It’s time for Democrats to follow the precedent of Bush v. Gore and stop the process of certifying this election.
It’s worth remembering that had an official statewide recount in Florida been completed — after the Supreme Court had already handed the presidency to George W. Bush — it might have given Al Gore the election.
This time, we have an election that we know Hillary Rodham Clinton won by nearly three million votes, an Electoral College vote being rocked by the Hamilton Electors, and an election that was gravely compromised by the Russians. We also know that Trump and his people have substantial, well-documented connections to Putin’s Russia.
The Hamilton Electors are calling for a national security briefing for the Electoral College, saying that it is the job of the electors to prevent efforts by “foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils,” in the words of Alexander Hamilton.
Following the revelations from major news organizations that the CIA believes the Russian effort to influence the U.S. election was not just a desire to sow chaos, but specifically to get Trump elected, the Hamilton Electors have written a letter — now signed by 40 members — asking for a national security briefing before they cast their ballots on Dec. 19.
Is Donald Trump the agent of a foreign government that Hamilton warned us about? We don’t know, but he’s done nothing to convince us he’s not. His nomination of Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson has reinvigorated the question. Tillerson had an estimated $500 billion in oil drilling deals with Russia that have been put on hold by U.S. sanctions following the Russian invasion of Crimea.
While taking that kind of oil out of the ground might be a grave threat to the future of the planet, it certainly could reinvigorate Russia’s flagging economy, which has been seriously hurt by the emergence of the U.S. as a petro-power with the expansion of fracking.
Furthermore, Donald Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns makes it hard to know much about the extent of his indebtedness, but we do know that after his multiple bankruptcies, U.S. banks stopped lending to him. That means that he is literally indebted to foreign powers.
As lifelong Republican Max Boot wrote in the Los Angeles Times in July, “Trump has sought and received funding from Russian investors for his business ventures.” Since we don’t know how solvent the Trump business operation is (but it always seems to teeter on the edge of bankruptcy), we don’t know whether Trump’s Russian creditors are in a position to lean on him. But we do know that he has refused to divest himself of his business interests, and his suggestion that he might give over the reins to two sons in no way eliminates that threat.
Trump’s advisers are a stunningly pro-Russian group. Paul Manafort remained his de facto campaign manager even after he was forced out by revelations of the extent of his Russia deals. Michael Flynn, Trump’s pick for national security adviser, flew to Moscow last year to attend a gala banquet celebrating Russia Today, the Kremlin’s propaganda channel, and was seated at the head table near Putin.
Carter Page, a Trump campaign adviser, has extensive investments in Russian energy giant Gazprom, and reportedly announced the Tillerson appointment in a lecture at the state-run Rossiya Segodnya news agency before Trump announced it to the United States.
And then there was the revelation in October by Newsweek reporter Kurt Eichenwald that Trump read from a faked Russian document from its Sputnik News propaganda site at a rally in Pennsylvania, confusing Eichenwald with John Podesta and claiming there was a smoking gun on Clinton and Benghazi.
In an op-ed published Dec. 14 in the New York Times, Dahlia Lithwick and David Cohen suggested that Democrats need to “fight like Republicans,” recalling the scorched-earth campaign after Florida was still contested the morning after the 2000 election.
This time, you don’t have to be a partisan of either party to question the results; you just have to be an American with concerns about whether Putin should run this country. With inauguration day still six weeks away, there is plenty of time if people act now.
Laura Briggs is chairwoman and professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She writes about U.S. foreign policy and reproductive politics.