Why would anyone trust anything McConnell says, or any other Republican senator, for that matter? They said Supreme Court justices shouldn’t go through a confirmation process in an election year, too.
By the way, can anyone ever remember, even during Nixon, when the Pentagon felt it necessary to affirmatively clarify they would be resigning en masse if a president attempted to involve the military in an insurrection attempt? They did today.
It is an attempted coup, whether via judiciary, military or other. That the thing about which I believe we should be highly mindful and responsive.
I wasn’t meaning to slam the point you made, and I know you don’t believe a word out of his mouth.
In fact, none of them have much bothered to lie over the past year. They’ve just stayed quiet. And surprisingly comfortable.
I think until COVID showed up, Republicans were pretty confident they could make the election close enough to pull Trump through with a little help from their friends – and then impeach him if they could hold onto the Senate. If they didn’t hold onto the Senate but somehow (miraculously) “won” the White House, Democrats would impeach Trump for them.
COVID is the game changer here. How sad, really, that we must be grateful for a virus that has already killed more than 200,000 of us to give us a shot at keeping our democratic republic.
And I apologize for my tone. I’m just really angry in general over all this.
I don’t think that the state legislatures will just out and out reject a Biden win and pledge the delegates to Trump. If they tried that they would at best be voted out of office in the next election, at worst be dragged out by and angry mob in the ensuing civil war.
The way its more likely to go down, is that there are 32 assertions of fraud, voter intimidation, and election irregularities, put forth by both sides that are working their way up and down the courts. Mmeanwhile the deadline December 14th deadline to select electors in time to comply with current election law, and so reluctantly the state legislature has to step in and do their constitutional duty to decide the issue and select the electors, and Lo and behold, each member of the legislature finds that the facts of the case align perfectly with their political party (what an amazing coincidence), so all the electors go to Trump.
But this is was a unique once in a century set of circumstances that should not be considered as precedent.
So I definitely think that the Republicans want to stick with their tried and true method of voter suppression followed by disputing ballots over fraud or whatnot. I definitely don’t think this is going to happen from both sides and I don’t think there winds up being a huge distinction between disputing mail-in ballots until the safe harbor deadline or just blatantly picking the electors without an excuse - it would be purely political as there’s no real technical reason that you can’t count every vote that comes in.
At the end of the day if the GOP state legislatures just decide the election by any quasilegal means, they won’t need to be worried about getting voted out in 2022 because they probably won’t have to pretend to follow any inconvenient laws.
That’s why I don’t buy into this idea that the GOP is secretly waiting or hoping that Trump will lose. Do some Republicans wish Trump had never run for office in the first place so that they didn’t have to live in this reality with the rest of us? Sure. But they, even the so-called “adults,” were the ones who put out the petri dish for this shit to grow - never forget that. They used Trump because they had an end game in mind, and it wasn’t spreading wealth, prosperity, or the franchise with everyone else.
If Trump had never run, maybe they wouldn’t be Trump toadies; we’d be talking about the shocking turn of events of how Ted Cruz went from Senate problem child to taking the entire party hostage.
I should have been clear, that the both sides wasn’t meant to mean that both sides will be equally culpable. But rather that Republicans will do some nasty things regarding voter suppression that Democrats will complain about, and Republicans will spin fanciful yarns about illegal votes and stealing the election against the Democrats. So that in the end everyone ends up in court.
Lindsay Graham stepped up to the microphone yesterday to uphold the concept of peaceful transition; and he did it by assuring us that whoever wins the election --as determined by the Supreme Court – will be the next president. It apparently didn’t occur to him that presidents are normally chosen by the voters.
Republicans are going to “follow the Constitution.” They will claim that what they are doing is Constitutional, not necessarily democratic, which I believe was a point that @RTFirefly was more or less making earlier in the thread. They could “follow the law” or “follow the Constitution” in different ways.
If there’s a coup, it won’t be Trump rounding up Mike Flynn, Eric Prince, and a ragtag group of former military malcontents and barricading themselves in the White House. That’s not how it’s going to go down. It’s going to be what Trump and his allies have been doing the last several years: normalizing the abnormal, and getting us to accept that this is just our new reality and there’s not much we can do to stop it. People believe it couldn’t happen, but there’s a lot about these last few years we thought we wouldn’t see. But seen it, we have.
What they are trying to do right now is what authoritarians try to do in illiberal democracies or in non-democracies. They overwhelm us with falsity to the point that people begin to question whether they can actually know what the truth really is. And in that situation, it’s easier to claim that what they’re doing is “constitutional” and “legal.”
“We know you don’t like the outcome, but the law and the Constitution don’t expressly say that what we did was wrong, so it’s legal, it’s fair. Next time, win the election - if you can.”
I wish people would understand that there’s a big difference between “Trump will use the courts to steal the election” and “Trump will try to use the courts to steal the election” and that even a rudimentary understanding of how presidential election law actually works makes it clear that there’s a huge gulf between the two.
I remember before the last election when people were saying “There is a difference between what Trump wants to do and what Trump will be allowed to do”, usually followed by “…so there is no reason to worry about it.”
Any solution that depends on our government developing a conscience and doing what is right when times demand it is not a solution at all.
And here’s Fox peddling a news story about mail-in ballots being dumped in a Wisconsin ditch.
I’m guessing that in every election there are votes that are discarded or otherwise rejected - it happens. Even losing candidates in past elections seem to get it. But this year we have a sitting president and a people all over his administration who are willing to use their power to cast doubt on the results.
Trump is giving as a reason for filling the SCOTUS vacancy right away, that a nine-justice court will be needed to resolve the election litigation. IOW, they’re already PLANNING election litigation.
A 6-3 majority wouldn’t be enough. Roberts is all but certain to defect on this rather than let Trump play unconstitutional tyrant, and there is a good chance Gorsuch or Kavanaugh will switch over too. It would be 5-4 in favor of the D’s.
Looks like we’re not only going to have to make sure that every ballot is counted but that every ballot that is counted actually counts. Be prepared to surround your clerk’s office to fend off goon squads trying to “confiscate” uncounted absentee ballots. Be prepare to storm your state capitol in the event that this sort of shenanigans are tried. Screw the virus. We lose our democracy, we’re doomed anyway.
NYT gives 3 articles for free each month, I think. I was able to access the full story, despite not subscribing. I know there are ways around their paywall, but I don’t try to breach them so am not familiar with how it’s done.
I am sure there are other reputable sources that will have reported on this if you wish to search further. I first heard it reported on MSNBC. It’s shocking to me that military leaders feel the need to make this stance clear. Not surprising, with this occupant of the Oval Office. But shocking all the same.
I don’t know about that. The Constitution specifies the legislature, which seems to take the governor out of play. And the legislature’s action now would supersede their previous decisions.