Day to day, Donald Trump’s judicial strategy …

The goal of Trump and the Republicans is to end up involving the Supreme Court, a court that has a large Conservative majority (six to three) after the president has served in that legislature. the appointment of three judges, the last of them, the ultra-conservative Amy Coney Barrett a week before the elections. And the gap Trump wants to get into is due to the country’s frequent failure to implement the country’s laws and constitution on the electoral process and on the process for electing the president after the vote count is over.

To deploy his legal strategy, the New York mogul will have to play around with the following key dates through January 20, a 73-day route in which Biden hopes to fortify his path to the White House.

December 8, appointment of delegates

Until December 8, the president will try to put all possible obstacles before the courts on the conduct of polling day or on the process of sending or counting votes. Why December 8? Because on this day, states must select the delegates they will send to the electoral college vote for the new president in a session to be held on the 14th of this month and that, in fact, this is the second front on which Trump could act, trying to change the vote of delegates.

Delegates vote that day, but ratification of this result is effected by Congress in Washington January 6, which would open up another possible three-and-a-half-week window for new resources to continue to bog down the process if Trump loses the Dec. 14 vote; and I would lose it with the results that are on the table at the moment, that is to say with Biden wins in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona. That’s why the first thing Trump wants to attack is voting at the polls.

Since last Tuesday, the United States has been waiting for the minute-by-minute vote count, waiting for the last minute. Officially, states always have several days and often weeks. In the United States, the tradition was established that the candidate who saw himself as an irreparable loser called out the winner and accepted his defeat, almost always on the same election night. Hillary Clinton was lazy, but ended up calling Trump in 2016 at 2:30 a.m. And it seemed late to us. But legality is what it is: the limit to certify a result is one week in six states; between November 10 and 30 for 26 states and Washington DC; in December for another 14 and there are even four that don’t have a cap (don’t worry, it’s Hawaii, New Hampshire, Tennessee and Rhode Island). So this is never resolved when every vote is counted. Simply, the projections of the parties, the polling stations and the media, and the first polls guide the file and during the following hours we declare ourselves the loser. This is where the other wins. You never wait to count all the votes.

Trump is playing this trick to justify his legal action for electoral fraud in order to delay and obstruct the process and ultimately end up convincing a judge to overturn part of the election laws of states like Pennsylvania so that cancel the post ballot that took place after Tuesday’s election and which is coming back overwhelmingly to Biden. None of this would happen if the votes were counted on the same election night and if there was a body responsible for announcing the final results.

So far, all lawsuits against the vote or their recount in Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia and Nevada have been quickly dropped. On the one the Republicans put in Pennsylvania on Saturday, that state’s attorney general responded to the high court that there had been no fraud in handling the mail-in vote. In any case, according to the prosecutor, it’s a few hundred votes and Biden has an advantage of 37,298 votes. The Supreme Court has yet to rule on this, but even if it overturned those votes, it would have no relevance to the end result and Trump’s defeat in Pennsylvania and, therefore, his re-election.

The electoral college and the “infidel” delegate

Whoever obtains 270 votes in this body in the vote on December 14 will be president. If Trump fails to overcome any state in the current tally, the difference between the two candidates will be 74 votes, impossible to eliminate by trickery. However, If Trump, with resources, somehow manages to win over Pennsylvania and Georgia would remain two voices behind Biden, and here another door opens for possible games of the New York tycoon.. This is why Trump will demand the vote count in Georgia, which he is entitled to have so little difference between the two (roughly 10,000 ballots) and why he is posing a huge legal battle in Pennsylvania. Its objective is to take control of these states and their delegates.

The key is in the following detail: all those elected by their state to the electoral college are not required to vote for their candidate. This opens the door to a tamayazo, with which Trump could afford to go to the Electoral College vote on the 14th with technically fewer delegates than Biden.

In American history it has sometimes happened that a delegate votes for the opposite candidate, but always in protest and never in scenarios where the end result of the popular will might be altered. According to Fairvote.org, an organization that oversees the disappearance of the electoral college, this has happened 85 times, including three abstentions.

