Federalist Society co-founder Stephen Calabresi said that President Trump’s tweet suggesting to postpone the election is “fascistic” and “grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment.”
“Until recently, I had taken as political hyperbole the Democrats’ assertion that President Trump is a fascist,” Calabresi wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times. “But this latest tweet is fascistic and is itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate.”
Calabresi noted that he has voted Republican in every presidential election since 1980, including for Trump in 2016. He said he had defended the president against the Mueller investigation and against the impeachment investigation.
The Federalist Society is an influential conservative and libertarian organization that advocates for textualist and originalist interpretation of the Consitutiton.
“Election Day was fixed by a federal law passed in 1845, and the Constitution itself in the 20th Amendment specifies that the newly elected Congress meet at noon on Jan. 3, 2021, and that the terms of the president and vice president end at noon on Jan. 20, 2021.”
SWIFT BACKLASH AFTER TRUMP SUGGESTS DELAYING THE ELECTION
Calabresi called on every Republican in Congress to tell Trump he can’t postpone the election. Otherwise, he said they “should never be elected to Congress again.”
“With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???” the president tweeted.
The tweet drew immediate backlash from both the left and the right. Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said in a local TV interview in his home state of Kentucky that the 2020 election date “is set in stone.”
And House Republican Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California stressed that “never in the history of the federal elections have we ever not held an election and we should go forward with our election.”
Former Rep. Zach Wamp, a conservative from Tennessee who’s working with the election advocacy group Issue One to push for Congress to approve more election security funding, told Fox News that the president’s tweet is “going over like a lead balloon among Republicans and Democrats.”
The president has repeatedly railed against the dramatic increase in balloting by mail during the primaries amid concerns over in-person voting due to the coronavirus.
Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden in April said “[m]ark my words, I think he is going to try to kick back the election somehow, come up with some rationale why it can’t be held. That’s the only way he thinks he can possibly win.”
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Trump, when pressed on the charge, denied he had thoughts of delaying the election, saying, “[w]hy would I do that?”