It’s probably safe to say this election has been one of the screwiest in recent memory, if not in history. A powerful, establishment democrat is squaring off against the embodiment of progressive politics on the left, while the right is a doltish cavalcade of failed fact-checks and in-fighting, led by a savage billionaire who appears to incite violence wherever he goes — a wet dream for tabloids and the press.
In all likelihood, the general election will come down to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, but if Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, and the rest of the Republican-led Congress have anything to say on the matter, there will be another candidate who will show up in the 11th hour and win the day.
History shows us how this could be done.
The 1824 general election was, like this one, a screwy election. The Democratic-Republican Party, realizing they could not settle on any one person to nominate for president, imploded, splintering into factions, each supporting a different candidate. John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, William Harris Crawford, and Henry Clay all ran for the highest elected office in the land, but none of them could secure enough electoral votes to win the election.
Because of the split, the decision on who would be the next President of the United States was taken out of the hands of the people and the Electoral College and deferred to the House of Representatives. The 12th Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1804, states:
“The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President.”
Since Henry Clay was the Speaker of the House, he was automatically disqualified from the race. Ultimately, John Quincy Adams would be elected the sixth President of the United States by virtue of 13 states voting in his favor.
190 years later, Rep. Paul Ryan is in Henry Clay’s chair, the potential key-holder for Trump’s undoing and a Republican victory in the 2016 general election.
On March 17, conservative leaders met “to discuss ways to unite the right against Trump” and “the feasibility of mounting a third-party challenge.” These leaders also discussed strategies that may negate the need to resort to such action, deliberating about “whether a coalition of anti-Trump forces could prevent the billionaire mogul from securing the party’s presidential nomination.”
Even though the individuals at the meeting realized mounting a third-party candidate this late in the game would be difficult to successfully pull off, there was interest in the scenario, though they agreed it makes more sense to do what they can to stop Trump by July.
The point is, such a plan has been discussed, it has happened before, and given how Republicans in Congress have been handling political affairs, there is no reason to think they wouldn’t try it as some sort of Hail Mary pass to get what they want.
Earlier this month, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg hinted at the possibility of the Republican-led Congress potentially having the last laugh in an election where Bloomberg, an Independent, would be a candidate:
“In a three-way race, it’s unlikely any candidate would win a majority of electoral votes, and then the power to choose the president would be taken out of the hands of the American people and thrown to Congress. The fact is, even if I were to receive the most popular votes and the most electoral votes, victory would be highly unlikely, because most members of Congress would vote for their party’s nominee. Party loyalists in Congress — not the American people or the Electoral College — would determine the next president.”
Republicans have two goals during this election, with the first being to keep Hillary Clinton (or Bernie Sanders, assuming he gets nominated) out of the White House and the second being to deal with the Trump problem. Even though it appears the American people want Donald Trump to be the Republican presidential nominee, the Republicans, it would seem, realize that not only would Trump be an inept candidate and an inept president, but that Trump is also an existential threat to the Republican brand.
So why not, hypothetically speaking, mount an insurrection against your party’s candidate? Why not push a Mitt Romney into the race as a third-party candidate, saturate the Electoral College, and leave the choice for the next President of the United States not in the hands of the citizenry, but in the hands of the man who ran with your guy four years ago?
This is just a hypothetical scenario. Even if the Republican Congress would actively put in the effort to pull off something like this, it may not be Mitt Romney they choose. It could be Cruz, Rubio, a Cruz-Rubio tandem, or anybody else who would fit the bill as a “movement conservative,” according to Rep. Trent Franks, R-Arizona, who attended the March 17 meeting.
Republicans have until August to decide. Even if they ultimately choose not to take this route, it is unnerving knowing that it’s on the table.
Featured image by Gage Skidmore, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.
[H/T Huffington Post]
