Reaching into the bag of tricks Could Republicans legally challenge the Biden withdrawal?
Fellow campaigners of Donald Trump are publicly questioning whether a new Democratic line-up would be permissible so close to the election. Experts describe such considerations as unfounded or even ridiculous.
25.07.2024, 00:00
25.07.2024, 08:20
dpa
No time? blue News summarizes for you
- Kamala Harris has started the election campaign for the office of US President with a strong Democratic tailwind.
- The Republicans are now throwing sand in the campaign gears by sowing doubts about the legal admissibility of her new nomination at this point in time.
- According to legal experts, however, these considerations are not tenable, as Biden had not even been nominated yet.
Even before President Joe Biden had officially announced his withdrawal from the race, a consideration had been brought into play from the challenger's circles: Would it be possible to take legal action to prevent the Democrats from nominating another candidate instead of the incumbent? Legal experts play it down. Advocates of the idea are nevertheless announcing steps in this direction.
"It's ridiculous when people talk about 'replacing Biden'. He hasn't even been nominated yet," says Richard Winger, a leading election law expert and long-standing publisher of the newsletter "Ballot Access News", which specializes in the topic of access to elections.
The nomination is usually made by a vote of the delegates at a party convention - which is still to come. The Democrats would therefore have nothing to fear.
A legal dispute would be possible in some states
In June, a conservative institute in Washington initiated a debate about what would happen if Biden were to abandon his re-election bid - which he finally did on Sunday after a long period of speculation. "There is potential for pre-election litigation in some states that would make the process difficult and possibly unsuccessful," wrote Mike Howell, who heads the Oversight Project at the Heritage Foundation. In Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin, attempts could be made to block the withdrawal of a candidate in this way.
Mike Johnson, the Republican chairman of the House of Representatives, also expressed this view on Sunday, a few hours before Biden's official statement. "I think they're facing legal hurdles in some of these states and I would expect there to be lawsuits there. And they're going to have to deal with that. They have a real problem," the congressman said on CNN's "State of the Union."
Democrats have met deadlines for nominations
However, this assessment appears to be controversial even among Republicans. "That's a pretty dubious claim," says Trey Grayson, who was Secretary of State in the US state of Kentucky for two terms and has held other important positions within the party. "The deadlines have not yet expired and the Democrats have not yet nominated anyone."
Delegates from all states, outlying areas and the capital district will elect a candidate for president according to a set procedure. Biden had already secured an overwhelming majority in the party's internal primaries in March and had been considered the Democrats' likely candidate ever since. However, the final decision would not have been made until the upcoming party convention anyway.
If Biden had only announced his withdrawal after the party conference, things would have been more complicated. However, experts see little reason for major difficulties. "The parties control the process of nominating their candidate," emphasizes legal scholar Edward B. Foley from Ohio State University. "I just don't see how the Republican Party or anyone associated with the Republican Party would be in a position to start a lawsuit here."
Biden has called himself a candidate - irrelevant
According to an analysis of the relevant laws in the US states by the AP news agency, no deadlines have yet passed anywhere. In Wisconsin, the deadline is September 3. In Georgia and Nevada, the two other examples listed by the Heritage Foundation, no deadline is given at all. The state with the earliest deadline is Iowa. There, candidates' names must be registered 81 days before the election, on August 16 - but in the event of a late party convention, as is the case with the Democrats this time, the deadline is postponed. In several other states, the deadline is August 22.
In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine published on July 4, Howell from the Heritage Foundation pointed out that Biden had already declared himself a candidate. This could be interpreted as him bypassing the formal process via the party convention. "Biden doing this has enormous legal implications and statutory significance for states that explicitly refer to the Democratic convention as to who appears on the ballot as the party's nominee."
Grayson denies that Biden's comments could have any legal significance. "If someone calls themselves the candidate, that doesn't make them the actual candidate," he says. "It's like when Trump called himself the candidate before the party convention. He wasn't either."
Candidates replaced after the party convention
When asked by the AP on Sunday, Howell said: "We are busy preparing our next step." Meanwhile, electoral law expert Winger emphasized that in the past, candidates have also been replaced after nominating conventions. In 1912, Vice President James Sherman, who was seeking re-election along with Republican President William Howard Taft, died just six days before the election. The fact that Nicholas Murray Butler was later nominated as a replacement had no consequences, as Taft had already lost the election at this point.
In 1972, the Democratic candidate for vice president, Thomas Eagleton, did not withdraw until after the party convention had concluded, when it became known that he had been undergoing psychiatric treatment. The Democrats nominated Sargent Shriver as his replacement at a new meeting the following week. "That happened in August. And nobody complained about it," Winger says. "It's just not a problem."
