The Friday Link for 10/2/20

I'm feeling emotionally unstable right now.  I can't stand Trump.  He's a horrible person, a nightmare of a leader, and a man who's undeniably guilty of committing crimes while in office.  I don't want him to win re-election, period.

That being said, I don't want the guy dead.  I don't!  You can dislike a person for their politics, and hope they live a long life.  I can say the same thing about the litany of Minnesota Republican officials who were exposed to COVID-19 by Trump and his campaign staff.  I dislike your wealth worshipping at the expense of 95% of this country, but here's to your health!  I'm consistent.  I've wanted people to be healthy and safe from Corona Virus; ALL people. 

With Trump's worsening condition, there has been a question of what would happen if a candidate for the Presidency died a few weeks before the election. The answer is unless both the House of Representatives and the US Senate vote to delay the election (something very unlikely), the election will go on as scheduled. The Constitution is pretty clear that only the Congress can delay a Presidential election.  The party who lost the candidate could name a replacement, but there's a nightmare of how exactly you vote for that person, especially when early voting has already begun. You can't assume just because someone votes for one political candidate from a party, the same vote would go for a replacement candidate. So if it becomes a write in campaign, the odds they'd be able to pull that off are astronomical.

It boils down to this.  There will be an election on November 3rd in the United States, and at the end of the day, either Joe Biden or Donald Trump will win.  No one else has a chance. 

The other time in American History we had a Constitutional Crisis like this was with the 9th President, William Henry Harrison, better know as the guy who died a month after talking office.  A lot of the rules were unwritten then, so we ended up having to create standards about line of succession.

For all your William Henry Harrison knowledge, let's start with the election of 1840 itself, courtesy of Hip Hughes. 

From The History Channel's exceptional series on The Presidents, Harrison was the shortest entry, 3 and a half minutes:

Finally, let's look at the life and death of Harrison. Like a lot of Presidents from back then, he made a name for himself killing and dominating Native Americans, including leading US forces as they ran Native tribes off their lands in Ohio and Indiana. Like all history, William Henry Harrison's should be complete, with both the good and the bad.  

There's also a lot of question about what exactly killed him.  The original story goes that due to his age (he was the oldest man to take the Presidency until Reagan took office in 1981) he decided to have a long and hearty Inauguration Address, going two hours.  It was a cool day, leading to people insisting he died of a cold he'd gotten from giving the Address.  The problem with that story is that for the first three weeks he was in office, he actually felt fine. 

After reviewing the doctor's notes of the illness, the determination was he actually died of Typhoid Fever brought on by drinking contaminated water, a common death culprit from those days.

'Today I Found Out' has the complete story. 

There you go, more than you ever wanted to know about William Henry Harrison, 9th President of the United States, for five weeks.

Stay safe everyone.  Have a nice weekend.