The Time May Be Approaching to Send Troops to Arizona
When radical Republican officials sabotage elections, President Biden may need to invoke the Insurrection Act and send troops to ensure a clean vote count.
With the possible elevation of MAGA election deniers to top state leadership positions in November, Arizona is positioning itself to become the Fort Sumter of this century. These ultra-right radicals have been vocal about their intention to rig future elections, thus triggering a constitutional crisis. President Joe Biden therefore potentially faces the prospect of being the first commander-in-chief in this century to invoke the insurrection act and deploy troops to ensure the constitutional right for free and fair elections.
Trump-endorsed MAGA Republicans made a clean sweep in Arizona’s primary election this month, winning races to compete with Democrats for governor, attorney general, secretary of state and U.S. senator. Traditionally a hothouse for the far right, Arizona is outdoing itself, with Republicans making a profession of faith to Donald Trump that the 2020 election was “stolen” being the key to winning. Republican primary voters there have elected a veritable rogue’s gallery of Guy Fawkes’s.
Former local Fox News host Kari Lake, who eked out a victory for gubernatorial candidate over her marginally less radical opponent, has made Trump’s Big Lie a centerpiece of her campaign, insisting, “We had our election stolen” and declaring President Biden “illegitimate.” Lake has said she wouldn’t have certified the 2020 results if she had been governor. A political “Chucky” who robotically apes Trump in her baseless utterances right down to deriding the news media as an “enemy of the state,” Lake has openly embraced QAnon activists and at least one Nazi sympathizer.
Blake Masters, the Trump-endorsed winner in the GOP primary for the U.S. Senate, squares off with incumbent Mark Kelly. While a U.S. senator has no role in the state’s internal handling of elections, Masters has displayed a penchant for racism and violence, having spread lies about January 6, asserting that African-Americans are behind the country’s gun problem, and shown admiration for the Unabomber.
GOP contender for state attorney general is Abraham Hamadeh, a 2016 law school graduate with a thin résumé who declared, “As Attorney General, I’ll take the fraud in our 2020 election seriously and bring justice to those who’ve undermined our Republic.”
The pièce de résistance among Arizona’s menagerie of maniacs is Mark Finchem, Republican choice to become secretary of state, i.e., the chief official in charge of managing elections. Finchem was central in Trump’s fake elector ploy in Arizona, worked to decertify the election results, pledged to outlaw voting machines and empower state legislators to overturn election results, and has called for the arrests of the current secretary of state and of his Democratic opponent. He furthermore has identified himself, as a QAnon adherent as well as a member of the Oath Keepers extremist group implicated in the January 6 assault on the Capitol, and was photographed outside as rioters attacked police. A Churchillian hero in defense of democracy he decidedly is not.
All it takes is for one of these radicals to win election to be governor, attorney general or secretary of state to throw monkey wrenches into the state’s election process which could then escalate to the national level. Disenfranchising voters, throwing out results, sending in fake electors, empowering partisan election “observers” to intimidate voters, etc. could quickly cascade into a full blown constitutional crisis.
“If any one of these election deniers wins statewide office, that’s a five-alarm fire for our elections,” Joanna Lydgate, the chief executive of States United Action, a bipartisan democracy watchdog organization, told the New York Times. “It could throw our elections into chaos. It could put our democracy at risk.”
And it’s not only Arizona about which we need to worry. GOP radicals have also won key primaries in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada and Michigan. “More than half (60 percent) of secretary of state contests include an election denier. In addition, more than one-third (40 percent) of governor and attorney general races currently have an election denier candidate on the ballot. There are still five states with election deniers running for all three top statewide positions,” reports States United Action.
Fortunately, our sophisticated, layered democratic system provides numerous brakes against overreach, as handily outlined by The Washington Post: other election officials who would resist such efforts, the courts, and public pressure.
But the radicals have other means to subvert the system: change state laws to make it easier to sabotage elections, drive poll workers to quit through intimidation, overturning by the Supreme Court of a long-standing precedent on who controls elections (this fall, the court will consider a case that would make it feasible for state legislatures alone to decide how to determine election results), and demagogues continuing to erode public confidence in elections.
Which brings us to the question of how would a sitting president react in the event a state, or states, brought the nation to a constitutional crisis over election subversion?
The courts acted as a bulwark against Trump’s nefarious efforts to steal the last election. As long as the judicial system isn’t subverted and the Supreme Court doesn’t turn the chicken coop over to the wolves, the courts are likely our best defense against democracy being overturned. But what if the newly aggressive Partisan Six on SCOTUS do empower the states, and thereby radical Republicans, to fully control elections? What if federal courts throw in the towel as a result?
Here’s where we get into Fort Sumter territory.
Envision Arizona’s Secretary of State Mark Finchem, with approval of Governor Kari Lake and Attorney General Abraham Hamadeh, throwing out tens of thousands of votes for Joe Biden in 2024 in favor of Donald Trump, or DeSantis, or whoever heads the GOP ticket? And all the brakes that theretofore would check cheating collapse? In this writer’s view, the choice facing the commander-in-chief would be twofold: await the naming of a Jefferson Davis reincarnate as president of a reconstituted CSA, or send in federal troops to restore constitutional norms.
The Insurrection Act of 1807 was invoked 14 times in the 20th century to suppress not only riots, but also violations of constitutional protections, notably civil rights. (It has not been invoked so far in this century, though Donald Trump reportedly wanted to.) President Eisenhower sent in the Army’s 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957 to ensure nine Black students could attend in peace a then segregated high school. And in 1963, President Kennedy deployed the National Guard to remove Alabama Governor George Wallace from a schoolhouse door, blocking African-American students from entering.
10 U.S. Code § 253 - Interference with State and Federal law states:
The President, by using the militia or the armed forces, or both, or by any other means, shall take such measures as he considers necessary to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy, if it—
(1) so hinders the execution of the laws of that State, and of the United States within the State, that any part or class of its people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law, and the constituted authorities of that State are unable, fail, or refuse to protect that right, privilege, or immunity, or to give that protection; or
(2) opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.
In any situation covered by clause (1), the State shall be considered to have denied the equal protection of the laws secured by the Constitution.
Of course, a sitting president, i.e., Biden in 2024, making such decisions essentially to keep himself in power (as democratically elected president) could trigger civil war. Which then leads us to examine President Abraham Lincoln’s imposition of martial law in 1861 in Maryland to keep that state in the Union. But we won’t go there for now.