Every two years between 2001 and 2015, I’d begin my term in Congress with the official swearing-in ceremony on the House Floor. I’d raise my right hand, proclaim my oath to the Constitution, and take a seat. I’d always assumed that seat was bestowed to me by a majority of voters in my Long Island district. Turns out I was wrong: The very Constitution I’d promised to protect and defend has an obscure clause that could have invalidated my election.

That simple language—tucked into Article 1, Section 5—might be a mechanism for Donald Trump and his congressional acolytes to maintain their House majority after the 2026 midterm elections, even if it’s clear the Democrats have flipped the House. It would be craven, but shockingly constitutional. And it would be hard for the courts to reverse.

The possible hijacking of a Democratic majority would rest on these words: “Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members, and a Majority of each shall constitute a Quorum to do Business.” More plainly, voters may believe they are choosing their preferred representative—that once they see their district’s race called on election night, they can sleep peacefully in the knowledge the winner will be sworn in. Ultimately, the final arbiter of those elections is the speaker of the House. And if an election is close—perhaps even beset by accusations of fraud—then the speaker has enough constitutional leeway to override election results.

Believe it or not, we’ve seen it happen before. In 1984, a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives refused to seat newly elected Republican Rick McIntyre from Indiana’s notorious “bloody” 8th congressional district. He’d just beaten incumbent Democrat Frank McCloskey by a mere 34 votes, but questions about the vote counting abounded, leading House Democrats to appoint a three-person commission to investigate further. They ultimately found that McCloskey had held the seat by four votes and seated him instead—reversing the results of the election.

Since then, no House majority has seriously sought to use Article I, Section 5. But as we barrel toward the 2026 midterms with a fully MAGA-filled Congress and a Trump administration intent on bending every institution to his will, Article I, Section 5 is a five-alarm fire waiting to happen. When the president already says any election he doesn’t like is rigged, what will stop Speaker Mike Johnson from asking his fellow Republicans to accept the fiction of compromised elections in enough close districts to reverse the judgment of actual voters and preserve a Trump rubber-stamp majority?

At the moment, historical trends point toward Democrats flipping the House. Trump has an abysmal approval rating of 36 percent, and the generic ballot favors Democrats by 14 percent. Last Tuesday’s special election for Tennessee’s 7th congressional district gave Republicans the shivers: A progressive Democrat in a district drawn to create a safe seat for the GOP came within single digits of defeating a Republican in a district Trump carried by over 20 points. And state and local elections in November demonstrated deep electoral support for Democrats in ballots across America.

And yet, the midterms are likely to be close. Under ordinary circumstances, Democrats could credibly expect to flip the historical average of 25 seats in these midterms, perhaps even more. But as a result of redistricting, there just aren’t enough competitive seats to produce the wave elections we saw in 2006 (31-seat gain for the Democrats) or 2010 (63-seat gain for the Republicans). Compounding the gerrymandering problem are the forces of residential sorting redistributing the electorate into ideologically homogenous communities and social media algorithms deepening partisanship, thereby culling the number of prized swing voters. The result: Control of the House in 2026 could possibly be decided by single or low double digits.

Picture this: Democrats win the House but narrowly—perhaps by a margin of fewer than 10 seats. When Trump gets on the phone with Speaker Johnson—the man who just refused to seat a new Democratic lawmaker for seven weeks after she won her election—and tells him to declare enough Democratic election victories invalid to grant Republicans a majority, do you think Johnson will turn Trump down? Do you expect him to willingly surrender the gavel because it’s the right thing to do, when Trump and the entire Republican Party threaten his political future?

I’d like to believe that the courts would halt any effort by Trump to enact this congressional coup. After all, the Supreme Court has previously sought to limit Article I, Section 5. In Powell v. McCormack in 1969, the court ruled against the House, as it attempted to leverage this section of the Constitution to refuse a seat to reelected Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., on the grounds of his well-documented corruption scandals. The court made clear that Congress could not decline a seat to a member based on its own interpretation of that member’s qualifications (or misdeeds). But it did not offer a robust check on Congress’s ability to interpret contentious election results. Would this Supreme Court go further than the Warren court? I’m not so sure.

Nonetheless, some legal experts doubt that this plan could really work. I spoke with Jeffrey Toobin, who concluded that “lots of pieces have to fall into place” because “the states run the elections, not the federal government or the Congress, and there have to be enough contested elections to even open this possibility.” He’s right, but what happens if Democrats flip a few close seats in Florida and Texas? If those seats decide who controls the House, we’re betting a lot on Ron DeSantis, Greg Abott, and Mike Johnson bucking Trump in favor of constitutional norms.

And sadly, those norms might not even exist anymore. They were based on a concept essential to a functioning and stable democracy: forbearance, which is described by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in their book How Democracies Die as “a collective willingness to avoid actions that respect the letter of the law but violate its spirit.”

Forbearance is the superglue that holds democracy together. It encourages us when we lose elections to offer better candidates and build better campaigns instead of tearing down our political institutions. It’s based on a common acceptance of inconvenient facts, instead of the fueling of political falsehoods. Without forbearance, we’re a set of partisan warriors with souped-up amygdalae locked in an existential battle to defend our own tribal truths. We voraciously swallow these truths without questioning whether they match reality. (For deeper reading on truth in politics, check out Harry Frankfurter’s On Bullshit, Hannah Arendt’s On Lying & Politics, or On Truth by Simon Blackburn.)

Forbearance is Al Gore conceding to George W. Bush in 2000 despite credible evidence that might have encouraged him to continue resisting. Willfulness, on the other hand, is a steadfast adherence to an opinion or course of action in spite of all reason, arguments, and persuasion—the governing style of the entire Trump administration.

Forbearance has steadily eroded in the bases of both parties over the past two decades. But Donald Trump has taken a wrecking ball to it. Once upon a time in America, we accepted electoral outcomes. In 2021, Americans stormed the U.S. Capitol and threatened to hang the people counting and certifying ballots. Trump forgave them, insisting they’re heroes instead of insurrectionists who were motivated to use violence to disrupt the congressional certification of the 2020 election.

That’s why I’m worried that the president and his most rabid supporters have a plan in their back pockets to invalidate the results of the 2026 midterms if Democrats win the House. And while the move may be thoroughly legal, it will be based on a Big (and not so beautiful) Lie that will amount to a constitutional coup d’état.

Next year’s elections will give the country a chance to reassert constitutional checks and balances on the worst impulses of the Trump administration, just as it did in 2018. But even if Democrats win, this fight will not be over. Trump will treat these elections as he’s treated everything else in his second presidency—bulldozing any fact that stands in the way of his power.

It means that Democrats must not only win, they must win big. They must create a cushion that makes it impossible for Republicans to use Article I, Section 5 to retain power. Not five districts but over a dozen. Not by the margin of error, but comfortably. And they must continue to build a nationwide team of election lawyers who will monitor the behavior of state and local election officials and maintain records of truth to withstand the torrential lies of Trump’s MAGA Math, where “two plus two = whatever Trump wants it to be.”

I’d be delighted to look back years later and realize I had been an alarmist. But let’s face it: Alarmism has had a good track record of late. And all around us, Trump is providing a mountain of evidence—from Republicans’ aggressive mid-decade redistricting to the Department of Justice’s politicized deployment of election monitors to Democratic states—that there is no forbearance in this administration. We must prepare accordingly. In 2026, fortitude will be more important than forbearance.