A right implies a remedy
If you think Joe Biden can be booted from the Oval Office over the 2020 election results, then you don't think much of the Constitution
A conspiracy theory continues to circulate -- to the alarm of Homeland Security officials -- that the outcome of last year's Presidential election, the subsequent certification of the election results by Congress, and the inauguration of Joe Biden as President could be overturned.
■ The election result was clear: Joe Biden won and Donald Trump lost. The popular vote totals (which are not dispositive) and the Electoral College results (which are) delivered the same result. Anyone who wants can check the only ballots that count. Yet the talk of a restoration of the previous administration lingers.
■ In Federalist Paper 43, James Madison wrote that "a right implies a remedy; and where else could the remedy be deposited, than where it is deposited by the Constitution?" As a Constitutional authority, nobody rivals Madison: He was one of the Constitution's primary authors.
■ Madison's question is the definitive statement on the matter of reconsidering, retracting, or somehow overturning a Constitutional election. If there were a right to do so, the remedy would be found in the document. The Constitution says a great deal about how a Presidential election is conducted. It says nothing about retraction. Not a word. There is no do-over. No challenging the umpire. No stripping the title from the victor. No asterisk on the power of the elected.
■ The United States -- and the powers vested in its officers, including the President -- has no sovereign. There is no individual of final appeal. We have people who grant power by their own consent to their government, and we have states which each have organic legal standing all their own Don't forget: a state is admitted to the Union; states are not willed into existence by some mysterious authority residing in DC. (Delaware was a state before it became the first "united" state.) The Constitution is the final say on our law, and if a matter or a process is documented in that law, there is no ethereal plane of law standing by to sweep it aside.
■ A right implies a remedy. And there is no Constitutional remedy for re-counting a result of the Electoral College -- thus there is no right to demand a do-over. The election of 2020 is over. The President has been duly elected. And anyone who adheres to a belief that Joe Biden can be jettisoned from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue -- other than strictly by the Constitutional mechanism of impeachment and removal -- is professing a belief that the Constitution isn't the final word on matters. Madison says otherwise.
