Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25626-20170620165203/@comment-25626-20170705232447

Turtle Fan wrote: I'll post a full summary and commentary when I finish, but I don't mind answering specific questions in the meantime.

Truman delays the presidential election until November 1953. Eisenhower accepts this on behalf of the GOP (informally, he's neither the party's nominee at the time nor does he officially hold any position inside the party at all) in exchange for Truman repeating that he has no intention of running in that election, so the extra year he's buying himself is definitely going to be his last year in office.

Congressional elections will still take place in '52, which will get Congress back to a full complement. Truman actually uses this as his constitutional rationale for delaying the election, on the grounds that, if Congress isn't in session when the Electoral College meets, it can't certify the result. That's a bit dubious: The lack-of-quorum thing is problematic as always (and by the way, HT repeats the special elections vs gubernatorial appointments goof yet again), and Congress could always certify the result at some point between January 3 and January 19. Still, at least he tried to come up with a constitutional justification, rather than saying "We're doing it this way just because."

I haven't gotten up to the point in the book where they hold elections yet, but everyone's expecting a Republican win. The book ends, by the way, with Aaron Finch at a New Year's Eve party (I flipped ahead to see what kind of time table we're dealing with here) so we should get the election result but not see the new session sworn in. Well that's interesting. I was really looking forward to having another '52 election for this project, but that is an intriguing way of handling things. Certainly never something that's actually happened in history, so it has that virtue.

The scheme, however, is problematic for the reasons you've listed. I have to wonder if HT is just tacitly admitting that the whole of the House was wiped out. The adjusting quorum rule would be irrelevant in that event, and thus getting Reps elected (ahem) would probably be the appropriate focus of the election. Otherwise, the only other "good argument" is that the surviving House is so small that it doesn't represent the American people fully, especially considering we started with 434 in the House and 96 in the Senate. But that's more of a "spirit of the Constitution" argument. A strict reading of the law shouldn't prevent even a tiny number of Representatives from participating in the count and making it legal.