6 per Congress.
In 2021 Mike Pence followed the advice of his courageous lawyer, retired Judge J. Michael Luttig, who persuaded him that our constitutional traditions required an orderly transfer of power and the election result must be respected. The same quandary may be unfolding now. And Johnson is no Mike Pence. A card-carrying election-denier, Johnson once filed a brief in the Supreme Court claiming there were “unconstitutional irregularities” in 2020 election outcomes.
That is exactly why I fear that Republicans have a legal loophole to subvert the will of the people. The 2026 midterms could thus be a decisive test of U.S. democratic norms, with the potential for a constitutional crisis if elected members are denied seats.
As the 2020 election conspiracies illustrate, the challenges could be based on virtually anything. Defeated contestants could claim that their state’s refusal to turn over voter rolls to the Trump administration meant the election was corrupt. They could argue that the Senate’s refusal to pass the SAVE Act allowed illegal immigrants to vote for their opponents in large numbers. They could try to cast doubt on mail-in ballots.
The brooding omnipresence in the midterms is Trump, whose endorsements have already proved to be the kiss of death. One thing is clear about Trump — most Americans don’t like him. His job approval rating stands at 33 percent in a new Reuters-Ipsos poll of adults, with 63 percent disapproving.
Trump has a big stake in the outcome aside from just his hatred of losing. He does not want to face congressional investigations, much less potential impeachment for corruption.
So, what’s the answer? Only an unambiguous election landslide will scotch Trump and his movement. That’s what dethroned Viktor Orban in Hungary. But there is no prospect that such a landslide is imminent. The influential Cook Political Report lists 18 tossup races in the House out of 435. A further 19 races lean Democratic or Republican. Even taken together, it means less than 10 percent of House races that will prove decisive.
So, it is entirely possible that we will run a reprise of 2020, when the outcome of a narrow election beclouded with accusations of fraud, and MAGA determined to retain control. The hope is only fleeting that men like Johnson have enough honesty and integrity to keep the nation from a constitutional crisis.
Whatever you learned in school, it is ultimately the House and the Senate deciding who sits in Congress — not the American people.
© 2026 Yahoo! News
® 2026 James D. Zirin, former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York and a published legal analyst
Krasnov is capable of almost anything, as we know to our cost.
Ukrainians and all civilized, democracy-minded people will be hoping and praying for a clean sweep by the Dems.
The alternative is just too terrible. Krasnov campaigned on a complete halt to Ukraine aid and delivered. But he also enabled genocide. Will the American people kick Ukraine in the teeth again? I’d like to think not.
Brief extracts from a long post by Heather Delaney Reese :-
Donald Trump’s high IQ hoax
At 9:58 this morning, Donald Trump was locked away deep inside the White House when he began panicking online in front of the entire world. Over the course of almost 10 hours, the President posted on social media 7 times about the exact same thing, spiraling out of control over artificial intelligence, with each post growing more unhinged than the next. He started by telling us all that our president has everything under control because of his genius-level intelligence:
“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!”
Before later saying it is all a hoax anyway, just like the other things our own government has warned us about, “I am the Hoax Buster” and that all warnings about AI are just a hoax, even wilder than “RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA HOAX, or the Global Warming Scam. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
In his final AI-focused post of the day at 7:55 PM, he shared the shortest and most desperate of them all: “The AI Hoax being perpetrated by the Radical Left Dumocrats is reminiscent of their Global Warming Scam of not so long ago, where everyone was going to die from extreme heat. What happened? MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!! President DJT”
Seeing that first post this morning, where Trump called himself, “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT,” brought me right back to that cramped White House press conference room in 2020, watching Donald Trump suggest that maybe we could inject disinfectants, like bleach, into our veins to stop the replication of the virus. I felt that same punch to the gut feeling then as I did this morning. That was quickly followed by a sense of doom for what was to come.
This wasn’t the only big story for today. While the president spent the day locked away in the White House, posting disinformation and declaring himself a genius, a story broke that is rightfully getting a lot of attention. ProPublica reported this morning that Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding in the Bahamas this past May, the one that Donald Trump did not attend, was paid for, at least in part, by Umar Kremlev, who is a Russian oligarch in Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.
Kremlev is the president of the International Boxing Association, an organization that has been financed by Gazprom, Russia’s state-run energy company. The in-depth investigation and subsequent reporting by ProPublica showed that Kremlev rented and paid for the private island where Don Jr. held his reception, and that he also paid an estimated $70,000 for a fireworks display after the wedding, which his team helped plan the logistics of. The money he used for this wedding came from an entity in Dubai that the boxing association uses for financial transactions. Don Jr.’s younger brother Eric Trump’s office said he has “absolutely no clue who this person is.” Which we can interpret as this not being some close family friend simply wanting to give someone they know well an extraordinarily generous wedding gift. Yet, Don Jr.’s spokesperson called Kremlev a “personal friend” he met through the hunting world. Bettina Trump posted on Instagram, saying that this was “an extraordinarily generous wedding gift from a friend” and insisting there is “no conspiracy, no mystery.”
Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who has continued to show what true leadership looks like in the time of authoritarian takeover, spoke on the floor of the Senate today and used his time to lay out exactly what had happened. He laid out the facts clearly on the connections, improprieties, and dangers of what that arrangement really represented. He reminded the room and those watching on video that Don Jr.’s net worth was $50 million before his father’s second term, and that it grew to $300 million in a single year after he took back office. He shared that at least 13 companies tied to the Trump brothers have received $1.8 billion in federal contracts and commitments during that same time. He pointed out that five of those companies received their first-ever government contract only after the Trump sons invested money in them. He called the Kremlev arrangement “as close to treason as you get” and asked whether any Republican senator would defend the Russian government paying for the president’s family wedding. He asked whether Republicans would have stayed silent if Hunter Biden’s wedding or Malia Obama’s graduation party had been financed by allies of the Ayatollah. “Just because the corruption happens so routinely that to some it feels normal,” Murphy said, “it doesn’t mean that it is.”
“He asked whether Republicans would have stayed silent if Hunter Biden’s wedding or Malia Obama’s graduation party had been financed by allies of the Ayatollah.”
No they would not have stayed silent. Furthermore, the ayatollahs are just maggots. Putler is 100 times more evil. Ordinary Iranians are not in fact evil, whereas “ordinary” russians are in fact evil, as we can see from their demonic social media posts.
lol, Commies will say anything for power.
It’s trump who loves the commies, Xi, putin, etc.