can Bernie Sanders still win

Bernie Sanders can still win

It’s not too late

| UPDATED

There’s still time for Bernie Sanders to win the presidential election, in a totally unprecedented but probably legal move.

If everyone in Trump’s cabinet, along with every senator and congressperson on Capitol Hill were to die – except for Bernie – then he could be inaugurated on January 20th, and finally beat Hillary Clinton.

It would require the deaths of all 100 US senators and all 435 of those serving in the House of Representatives for visionary Bernie Sanders to be sworn in as the 45th President of the United States. He would lead a world at once weeping from the single worst political catastrophe in US history, but also rejoicing for his unique progressive politics and promise to break up the big banks.

We asked UDel political professor David Redlawsk for more info, who told us: “My reading of the Constitution and its amendments (as well as the succession law that specifies the order of Cabinet positions taking over) results in the answer of: no one knows.

“The law and Constitution are both silent on what happens if everyone in the line of succession is unable to serve. And so in the scenario you lay out, citizens might accept that the only remaining congressional survivor could act as president, but there is no law making that person either acting president or president, to my knowledge.”

So it’s technically possible for Bernie Sanders to still win the election!

And there’s a historical precedent for this – the ABC political drama Designated Survivor, in which a low-ranking politician played by Kiefer Sutherland becomes president after the Capitol is consumed in a gigantic ball of fire. It could happen for Bernie Sanders!

But we have a long road ahead of us. Professor Gerald Pomper of Rutgers – presumably a corporate shill of the Hillary campaign – told us:

“The answer is a total and unequivocal NO. Succession to the Presidency is established by law. The order of succession is: VP, House Speaker, President pro tempore of the Senate, and then members of the Cabinet, in the order of their creation, beginning with Secretary of State. Only Congress can further extend the succession. They would have to do so through normal legislation, which requires approval by actual majorities in both House and Senate.

“Since your grim scenario rules that out, even a surviving Bernie Sanders could not pass legislation or become president, and he has no claim to be considered for the position. I wish supporters of Sanders – and I assume you are one – would stop making up fantasies, find ways to resist the likely disasters of the Trump administration, and get to work on using the realities of politics to change the current dire situation of the nation.”

Go Bernie!