The anti-Trump revolt in the Republican Party has gone full throttle, which is another way of saying the GOP establishment is desperate. How desperate? Well, consider the best-case scenarios from their point of view.
Either
a) They scare off enough voters and/or bolster Cruz and Rubio to the point where Trump fails to win the required number of delegates ahead of the convention. They would then presumably seek to freeze out Trump, even if he is the clear favorite of the primary electorate, in favor of either one of the other primary candidates or a last-minute knight in shining armor like (don’t laugh) Mitt Romney.
Or
b) They can’t prevent Trump becoming the nominee and they run an “independent” third-party candidate to compete against both him and Hillary. If that candidate does well enough to prevent either of the others winning a majority of electoral college seats, the race — per Article II of the Constitution — gets thrown to the House of Representatives, over which the GOP has a rock-solid grip that won’t change even after November. At that point, the most logical outcome is that the candidate in third place (the independent) becomes president by congressional fiat.
Notice the common pattern here? Yup, the will of the people goes in the shredder. Of course it’s just as likely, if not more so, that a split Republican Party goes down in flames and the Democrats take the White House and a majority in the Senate. But consider, for a moment, the consequences of either of the anti-Trumpers’ Hail Mary scenarios: these so-called moderate Republicans will no doubt argue, as Paul Ryan and his cohorts wave the guy who comes in third into the White House, that sometimes you have to burn down an election to save an election.
The rest of us, though, might want to call it the worst constitutional crisis since the Civil War. Fingers crossed it doesn’t come to that.
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