Mayhem on Capitol Hill

Vappala Balachandran

Former Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat

Donald John Trump, America’s 45th President, has many ignominious ‘firsts’ to his name. He is the first President to wage wars on his own government departments and the US media, denigrating them as the ‘Deep State’. He exonerated the Russian President at the Helsinki summit in 2018 from serious charges of aggressive electronic interference, thereby embarrassing his own agencies.

He insulted senior Senator Jeff Sessions a number of times, once calling him an ‘idiot’, while he was holding the post of Attorney General, which was created soon after the Constitution was framed in 1787. He is also the first President to be so openly exposed to allegations of predatory sexual deviations and corruption.

Now he has crowned his baseness by exhorting his armed goons to march towards the Capitol, causing deaths and mayhem, thereby inviting international ridicule to the most powerful country in the world. His incitement was a scene torn out of Hollywood’s surrealistic movies of fictitious Presidents betraying their countries through sedition and insurrection.

Trump has also proved, either due to Congressional reticence or the passivity of his own senior executive aides, that it is possible to become a ‘constitutional dictator’, a fear that was voiced by the ‘anti-Federalists’ during the constitutional debates in 1787. They had then framed laws on ‘separation of powers’ and ‘checks and balances’ in the Constitution to “prevent a tyrannous concentration of power in any one branch, to check and restrain Government and, ultimately, to protect the rights and liberties of citizens”.

The First Article gave the Congress ‘all legislative powers’. The Second granted ‘executive powers’ to the President. The Third Article conferred all ‘judicial powers’ to the Supreme Court. James Madison had then proposed ‘auxiliary precautions’ as ‘checks and balances’ allowing each branch to check and balance the others. The presidential veto and nomination powers to higher judiciary to be approved by the Senate, impeachment powers by the Congress and the Supreme Court’s power to strike down laws passed by the Congress were in this direction.

Trump was perhaps the first to declare that his nominations of ‘Conservatives’ to the higher judiciary was for his partisan political ends. It speaks highly of the courts that it did not happen that way. However, the Congress failed to check Trump’s transgressions as the Republican-majority Senate gave more importance to partisan political alignments. The result was seen on January 6.

The seemingly labyrinthine state polls and the ‘electoral votes’ were also devised as insurance from meddling by predatory candidates like Trump who had disregarded prudence by calling the Secretary of State in Georgia to swing votes in his favour.

During the 1787 Philadelphia Convention, 13 US colonies joining the new Union wanted to preserve their independent decision-making powers, including elections. Initially, they considered three choices for the President’s election: elected by the Congress, elected by the state legislatures, or through direct popular elections. It was felt that a President elected by the Congress would have to appease Congressional majority and become a demagogue. In the second and third situations, big states would dominate smaller states.

Hence a ‘Committee of Eleven’ recommended a system of election by some “most knowledgeable and most informed” group of ‘Electors’ to be appointed by the states. Thus, Article II lays down the process of presidential election: “Each State shall appoint in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of Electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress”. The emphasis is on the words “as the Legislature thereof may direct”. As a result, the procedure on the presidential elections differs from state to state.

In the beginning, there was no stipulation that these Electors should be political persons or be elected. Over the years, all states decided to directly elect the presidential Electors. So, the presidential polls are 51 simultaneous state elections rather than one nationally consolidated election (50 states and the district of Columbia). Thus, Trump had no authority to make that call to the Georgia Secretary of State.

The system of Electoral College was copied from the Roman “Centuriate Assembly” system in which adult males were divided according to wealth into groups of 100, with each 100 having one vote. In America, the states form these “Centuriate Groups”, their votes depending on the size of their delegation to the Congress.

Thus every four years on the first Tuesday in November the voters in states choose the Slate of Electors. The next process is the allotment of electoral votes in each state. Under the “Winner Takes All” system, all the electoral votes are allotted to the slate getting the majority of popular votes in a state under Article II which considers each state as one entity. The same system is followed in the case of a deadlock when the House of Representatives elects the President. One state has only one vote in that situation, irrespective of the number of different party representatives.

As regards India, one cannot but regret how misdirected our diplomacy was in the US by openly backing Trump for re-election through special events like Texas’ ‘Howdy, Mody?’ in 2019 and Motera’ ‘Namaste Trump’ in February 2020. The needless controversy in December 2019, when our External Affairs Minister refused an invitation by the Democrat-majority House Foreign Relations Committee was another, ignoring the straws in the wind on the US poll trends.

Equally strange was the description of Biden’s followers as “Biden’s gang” who would not be favourable to India by a leading Indian-American Hindu idealogue while he was holding a pre-election discussion in May 2020 on TV. The provocation was the February 4, 2020, Seattle City Council resolution criticising arrests of anti-CAA protesters in India.

Join Whatsapp Channel of The Tribune for latest updates.