I would like to raise two main questions of a general and hypothetical sort. But clearly, it is our specific situation in America today that I have in mind.
Imagine that someone is elected president, and that subsequently it becomes known that some sort of wrong-doing by that person’s campaign was instrumental in winning the presidency. Question:
Are there any kinds of wrong-doing that, in the American system, would nullify that election?
I’m not talking about impeachment. (In any event, I believe that offenses committed prior to assuming office are not eligible as grounds for impeachment.)
I’m talking about declaring the election to have been invalidated because of the means by which it was won. (If that question has ever arisen about an American presidential election, I am unaware of it. Nor do I know what precedents there may be in American law and electoral practice involving wrong-doing by candidates in elections for lower offices.)
If a presidential election will stand regardless of any conceivable misdeed by which the winner might have (in effect) “stolen” the election, then that ends this inquiry.
If some forms of election misconduct — election “stealing” — would lead to the invalidation of the election, and to the disqualification of the winner and the withdrawal from him of the powers of the presidency, then the less hypothetical question arises:
Is there anything that might conceivably be uncovered in the Russia/Trump scandal that would meet the criteria (whatever they are) for nullifying Trump’s election and removing him from office on that basis?
If the election were nullified, then of course the question would arise as to how the presidency would be filled between the removal of the cheater from office and the next regularly scheduled presidential election. But that question is not relevant to my inquiry here.
What I would like to ask next is this: If it were determined that the person whose rise to the presidency was the fruit of cheating so impermissible that the presidential powers he has been wielding, prior to being removed from office, were not legitimately his to use
Would anything the president has done be automatically UN-done with his removal from office?
Obviously, one cannot change the past. If the cheater were removed, the nation would still have had all the experiences, and undergone all the changes, that were the result of his having occupied the presidency during those months or years. But what about those presidential actions that would remain standing --shaping America -- into the future?
In particular, if some such scenario were to unfold to delegitimize and terminate Trump’s presidency, would that serve to undo such actions as his executive orders, and his nominations for judgeships? Is there any way in which, if it were determined that his wrong-doing that got him elected, and that therefore he was not entitled to wield those presidential powers, such actions could also be legally nullified?
It is the matter of the appointment of judges that particularly prompts me into this line of inquiry: Would the American system allow someone who — hypothetically — was not entitled to the presidential victory he apparently won, and who is therefore removed from his ill-gotten office, to appoint judges who will serve for life?