No. The laws of California were followed, and according to the US Supreme Court’s decision in Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. v. US House of Representatives, the House has no choice but to seat. It’s a maxim of law that fraud vitiates everything it touches, but once an election is certified and not contested under that state’s election contest laws, the results of the election hold. The only recourse is to embarrass an elected official into resigning or indict the official if he is an active party to the fraud, perhaps forcing him to resign. Resignation would set off a special election to be called by that state’s legislature.
Does this mean that until and unless the State of California cleans up it’s elections process, laws, voter roles, etc. the State of California has forfeited its rights to representation of all federal office holders in the State of California?
No. Federal elections are partially controlled by Congress; for example, setting the date of a federal election. The state is responsible for the actual election. Failure of a state to handle its job properly does not translate into losing rights of statehood.
Thinking long term, does that mean that California from now until the voter fraud is remedied and corrected, loses its U.S. Senators, U.S. Congressmen, etc. representation in the U.S. Government?
No.
If we look at the reconstruction period following the Civil War, it took some of the former confederate states years to re-enter the Union. The state of California might be in a similar predicament.
Not unless there is an insurrection, followed by civil war, followed by a presidential assassination, followed by Congress going crazy and ignoring the Constitution altogether.
Following the end of the war and Lincoln’s assassination, ten southern states were rolled into five military districts and placed under martial law. There is nothing in the Constitution about military districts, only about states and territories. This was blatantly unconstitutional, and insisting that these military districts ratify the 14th Amendment before their constituent states could be readmitted as states was unconstitutional on its face. Lincoln had fought the war under the principle that the Union was permanent, states could not secede at pleasure – and that Congress couldn’t throw a state out of the Union at its pleasure.
The Supreme Court could have addressed this anomaly and its attendant can of constitutional worms tangentially in 1939 in Coleman v. Miller, but with Appomattox only 74 years in the past and war on the horizon, the Court didn’t want to rip the scab off the Civil War. The Court held that in the heat of the moment, actions were taken that were not properly constitutional, but this wasn’t the time to address them.
For a federal takeover of California as you are suggesting, the state or its citizenry would have to take actions that would cause the President to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 and Congress to suspend habeus corpus in accordance with Article I/Section 9 of the Constitution, in effect declaring martial law. That’s what happened after Fort Sumter.
Read this
Read this