Human behavior is human behavior. If your office assistant believes he can get away with “borrowing” $5 from petty cash and pay it back when he/she comes to work next Monday, he will test that out and see what happens. If nothing happens, he’ll “borrow” again and again - next time $10, and $15 the time after that. Maybe he gets caught once and says “Oh, uh, I’m sorry, I was just borrowing - I always do this. I was gonna pay it back like I’ve always done.” And that moment is itself a test. People will keep testing to see what all kinds of shit they can get away with.
I’m not saying that everyone is the same, but recognize when we’re being tested. This is one of those times. The Republicans are testing us out just to see how we will react. They might not even be consciously testing us - maybe it’s just a realization that comes after the fact. Either way, it’s a test to see how we will respond. If they come away from this believing that they can simply overturn election results on some sort of procedural grounds, they’ll have that strategy in their back pocket going forward.
They’ll directly incorporate it into their strategy, just like Trump has done. Every election will be contested. Because their candidate deserves to win.
I’m responding directly to people who feel like the official statement from the Michigan dudes mean that this foray, at least, is over. It doesn’t. No matter what, they would say something like this.
Agreed - it’s entirely possible that they are just giving themselves cover. I think it was HappyL who posted the article from Politico in which the author wrote that visiting and deliberately discussing plans to overturn state election law could result in criminal charges. They might be saying things privately with the understanding that what is said in the WH stays there. It’s not like Michigan’s AG could retrieve any private WH conversation notes. The AG would only find out if the they were dumb enough to incriminate themselves in their own communications with others.
I would not be surprised to see states with GOP legislative majorities actively discuss and even possibly send their own slates of electors, or at least attempt to. I don’t think that’s off the table yet. Like others, I think that whatever they do will eventually run into a legal wall they cannot surmount, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be serious long-term damage inflicted in the aftermath. We’re seeing divisions in this country not seen since the 1850s.
I was hoping one or the other of them was wearing a wire – or most likely just started the record app on a smart phone – before entering the room, and let Donny Two-scoops do all of the implicating he could muster.
Let’s say the legislatures do something completely illegal and outrageous. How long would it take to ‘surmount’ their actions. Consider that Trump owns the DOJ and will ignore any legal moves - weeks? months? years?.
Well, I can grab my pitchfork in a matter of minutes, and it shouldn’t take much longer than that to light a torch. I won’t be waiting for the DoJ to fix anything at that point, hopefully millions more would join the fight for some serious citizen surmounting…
I don’t think this would in any way involve DOJ – it’s a matter for Michigan prosecutors, over whom Barr has no control.
My anxieties isn’t whether Trump will win the legal fight: I’d give him about a 1% chance of the courts, political system, and SCOTUS signing off an any scheme that would overturn an election. A non-zero chance based on everything I’ve observed over the past decade or longer, but still quite low.
But the GOP is building a dangerous “lost cause” narrative with residue that will linger for potentially a very long time, and that is what worries me.
Same here. I don’t see it as likely, but I’m prepared for it if we somehow get to that point. I don’t trust Trump at all, and his administration gets zero benefit of the doubt from me. As for Michigan state legislators? I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that they’re not going to shamelessly throw out their own election just for Trumps benefit. But I’m prepared to be wrong.
But, that, is the point. An outrageous, illegal act has no remedy. The DOJ will do nothing to Trump and has no power over the states. SCOTUS has no enforcement power. If a group of Republicans submits a slate of electors that is accepted by the VP and they elect Trump the ensuing legal fight could take years and the courts have no enforcement power. Sure Trump would loose but he would ignore the loss. Who will remove him from office?
First, to be clear: Trump’s term expires at noon on 20 January 2021. At that time, he is removed from office.
Second: do you really think that all of the 80 million people who voted for Biden, as well as all of the people who didn’t vote for either candidate, will just sit on their hands and do nothing if this occurs?
Trump and his minions are 100% trying to pull off a coup, and anyone who says it’s impossible just isn’t paying attention. It’s HARD, and they will probably fail, in part because Trump is stupid and didn’t start planning it a long time ago. But it’s absolutely possible, and all the “well, it’s illegal” talk is just dumb as hell. Of course it’s illegal; all coups are illegal by definition, and yet they happen anyway. There is absolutely a path to a coup, it’s perfectly plausible, and Trump could have had a better than even shot at pulling it off had he had smarter guys start planning it awhile ago. Once you have a significant plurality of the populace willing to abandon democracy, you can do it. Doesn’t matter what the law says.
So now what you have is that last condition. Trumpists do not believe the election really went the way it did, and they don’t care about democracy, so they will support democracy being tossed aside, and that means it CAN be tossed aside. David Frum was right.
Elected servants sipping on expensive champagne in the president’s own luxury hotel while Michigan suffocates under the weight of a pandemic and financial collapse. All under the guise of being in DC to discuss “COVID” with Trump. But yet after this all-important meeting that just had to happen at the same time Trump’s staging an attempted coup, they have nothing constructive to report back to their constituents who have to yet again shut down their businesses, keep their kids home while juggling work, hospitals are again beyond full, and there’s no money to help the unemployed. Fuck. Them.
In public, it’s a clown dumpsterfire show. But I’m more worried about the people we don’t see. Barr is no idiot, Miller is pure evil, but he’s not stupid. I’m much more worried about what is going on behind the scenes as Giuliani distracts us with his Four Seasons Total landscaping press conferences and his movie references while his hair melts.
So apparently Sen. Shitbird wasn’t there, just Speaker Shitnuts and another state representative (Rep. Shitlick, if you were wondering) and some others. Perhaps Shitbird was working on a hymn to sing for the flight home.