Is It Still a ‘Coup’ If Democrats Do It?

There was a lot of talk about how Donald Trump’s challenges to the election amounted to a “coup.” Some of that was just a confusion of methods: It’s not a coup to have an election resolved through the legal process of recounts and court challenges — at least, not unless the judges themselves abandon the path of applying written law, something conservative judges have been quite unwilling to do. (This would be my quibble with Jason Steorts’ response to my earlier column on Trump-coup rhetoric — a court process is not the same as asking a legislature to override the vote counts, and it’s important to distinguish the two.) Trump’s apparent, generally unspoken strategy of seeking a legislative override has been deeply improper and damaging. But it was never a realistic plan.

As my prior column noted, it was fanciful to think that Republicans would cooperate, in numbers sufficient to make such a scheme possible, in simply handing Trump the election through legislative action without Trump having made a successful case in court that he was actually robbed of the election by fraud. There just are not enough Republicans willing to take that step — not when you have Attorney General Bill Barr stating publicly that he has “not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

But are we still calling it a “coup” when it’s a Democrat asking the legislature to override the vote counts? Because that is what Democrat Rita Hart is doing in the race for Iowa’s Second Congressional District. The state has certified the results, and Hart lost to Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks by the agonizing margin of six votes. Instead of challenging the result in court, Hart is appealing to Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic caucus in the House:

Hart announced she plans to appeal to the House to consider ballots not included in the recount. The overturning of state-certified results by the House is rare and last happened after the 1984 elections. Hart could have challenged the results in court. But election challenges in Iowa must be completed by Dec. 8, and Hart’s campaign did not believe that left enough time to resolve the issue. Miller-Meeks’ campaign lawyer, Alan Ostergren, said in a statement that Hart “has chosen to avoid Iowa’s judicial system because she knows that a fair, objective analysis of this election would show what we already know: Miller-Meeks won.”

That 1984 decision, which overturned a House victory in Indiana by Republican Rick McIntyre, and gave the seat back to Democratic incumbent Frank McCloskey (who held it for another decade) left deep bitterness among House Republicans. It will be interesting to see if the people who went ballistic at Trump and Republicans are similarly outraged at Hart and Democrats.