On Wed, Sep 2, 2026, at 09:48 PM, Charles wrote: > > Teso says the USPS scheme "is not a plan to suspend the election." Wrong, > because it overlooks a variation of suspending the election: a messed-up > Portal will lead to confusion and crisis about election outcomes. The > result would be to throw out the election in a number of states, leaving > their current Representatives and Senators in place. Count on the Supreme > Court to approve this shit. That alone could stop the House from going > Democratic, as well as having unpredictable consequences for the > functioning of bourgeois democracy even at the crippled level to which the > Administration and the Court have already reduced it. > > As for Teso resurrecting Harrington about micro-sects, the latter > discussed the long view, arguing for his reformism versus the Bolshevik > road. That is irrelevant here. The issue is the midterms on Nov. 3, two > months from now: what should small left groups do between now and then? > > > > > > Reply ( #window-269538493 ) > Like ( # ) > ( # ) >
Charles has described the mechanism better than he thinks, and it is worth being clear that his scenario is my argument rather than an objection to it. Nothing is suspended. A portal produces discrepancies, discrepancies produce contested returns, contested returns produce litigation, and the litigation is resolved by a court staffed on the same principle as the agency. That is what administering an election rather than abolishing it looks like. The word "suspension" implies a decision someone signs. The danger here is that no one has to sign anything. But the constitutional mechanics need correcting, because Charles has the consequence backwards, and the corrected version is worse. If a House election is voided, the incumbent does not stay. The Twentieth Amendment ends every House term at noon on January 3 regardless of whether a successor has been chosen. A voided election produces a vacancy, not a holdover. Same for the Senate, except that under the Seventeenth Amendment most states authorize the governor to make a temporary appointment, which in the states most exposed to mail-ballot disruption often means a Democratic governor filling the seat. So the danger is not a frozen Congress. It is a shrunken one. A quorum is a majority of the House, and control turns on members chosen and sworn. Void enough elections in high mail-ballot districts, and you do not preserve the current membership. You subtract from it, disproportionately on one side, and hand control of a smaller chamber to whoever lost fewer seats to nullification. Charles reaches roughly the right political conclusion by the wrong route, and the right route is more alarming, because a vacancy needs no theory of holdover to justify it. It is just an empty chair. On the second point, the Anatomy of the Micro-Sect is by Hal Draper, not Michael Harrington, and the difference is the whole matter. Harrington argued for realignment inside the Democratic Party. Draper was a third-camp revolutionary who wrote that essay against the sects from inside revolutionary politics, and his charge was not that they took the long view. It was that they substituted a program for a social force, then treated the absence of the force as evidence of the program's purity. That is not a long-view argument. It is the most immediate tactical question there is, and it is exactly the question Charles is asking. So, two months, small forces. What follows from Charles's own scenario: The decisive material is the paper trail, and the people who will see the discrepancies first are postal workers. Agitation into APWU and NALC locals, aimed at getting members to document what the portal actually does to real mail rather than at passing a resolution about it, is small, specific, and within reach. Second, county and state election officials are already the point of resistance, since the scheme requires them to hand over voter lists. Supporting refusals in the states where officials are balking is work that scales to the forces we have. Third, prepare now for the certification fight in November, because that is where the nullification Charles describes would actually occur, and it will occur locally, in canvassing boards, before it reaches any court. None of that requires anyone to first agree that capitalism cannot be reformed. -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#43267): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/43267 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/121053097/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
