Daylight savings proves that, in law, Congress has the power to turn back the clock.
So just turn the clock back 23 hours and 59 minutes, and boom, more time to get it done!
That is moronic (surprise, surprise). The ECA explicitly provides that the joint session may not adjourn until the count is completed. It anticipates the session running for more than one day, providing that if the count has not been completed by the fifth day the members may not take any recesses until the count is completed.
This is another reason why the “have Pence say he can’t decide which are the real certificates of electors” plan is dumb. Under the statute, the joint session would just continue even if it had to go past Inauguration Day. At which point the Speaker of the House (i.e. Nancy Pelosi) would become Acting President.
That’s how we know the insurrectionists were Antifa. /sarcasm
That’s why I used the term “GiulianiPowellWood-esque” — i.e., insane (though “moronic” works as well).
In a vague way, yes, this was Plan A; Plan B was the “it’s unclear so there do not count” approach, in the hopes it’d throw the election into the House.
I’ve said before and will again that the primary reason the coup failed is that Trump is both stupid and lazy; had he planned ahead and listened to intelligent advisors, they could have pulled something off, but it’s clear that instead of a well executed plan, there were instead five or six separate half-assed plans, and he was relying on the advice of idiots.
Can’t blame him for listening to advice from people that are far more intelligent than he is.
Had he been capable of that, COVID would not have been the complete disaster it was and he’d likely’ve been re-elected.
This update actually broke yesterday but I haven’t seen it mentioned elsewhere on the board yet.
So it looks like this ingenious scheme was cooked up by Rudy with an assist from “Trump Campaign Officials.” Should’ve bet real money on this one. It had all the earmarks of his brazen stupidity and complete disregard for democracy and the rule of law.
Throw the book at them. They need to be made an example of.
Nah. Drop a library on them.
If they do get charged and arrested, it would be a cruel but fitting joke to serve them first an obviously fake mittimus* and insist straight-faced they’d already been tried, convicted, and sentenced and you’re there to take them directly to prison. Let them see the “mittimus” – the more ludicrously fake, the better. When they say it’s not real, reply that it’s just as real as their election certificate. Yes, have the real arrest warrant too and pull it out…eventually. 
*the judgment including the sentence that commits a convicted defendant to prison.
Are any of them smart enough to know it’s not real?
Depends on whether it has a gold fringe.
Seems to be something of a Trump pattern, to just go “X should happen” to everyone and no one in particular, and then let whoever picks up on it figure it out; so you end up with various different people with various different plans “competing” to see which one is the one that produces the desired result or at least pleases the boss the most – but doing so without any centralized coordination or resources, so if/when it fails it’s their fault not his.
Of course, that’s how he operates……and if it isn’t clear he will start firing people because “x didn’t happen”, to make sure the message is heard.
Not to sound like a broken record, but Trump was a criminal long before he was a politician or President, and he knows how this works. It’s why I’m skeptical that he’ll ever face prosecution— he’s been using this tactic to evade prosecutors his whole life…and it works.
Speaking of Trump’s criminal past, his former lieutenant and fixer ( white collar crime spotter tip # — legitimate businessmen don’t have lieutenants and fixers) dropped a fun tidbit yesterday.
Back in the late 2000’s, when the Trump kids were being investigated for criminal fraud over the sales practices at the Trump Soho, Trump told Cohen that if one of them had to take the fall and go to prison, he needed to make sure it was Don Jr. because he was the one that could “handle” it.
Do you have a cite/link to this?
And if so is there any way we can send it to Don Jr. in a Hallmark card just to make him know that his father is thinking about him?
ETA: nevermind I found a link
For a fuller discussion, see
Here is a two paragraph quote, which fingers Guiliani as the instigator:
"In this case, the Trump electors met, as if the 45th president had been reelected, to cast their electoral votes. That’s probably ok, since it’s really just a protest statement. If a group of, say, Green Party members want to get together and loudly cast their “electoral votes” for the Green Party candidate, they can do it. However, more than a dozen Trump electors were leery that they were being used for purposes beyond protest, and so bailed on the scheme. This is where we start to get into lawbreaking, since the defectors were replaced by fiat, meaning that the new “electors” were representing themselves as something they were not.
After these “electoral votes” were cast, then Giuliani (and several associates) went from “probably breaking the law” to “full-blown felony.” They cooked up fraudulent electoral certificates, got signatures from the highest-profile person willing to play along, and sent those to the archivist of the United States. To quote Michigan AG Dana Nessel (D), that is “an open-and-shut case of forgery of a public record.” The fraudulent certificates were rejected, of course."
I don’t know about all of this forgery stuff. It has to be for the purposes of fooling a reasonable person, e.g., if I write a “dollar bill” in crayon, then nobody will reasonably believe it to be U.S. currency, so therefore I am not guilty of counterfeiting. I think everyone knew what the game was here, so forgery charges would not be supported, IMHO.
Legally, what matters isn’t the technical quality of the forgery, but rather the intent to defraud. In this case, the evidence indicates an intent to use the fake electoral certificates to fraudulently reverse the outcome of the Presidential election. The fact that the scheme didn’t work for reasons beyond the forgers’ control doesn’t mitigate their criminal intent.