In total, 17 states do not have laws requiring their delegate to vote for their party’s candidate, so if Trump were to win Pennsylvania and Georgia, he could try to convince a Democratic delegate (or those who were needed) to vote. for him and would be president since with a tie of 269 votes, the election would go to the House of Representatives, not in the form of one vote per seat but one vote for each state and there are more Republican states than Democrats. Trump would be president.

In addition, two states where these laws exist which bind the delegate to an electoral result, paradoxically have Democratic governors, but republican parliaments. One of them is Michigan. The other, precisely, Pennsylvania. And the Constitution says nothing about the obligation of a state government to choose its delegates based on the outcome of the general election vote. The citizens of Pennsylvania voted for Biden, but the Republican state parliament could elect two delegates from that party and they would not violate the Constitution.

January 6, the Senate ratifies the Electoral College

If, ultimately, the recounts end with Biden’s victory in the states that remain unresolved and no appeal or maneuver by Trump succeeds, until December 14, the Democrat would be pre-elected president by the Electoral College, a result that Congress must validate and formalize January 6 to take office on the 20 of this month, according to the real estate date set by the constitution. The last trick that would remain for Trump is that, if the Senate finally remains in Republican power, try to modify by the action of this chamber the result of the vote of the electoral college, with the support of an intervention of the Supreme Court, marked conservative look.

Meanwhile, during all these weeks, the outgoing president can only carry out ordinary management of the country which, in practice, should already be in the hands of the transition teams between the outgoing president and the future president. Trump could refuse to have transition teams. There is nothing legal that requires you to do this. In any case, Joe Biden has already started them.

The names of the first team “Biden-Harris”

Joe Biden, however, convinced of the victory at the polls, began to walk. Last Wednesday, he launched his “Biden-Harris Administration” transition team website and the names of those who make up this campus are already known. And even those around Donald Trump have started to comment on this transition process, a sign that, deep down, the possible defeat of the current president is starting to be accepted as very real. On Friday, in fact, the director of the National Economic Council of the Trump administration, Larry kudlow, called for tranquility and assured CNBC that “there will be a peaceful transfer of powers, as is always done”.

At the top of Biden’s team is Ted kaufman, appointed at the beginning of the year by the Democratic candidate for this purpose. Kaufman, according to The independent, he drafted laws on presidential transitions as a senator and adviser Biden. Depending on the medium PoliticoKaufman’s goal is that by inauguration day, that is, by January 20, around 350 people will be working on this team.

John abraham, legal counsel under the Obama administration, will be the director of day-to-day operations; Jeffrey Zients, an economist in the Obama administration, will serve on Biden’s advisory board; as advisers will be the Democratic candidate in the last primaries, Pete Buttigieg, as well as the candidate and senator in Washington, Elizabeth warren.

In other sections, Biden named for environmental issues Cecilia martinez, director of the NGO Centro por la Tierra, la Energía y la Democracia and who in 2020 was chosen by the magazine Time as one of the most influential people of the year; Susan rice, Ambassador of the United States to the UN between 2009 and 2013; or Teresa romero, president of the union of agricultural workers.

To demonstrate his desire to unite Joe Biden’s country, he appointed two well-known Republicans to this team of advisers: Bob mcdonald, former secretary of veterans affairs, and above all, Cindy mccain, widow of John McCain, the late Republican senator and that party’s presidential candidate in the 2008 Obama election.

Cindy McCain campaigned for Biden in Arizona and was even at the Democratic convention that launched Obama’s vice president’s candidacy. Asked last Friday on ABC about her involvement with Biden, McCain’s widow could not have been more adamant: “My husband would like the best for the United States to be done and the best for the United States at the moment is not to vote for our party but support Joe Biden “.

As Biden pointed out in his Friday night speech, he and Harris are already working with a team on what will be his administration’s two priorities “from day one: one plan to control the pandemic and another for economic recovery. . because there are 20 million unemployed “.

* From the public newspaper of Spain, special for Page 12.