https://thefulcrum.us/election-2024/trump-is-a-threat-to-democracy

If #Trump wins, should #Democrats turn over the keys to the White House?
Austin Sarat

..."Faced with the prospect of a Trump presidency, some, out of desperation, might urge Biden to turn the tables on Trump and refuse to transfer power to him. In this scenario, Biden would resign, and Harris would be sworn in as president. There would be no constitutional problem if he were to take this step.

Harris would then face the horrible possibility that her oath of office and promise to defend the Constitution against “all enemies, foreign and domestic” might require her not to transfer power to someone who has already said he might terminate the Constitution. Doing so is the kind of nuclear option that Walzer says good politicians must consider when circumstances warrant it.

Constitutional implications of refusal
On the surface, exercising this last option would dishonor the Constitution’s Electoral College system and the millions of Americans who had voted for Trump. But Harris might do so believing, as former Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson said 75 years ago, “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.”

Proponents of this option might argue that until a new constitutional convention undoes it, the incumbent president has a duty to respect the existing Constitution and its guarantee of some form of republican government for the individual states. “Republican government,” in constitutional terms, does not refer to a political party but rather to government through representative institutions and respect for political rights.

The National Constitution Center explains that the guarantee clause requires the United States “to prevent any state from imposing rule by monarchy, dictatorship, aristocracy, or permanent military rule, even through majority vote.” The clause contemplates that the vote of a majority cannot itself authorize “monarchy,” “dictatorship,” “aristocracy” or “permanent military rule” in the states.

And if that is true for the states, it is also true for the federal government. The guarantee clause would be drained of all meaning if the federal government itself were not itself a republican form of government."...