In our last election, a lot of these state officials were die hard Trump loyalists. Yet, when it came time to press the button, they didn’t do it.
I think a good portion of the conservatives are just paying lip service to protect their political careers. But when it comes time to act, they won’t do it because they understand the implications of what that means even if they are successful. Actually, being successful in this endeavor may be their biggest fear. I doubt they want their children and grandchildren growing up in such a country.
The problem is the Republicans are taking control of all of the institutions that are supposed to act as checks on each other.
The President is supposed to be answerable to Congress if he breaks the law. But if the President and a majority of Congress belong to the same organization and they place loyalty to the organization above loyalty to the Constitution or the country, then Congress can choose not to exercise any restraint of a President acting illegally.
The same is true of the court system; they’re supposed to rule against illegal legislation. But if they’re controlled by the same organization that controlled the legislature that enacted that legislation, it can choose to ignore its duties.
The same is true with regard to the states and the federal government. Or law enforcement agencies and elected officials. Or private corporations and government regulators. Or the media and the government.
All of our checks and balances are based on the premise that separate entities are acting independently.
I don’t think this was true. These officials were loyal to the Republican Party not to Donald Trump personally. And they saw that what was good for Donald Trump might not be the same as what was good for the Republican Party.
Trump was lazy. He didn’t put any effort into building up his base of loyalists throughout the political system. He just assumed they all started working for him the day he took office and he automatically commanded their loyalty.
Basically the litmus test for whether someone was loyal to Trump or not (and that’s a test that continues) is whether they took action to try to invalidate the election. I believe that is Trump’s metric too. So I think your statement is true almost by tautology.
I’ll take your point but, whether they are loyal to Trump or the Republican party is irrelevant. The Republican party is about usurping elections be it with Trump or sans Trump.
So it still leaves me wondering if they’ll actually jump off that precipice.
I think the test is over what the group’s plans for the future are.
True conservative loyalists might have loved Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush or Donald Trump - but they were all making plans for a post-Reagan, post-Bush, or post-Trump era. Their loyalty is to an ongoing ideology not to individuals.
I don’t think Trump and his personal loyalists ever saw it that way. Their only concern was getting Donald Trump into the presidency. They had no concerns about what would happen after he left the presidency. So they were willing to burn down the Republican party as long as it lasted long enough to see Trump through his term of office.
Look ahead to 2024 for example. Do you believe Trump will make any effort to help the Republican nominee get elected if he isn’t that nominee?
Exactly how dead in the water is The Freedom to Vote Act anyway?
So, this was Manchin’s personal thing, then? Is getting a minumum 10 GOP senators on board with this the main roadblock?
From various news articles I’ve seen on it (and I’ve only seen a few), it seems just as dead as all the other recent voting rights acts, and for the same reason: Senate Republicans just won’t permit it, no way, no how.
Let me mention that there is a clause in the US constitution that requires each state to have a “republican* form of government”. How a court would interpret that is not clear, but it is there.
*Amusingly, it would be absolutely wrong to obey the usual rule that the first word of a direct quote be capitalized.
My understanding is based on Luthur v. Borden and Virginia v. West Virginia the courts do not interpret the Guarantee Clause. It is up to Congress to do that.
Yes, I believe he will, barring his own death or the nominee being an outspoken anti-Trumper like Liz Cheney. It’ll probably even be enthusiastic support.
If Trump runs and loses the nomination there is a close to zero chance he will support the person who “steals” the nomination from him. Anyone who dares to run against him in the primaries will be denounced as a traitor from the outset.
The only chance I see he would support the ultimate nominee in such a situation would be if they made a multimillion donation to the Donald J Trump Greatest Living Ex-President Retirement Fund.
We’ll see if the situation arises. But my personal opinion is that Trump would regard any Republican nominee other than himself as somebody who stole the nomination Trump feels entitled to and Trump would attack him rather than support him.
Beautiful.
And then he starts a KickMe fund, which looks I’m mixing up Kickstarter and GoFundMe to dyslexically end up with KickMe, but then realise KickMe sounds like a perfectly appropriate venture for Don to pursue, maybe at a discreet reception room in Mar-a-Lago where he can bend over and drop his pants before a huge snaking line-up out of the room and down the hall that no longer becomes discreet.
At $20,000 a, um, crack.
Hopefully Ray Guy would take this up.
No such rule. Only when the quoted begins your sentence. And then the initial quoted capital letter goes inside brackets.
More fundamentally, and this might have been discussed before or elsewhere, but the Republicans have no intention of claiming “We’re overthrowing the election results just because.”
Their plan is to claim that certain votes don’t count because they’re invalid: i.e., belonging to unregistered, improperly identified, non-resident, underaged, dead, etc “voters.” I suppose a sufficiently racist or sexist Board of Elections member might even claim that blacks or women don’t have a legal vote in his opinion, and a racist judge would back that up, supported by a racist appeals court and a racist Supreme Court, which might decline to hear the appeal.
I should have explained my underlying assumptions a bit more. I assume that either Trump will run and win the nomination, or not run at all. I don’t leave any room for Trump running but losing the nomination. I leave very little room, less than a 5% chance, for an anti-Trump Republican (someone vocal like Adam Kinzinger or Liz Cheney - Trump would come around on someone like Ron Desantis) to win the nomination in the event Trump doesn’t run.
ETA: I agree that it Trump were to run and lose, he’d be a sore loser and work against the nominee. I just think a scenario in which Trump runs but loses is extremely unlikely. I think it would take something like a huge number of Democrats voting in the Republican primary in a coordinated effort for one particular opponent…
“There have been too many reports of voting irregularities coming from Milwaukee County and we have no choice but to disqualify the current vote totals from the at-large state results. Therefore we will be sending electors to cast Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes for Donald J. Trump on the basis of the votes which can be verified.”
Note: no hard evidence of fraud will ever be presented.
Exactly. One thing to remember is that it’s all going to be wall-to-wall outrage from concern trolls about fairness, illegal voters, fraudulent counting, etc. Nothing about “We’re stealing this because we can, nyah, nyah nyah nyah.”