President Donald Trump has a potential new scheme to implement his desired voter suppression and intimidation tactics against his political critics — but it’s the same old playbook federal courts already threw out when he implemented his tariffs, Hofstra University law professor James Sample told MS NOW’s Katy Tur, and it’s even more tenuous now than it was then.
“There was an interview on CNN with Peter Tickton, who Donald Trump calls his childhood friend,” said Tur. And Tickton, in that interview, said “he wants him to push an executive order to effectively seize federal control of the upcoming midterms by declaring a national emergency based on alleged foreign interference through electronic voting machines.”
“Can he do that, James?” Tur asked.
Sample’s answer was a resounding “no.”
“Let me be clear there,” said Sample. “There are emergency powers that are granted in statutes, the two primary statutes that grant the president emergency power, the National Emergencies Act and IEEPA.”
The first law, he said, “does not mention elections as one of the powers” granted the president by Congress in emergencies, while IEEPA “is the statute that was at issue in the tariff case, where it didn’t mention tariffs or taxes, and the Supreme Court struck it down.” And that law, too, doesn’t once mention elections, said Sample.
The bottom line, he said, is that “there’s no way for him to claim an emergency legally,” and his only strategy is to hope he can “outrun the courts” and put his thumb on the scale of elections before judges say he can’t.
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