Speaker Mike Johnson
Republicans – with the assistance of the far-right Heritage Foundation (architects of Project 2025) — are planning a last-ditch effort to stop Vice President Kamala Harris from getting ballot access. But Democratic-aligned attorneys are already waiting to shut it down.
Heritage has been planning for the possibility of President Joe Biden exiting the race since late June. Mike Howell, who is the director of Heritage's Oversight Project, laid out how Republicans could exploit laws in several swing states to challenge a non-Biden nominee's efforts to qualify for the ballot. But in a Tuesday report for Rolling Stone, reporters Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng wrote that the GOP's goal of preventing Harris from getting on the ballot is likely to fail.
"I am going to bet that if [Republicans] try to do this, it’ll be something that we can pull the guts out of in the time it takes to have lunch," an unnamed Democratic lawyer said.
The attorney, who called the effort "some of the dumbest bulls— I’ve ever had to read," went on to compare the effort to deny ballot access to Harris to one by former President Donald Trump's disgraced ex-attorney, John Eastman. He argued in 2020 that Harris didn't meet the presidency's natural-born citizen requirements despite being born on U.S. soil, due to her parents being immigrants. Eastman simultaneously believed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) was an eligible candidate in 2016 despite being born in Canada.
Perez and Suebsaeng previously reported that an unnamed "senior source" within the Trump campaign, as well as an individual involved with Project 2025 confided that they knew the effort to keep Harris off of ballots would fall apart. However, those sources said the goal was more to distract Democrats from the campaign trial with complex litigation in the final months of the election cycle.
“Such litigation is extremely unlikely to be successful,” Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project At UCLA’s Law School, told the outlet. “I fully expect the Democrats’ nominee to be on the ballot in every state and Washington, D.C."
Before he dropped out of the race, Biden and his campaign reportedly had calls with attorneys and legal experts who pored over how to respond if Heritage tried to argue in court that Harris wasn't able to replace Biden on the ballot. Democratic lawyers tended to agree that their arguments to the court would be "as condescending as possible" in the event Heritage followed through on their legal threats. According to Rolling Stone, one idea kicked around on the call was "scolding these Republicans for supposedly not understanding how basic terms like 'presumptive nominee' work."
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) hinted that Democrats would run into "legal impediments" if they tried to replace Biden on the top ballot line. But Democratic election attorney Marc Elias dismissed that as "frivolous threats of frivolous litigation by an election denier." He also stated that no Democratic nominee would be official anyway until after delegates at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next month officially select their party's general election candidate.
“There is currently no nominee of the Democratic Party, and so the notion that the Democratic Party is somehow precluded from choosing its nominee, pursuant to its bylaws and its rules, is preposterous,” Elias said.
“I am here to say that with 100 percent certainty that when the Democratic National Committee nominates its candidate and transmits that to the states, that person will be on the ballot in all 50 states and the District of Columbia," he added.
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
