Under the headline “This Is What’s Keeping Me Up at Night,” New York Times columnist (and Charles F. Kettering Foundation Senior Fellow) David French sketches a disturbing scenario.
The Democrats may win a majority of House seats this fall. Donald Trump and many allies would decry the election as rigged and corrupt. When the House convenes in January, several defeated Republicans would file challenges, which the Committee on House Administration would consider. Controlled, as now, by Republicans, this committee would refer the final decision to the full House, also with its current composition. The Constitution says that “Each house shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members,” and the Supreme Court has clarified that there is no appeal to the courts. The House majority could vote to seat several incumbents who actually lost their elections, thus retaining Republican control.
To accomplish this outcome, the House Republican majority of 218 would have to hold together. A disproportionate number of the defeated Republican incumbents would come from the party’s more centrist and institutionalist wing. Although they would have an incentive to award their seats to themselves, that would be crossing a Rubicon. If several defeated candidates were seated, then arguably the current Republic would have ended just after its 250th anniversary. That fact would probably deter at least three Republicans, thus defeating the effort. And we might hope that many more, including the Speaker, would avoid the temptation.
But the risk is high enough that civil society must prepare. No republic can depend on the self-denying virtue of its current leaders. We should certainly expect step one: very prominent efforts to depict the election as stolen.
Citing Minnesota organizer Doran Schrantz and others, Micah Sifry envisions a mass response involving “coordinated work stoppages, business closures, and economic withdrawal, to put pressure on business elites and corporations.” I assume that the most effective time for such efforts would be while the House Administration Committee considers challenges to the election, although resistance should persist and grow in the event of an adverse vote in the full House.
Last winter, Minnesotans provided an example of a large-scale and disciplined civil action that depended on prior training and coordination. Robert F. Worth reported that 65,000 residents of the Twin Cities received training in civil resistance. Now is the time for more such preparation, and Sifry recommends Indivisible’s Hands Off Our Vote national kick-off call on Thursday July 30 and Freedom Trainers’ election defense resources. I’m also tracking the 10 Steps Campaign and Vote Riders, among othes.
These groups will tend–overall–to draw people who want the Republicans to lose the election in the first place. That category includes me. However, it is also important for people who may vote Republican to defend the election results, whoever wins. They can be more persuasive inside the House GOP caucus.
I doubt that 218 House Republicans will vote to seat candidates whom they know just lost the election. But it is plausible that 218 Republicans will convince themselves that the election really was stolen by Democrats, relying on lurid charges from the president that circulate in right-wing media. Conservatives will be the best sources of countervailing information.
As examples of efforts to organize and train people in defense of the election that are more likely to draw conservatives, I would cite The Advancing Liberty Coalition, Vet the Vote, and Mormon Women for Ethical Government, among others. Some of these groups emphasize recruiting people as volunteer poll workers while encouraging them to defend the election if necessary.
As Sherilyn Ifill wrote last year: “People are doing things. You will meet those people when you start doing things.”
See also: What our nation needs is a broad-based, pro-democracy civic movement; building power for resisting authoritarianism; learning from the Great Salt March: on civil disobedience and breaking through to mass opinion; the state of nonviolent grassroots resistance (march 2025)