One of the nation’s top constitutional law attorneys, the well-known University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, Laurence Tribe, blasted the dark money group No Labels on Monday, calling it a “lethal scam.”
No Labels, which insists it is not a political party while attempting to get a potential candidate on the 2024 presidential ballot, reportedly is now “openly floating” a plot to throw the November election into the U.S. House of Representatives, which would mostly likely hand the White House back to Donald Trump.
“Yet as it works to gain ballot access, it has to ask voters in some states to identify themselves as members of the No Label party,” The Wall Street Journal reported in November, noting that since it technically is not a political party it does not legally have to identify its donors.
Last week, Esquire‘s Charles P. Pierce took a look at No Labels, concluding it “claims to be born from the horrible divisiveness of our current politics. In reality, it is a fully begotten child of Citizens United. Mother Jones ran through the roster of the people funding No Labels and found that it is thickly infested with bet-hedging plutocrats.”
The New Republic earlier this month observed, “far from coming together to defeat a fascist threat, as one might expect, the Democratic Party is splintering into factionalism. This begins with the centrists behind the No Labels movement. Just before Christmas, they did something absolutely gobsmacking, which got very little attention because of the timing. In a December 21 briefing for reporters, No Labels officials floated the possibility of forming a ‘coalition government’ with one of the major parties in the event that no candidate for president receives 270 electoral votes.”
“Put that way, it sounds relatively benign,” TNR editor Michael Tomasky explained. “It is, however, anything but. No Labels chief strategist Ryan Clancy explicitly mentioned, according to NBC News’s account, the possibility that the election could be tossed to the House of Representatives, where deals could be cut to determine a winner. This has happened before, in 1824 (also in 1800, but 1824 is the relevant case). Those who know their history will recall that this exercise in horse-trading, in which Henry Clay threw his support to John Quincy Adams and became his secretary of state, has gone down in political lore by the name the ‘corrupt bargain.’ And No Labels is bragging about emulating it!”
Highly-popular Boston College professor of history Heather Cox Richardson on Saturday served up more insight into the House of Representatives gambit.
“I am exceedingly concerned about the Twelfth Amendment,” she wrote. “John Eastman suggested using it in 2020, and it could be central to stealing the 2024 election by throwing the vote to the House, where each state has a single vote. South Dakota would have as much power as California.”
There’s been talk that both U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) and U.S. Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN) have been considering presidential runs on a No Labels ticket. Congressman Phillips has been running in the Democratic primary but has not gained much traction.
Phillips is polling at just over 3% among Democrats, a little more than half of where Marianne Williamson is, according to FiveThirtyEight.
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Meanwhile, noting the Minnesota Democratic congressman’s “long-shot” primary bid against President Biden, The New York Times reported, “if it appeared the general election would be a rematch between Mr. Biden and Donald J. Trump,” Phillips said “he would consider running on the ticket of No Labels.”
“It would have to be a Joe Biden-Donald Trump rematch that shows Joe Biden is almost certain to lose,” Phillips told The Times. “That is the only condition in which I would even entertain a conversation with any alternative.”
Pointing to Manchin and Phillips, political commentator Lindy Li alleged, “No Labels is a pro-Trump PAC designed to fracture Democrats.”
“It’s funded by GOP billionaires like Clarence Thomas’s sugar daddy, Harlan Crow,” she added, warning: “Stay the hell away from this scam to get Trump back in power.”
Professor Tribe responded to Li’s remarks, writing: “No Labels is a lethal scam. It could end democracy if it tosses the 2024 presidential election into the House, where each state has exactly one vote.”
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The Atlantic’s Norman Ornstein, an Emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), responded to Richardson’s warning with one of his own: “Because of the red tint of so many small rural states, Republicans usually have more state delegations than Democrats, even if they lose the majority. This is a path to a Trump presidency engineered by the vile No Labels.”
Tribe weighed in on Ornstein’s warning by adding, “Even if ‘No Labels’ fails to carry any state, it might shift a close state into Trump’s column or win a single district in Maine or Nebraska, the two states that don’t use a winner-takes-all system, and thus toss the whole election into the House, where Trump would have the edge.”