'No longer amateurs': Legal expert says one tricky law could stop Trump coup

One complicated congressional law could stand between the White House and a former president Donald Trump armed with legal wiles rather than Electoral College votes, according to a new analysis.

Georgetown University Law Center professor Neal Katyal argued Wednesday in a New York Times editorial that the nation should brace itself for a sprawling legal battle should Trump lose the presidential election to Vice President Kamala Harris in November.

"The rogues are no longer amateurs," wrote Katyal. "They have spent the last four years going pro, meticulously devising a strategy across multiple fronts — state legislatures, Congress, executive branches and elected judges — to overturn any close election."

Katyal details several paths a defeated Trump could take to seize executive power — among them challenging ballots in swing state lawsuits,sowing chaos on local election boards and forcing fake electors on allies in the state legislature — before landing on the one through Congress.

His analysis comes with good and bad news introduced with an alarming disclaimer.

"The Congress has the power to swing the entire election," Katyal said. "The rules are complex — even as a law professor I can barely make sense of them."

Katyal's good news is a 2022 law that made it more difficult for a Congressional member to object to a state's vote by mandating 20 percent of members in both houses sign on to the challenge, which must win a simple majority in both chambers as well.

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The bad news Katyal previewed in his disclaimer.

"The rules are so complicated that they could be stretched, wrongly, to give Congress the power to select the next president by sustaining bogus objections," he wrote. "Don’t get me wrong, such maneuvering is totally inconsistent with the 2022 law. But it can be attempted and create chaos."

Katyal is not optimistic that certain members of Congress will put correct legal interpretation above loyalty to their party's presidential nominee.

The Republican Party, according to Katyal, can no longer be trusted to hold democratic norms as sacrosanct.

"We have much to fear," Katyal wrote.

"It does not require much imagination to see a bad faith actor in Congress try to squeeze through bogus election fraud theories and plunge the country into uncertainty on Jan. 6," Katyal wrote.

"The 20 percent voting threshold is meant to avoid crackpot election fraud theories, but these days more than 20 percent of Congress might be inclined to support a crackpot theory."

The safest bet to ensure the protectors of election integrity survive the 2024 presidential election is for Americans to vote for the candidate who has never tried to dismantle them, the law professor argued.

"If either candidate wins the Electoral College decisively," he concluded, "any dispute will be rendered academic."