QUESTION: President Trump has suggested he might not accept the results of the upcoming Presidential election, if he loses. Critics claim he might engage in a "fire sale" of U.S. foreign policy. What are the limits of a lame duck President? Follow this thread for the answer. 
ANSWER: We asked Jeremy Mayer, an Associate Professor in the @ScharSchool of Policy and Government at George Mason University.
"One oddity of our Constitution is the very long lame duck period. In Britain and many other modern democracies, the moving trucks arrive for a defeated executive much sooner. This is related to the age of our Constitution,
written at a time when traversing even the young thirteen states was quite a challenge. So what limits are put on a president’s discretion in this lame duck period? Most of them are not legal, but traditional. And of course,
he is limited in that the House in the lame duck period will still be run by the Democrats. That puts legislation out of reach. What about regulation? The regulatory process itself would slow down the president. Most dramatic changes require certain procedural steps,
although President Trump might be able to find ways around some of them, at least temporarily. One of the biggest limits is fairly recent: the Congressional Review Act of 1996. This act would allow the new Congress to overturn any late Trump administration actions.
The catch is, the Democrats would almost certainly need to win the Senate and hold onto the House to do this.
For the more dramatic abuses of power that no prior president might have contemplated, there are very few rules or norms that could keep Trump...
For the more dramatic abuses of power that no prior president might have contemplated, there are very few rules or norms that could keep Trump...
from taking his rage out on the American Government. If Trump, bitter and resentful after a landslide defeat, set out to damage our foreign policy, say by abruptly removing troops from South Korea or Germany, there is very little that could be done to stop him.
The Commander in Chief power is broad and largely unrestricted. Yet even in these cases, a unified lame duck Congress could act to stop Trump, but that would require Senate Republicans, or at least a few of them, to decisively break with Trump and stand with Democrats against him
on high-profile votes. Maybe if enough Republicans are defeated, some lame duck Republican Senators will decide to end their careers by standing up to the president they might see as responsible for their defeat?
The short answer is that Trump could do a lot of short term damage in the lame duck period, particularly in foreign policy. One positive thing that might come out of this is a rewriting of that part of the Constitution.
Maybe we should have inauguration at the end of November, now that we have jet airplanes and the Internet?"
You can read more about Jeremy Mayer here: schar.gmu.edu/about/faculty-…
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