[Order Daniel Greenfield’s new book, Domestic Enemies: HERE.]

When the English arrived in Australia, they discovered tribesmen using curved pieces of wood that they called “bou-mar-rangs” or “boomerangs” which fly away and come back at you.

Politics has lots of boomerangs. The latest throwing stick to fly out and come circling back when least expected was a Democrat conspiracy aimed at keeping Trump out of the White House.

A year earlier, Hamilton’s awkward ahistorical rapping had swept elites from Manhattan to D.C. and the “Hamilton Electors” came up with their own unmusical scheme to rig the 2016 election.

After Trump won and Hillary lost, the Hamilton Electors tried to find Republican “faithless electors” to block Trump’s certification by backing a fake Republican like Colin Powell. While Hamilton went on touring the country and then became a movie, the Hamilton election rigging scheme didn’t do so well with only a handful of mostly Dem electors casting votes for Colin Powell (3), Bernie Sanders (2) Ron Paul (1) and Native American activists Faith Spotted Eagle (1) and Elizabeth Warren (1). This wasn’t nearly enough to throw the election to the House to recreate the scheme Aaron Burr.(as described in my book, not the musical) tried to pull in 1800.

Had Republicans tried any such thing, the electors involved would have spent the rest of their lives battling it out in local and federal courts, and their lawyers (in this case Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig) would have been disbarred and then prosecuted under laws last used after the Civil War. But “creative election challenges” are in the “finest legal tradition” when done by leftists, but a “threat to democracy” when engaged in by conservatives.

While the scheme was an election failure, it did lead to a Supreme Court case (Chiafalo v. Washington) testing whether states can force electors to vote for the pledged candidate.

And that might be a big problem.

States like Washington and Colorado cracked down on “faithless electors” but if Biden wins the election and becomes officially non-compos mentis, the faithless might be the party’s only hope.

The Democrats are mired in a crisis of their own making when after rigging the primaries for Biden they discovered that his brain might not be fully rigged, but that throwing him off the ballot may be unworkable. Even if Biden remains the nominee and wins, and then plops, there’s no mechanism for many electors voting for anyone else and that makes for a very split ticket.

Democrat electors would have a choice of selecting a dead (or brain dead) man or nothing.

The status of electors was somewhat ambiguous despite the precedent set back in 1952 with

Ray v. Blair and Chiafalo v. Washington reasserted it on the worst possible terms. Despite Lessig’s representation, the faithless elector case was pathetically weak and appeared unclear as to whether it was aimed at undermining the 2016 election, the Electoral College or both.

Justice Jackson was much plainer when he bluntly wrote in Ray v. Blair that, “the demise of the whole electoral system would not impress me as a disaster” and yet he also compellingly argued, what none of the originalists on today’s court seemed willing to, that the Constitution intended “that electors would be free agents, to exercise an independent and nonpartisan judgment as to the men best qualified for the Nation’s highest offices.”

He warned that while many believe “that it is the progressive or liberal element of the party that will presently advantage from this device does not prove that the device itself has any proper place in a truly liberal or progressive scheme of government. Who will come to possess this weapon and to whose advantage it will prove in the long run I am not foresighted enough to predict.”

These days we cannot even predict after all the primaries have been concluded who will be the 2024 Democrat presidential nominee from day to day, whether he will be alive on Election Day or whether he will still be alive by the time the electors are doing their work.

With thirty-two states (not to mention D.C.) mandating that electors vote for the winner, and a number of those removing electors who don’t toe the line, this could get messy. It could even mean that Biden could win, then be disabled, and a lot of Dem state electors would have a choice of backing someone who can’t serve, someone who can serve but whom they can’t vote for, or just give up and let the election fall to Trump anyway.

Would it actually work that way? No, for the same reason that the ‘faithless electors’, their lawyers and the various Democrats who organized the scheme don’t have mug shots across the country. Faced with the immovable reality of Biden’s mental state and the unstoppable law, they would just connive to set the law aside the way that they had so many election laws in 2020.

Suddenly state and federal judges would discover that the same laws they upheld are no longer valid or binding, and that no one has any standing to sue over their non-enforcement.

But Chiafalo v. Washington will make that more difficult.

When Lessig and his ‘Equal Citizens’ organization, whose board includes Clinton cabinet member Robert Reich, and had backing from key Democrat and leftist groups, decided to gamble on the 2016 election to stop Trump, they could end up making him president.

The ideal test case for faithless electors wasn’t the Bernie Sanders and Ron Paul supporters in 2016 trying to stop Trump, but a crisis in which Joe Biden can’t be and yet must be president. And yet the Democrats may be stuck with the Chiafalo v. Washington precedent instead.

The short term obsession with stopping Trump by any means, including counterintelligence investigations, the weaponization of the DOJ, FBI and CIA, illegal prosecutions and election rigging schemes has always been a boomerang. And like all abuses of power, these carry the very real risk of consciously rebounding when what they do is done to them but also unconsciously rebounding in the unforeseen consequences of any major action.

The ability to control the outcome ends when a stick is thrown or a bullet is fired.

A lot of sticks were thrown and bullets fired in the last 9 years to stop Trump. There is no telling where some of them will end up. Chiafalo v. Washington is just one of many nightmare scenarios, ticking time bombs embedded in our system by thoughtless and ruthless men, that may rebound badly on them and all of us. The media has taken to its ninth year of lecturing us about how dangerous Trump is, but it and its cohort are the truly dangerous ones.