President Trump has a new post up on Truth Social today in which he claims that states only run elections and count ballots as agents acting at his direction as president of the United States. The key lines are “the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tell them …” He claims he’s going to issue an executive order to ban voting by mail and any voting machines he doesn’t like.
Put simply, this is total bullshit.
The president has basically nothing to do with election administration. States run American elections. Period. Congress, within certain parameters, can make laws with standards that states must apply. But states still administer them. This is a foundational, constitutionally-mandated and structural feature of the American republic. Trump’s claims are so far from anything even remotely legal or constitutional that I doubt even the corrupted federal judiciary will have much truck with it.
But Trump will definitely try. We already know this. So this is a reminder not only of the established and clearly delineated constitutional role of states in administering federal elections. It’s a reminder of the critical role of the separate sovereignty of the states, a sovereign authority that is separate from the hierarchy of federal power even as its law is inferior to federal law.
As the courts now interpret the law, the president is an absolute monarch within the federal government. He can fire anyone at will. He can set aside statutes under the guise of enforcement that is “aligned” with administration “vision” and policy. No one anywhere in government that is plausibly part of the executive branch can enter into a contest or struggle with the president. If they do, he simply fires them, sends them to the ersatz constitutional cornfield as the boy Anthony did in that famous dystopic Twilight Zone episode.
But the president can’t fire governors or mayors or secretaries of state or anyone else in a state government. He can illegally withhold funds. He can pour federal police into states. But the existence of these bundles of sovereign power are simply beyond his reach. And that is the opposition’s greatest power, its strategic depth to parry and contest the designs of a lawless demagogue while the forces of opposition build.
