RUSH: I told you it was gonna happen. It wasn’t hard. I predicted it even before Jay Carney’s press conference yesterday. I predicted that there would be media outlets who would urge Obama to move the election. The president has no power whatsoever to do this. The president cannot do it. The fact that so many people want the president to is alarming because it indicates how many people would be comfortable with that kind of autocratic, totalitarian power.
But in our constitutional system, the president has no say. I hate to tell you this, but the president can’t do a thing about this. He can go on TV, and he can suggest and he can cajole and he could talk about “fairness” and all that, but he can’t do anything. The Constitution sets the terms of the election. The states determine whether the elections are, the federal government and states together.
Congress requires the states inform it of their electors by mid-December. But the president has no say-so in when the election is. “Mr. President! Mr. President! Would you move the election?” TheyÂ’re asking Jay Carney. “Jay, would the president move the election? Huh? Huh? Will you move the election?” Slate.com is suggesting it; the Atlantic Monthly is out suggesting we move it. Can’t. It’s absolutely silly.
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RUSH: Here just one sample story on moving the election. It’s from The Politico. The headline: “Hurricane Sandy: Could It Push back the Election? — [FEMA] is preparing for Hurricane Sandy to disrupt next weekÂ’s elections, agency Administrator Craig Fugate said Monday afternoon.” Really? How’s FEMA preparing for Hurricane Sandy to disrupt the elections? What’s FEMA got to do with it? FEMA doesn’t have anything to do with this. “We are anticipating that, based on the storm, there could be impacts that would linger into next week and have impacts on the federal election,” said Craig Fugate, the FEMA administrator.
Well, he can “anticipate” all he wants, but FEMA’s got nothing to say about this. Congress sets the date of election. The states have to get their reelects in by the middle of December. They’ve got 34 days to have their electors vote. States don’t set the election day; the Congress does. The uniform date for the presidential election is in number three and title two of the US Code.
Obama doesn’t have anything to do about it; FEMA doesn’t have anything to say about it. States can set early voting within limits, but they can’t move an election. That doesn’t matter. Politico’s doing everything they can. And getting FEMA involved here, of course, is part of the psychological strategery. And, of course, here’s Slate magazine: “Could Hurricane Sandy Delay the Election? — As Hurricane Sandy begins battering the East Coast, many people in the stormÂ’s path are preparing for days of power outages.
“Meanwhile, pundits are asking how the storm could affect the outcome of the presidential election. If there are still widespread power outages on the East Coast come Nov. 6, could the election be postponed?” (Translation: We hope! We hope! Oh, please!) They don’t realize that the longer this goes, the worse it’s gonna get for Obama. If they were smart, they’d want to move the election up.
But of course that isn’t gonna help ’em, either, because Romney is leading in the early voting 52-45, plus seven. Folks, are we really such a Third World banana republic we can’t recover from a storm in a week? No, we can’t. What storm took out parts of Maryland and left the nation’s capital without power for a week? I remember being shocked at that.
Anyway, I just want you to know that there is nothing the president can do, legally. Now, he can go on TV and start tugging at heartstrings and talk about “fairness” and all of that. But legally, authoratively, authoritarianively, totalitarianally (as I invent words), he can’t do anything about the election. If he could, he could also cancel it, couldn’t he? He doesn’t have that power.