Well, the clear conclusion for me is that Cruz is 100% sure that no election fraud took place. The wording is very careful to not allege even one fraudulent vote. There is no piece of data that could refute what Cruz has claimed as all he’s claimed is someone cried wolf and others took it seriously.
As to the why, I agree with the analysis…in a parallel thread, I can’t find right now: Cruz is hoping he can ultimately win over the Trumpists and win the white house in 2024. But, having anti-charisma (negisma?) means that’s not gonna happen. He’ll end up in the same basket as Guiliani eventually.
I guess the 2024 Republican Presidential hopeful lineup is defined by leading a 2020 election coup attempt as a qualifier. Watch - anyone that tries to run in 2024 that wasn’t either the leader or key part of a coup attempt will be ridiculed by the MAGA/Qanon cultists.
The president is currently really pushing this January 6th rally in DC this morning. He clearly wants violence. I left the Republican party awhile back, but I never imagined they would get this bad.
I think Ted Cruz’s statement is like that definition of chutzpah – killing your parents and asking for mercy because you’re an orphan.
“We’ve made lots of allegations of fraud and abuse. Look at all the allegations! These allegations should require some follow-up.”
“We’ve installed a huge smoke machine. Where there’s smoke there’s fire. There must be a fire, because look at all the smoke!”
@Deeg – this is a existential threat to American democracy. These Republicans, 11 in the Senate so far and over 100 in the House, are akin to aligning with the Japanese government after Pearl Harbor, aligning with Al Qaeda after September 11th. They are attacking the core of our democracy – peaceful transition of power after an election. I don’t know how any patriot can consider themselves American after these moves. They are probably doomed to fail this time, but if the Republicans had a majority in the House, they may have succeeded. You’re downplaying truly awful, anti-American behavior by these elected Republicans.
The Republican party is a party of billionaires who are angry that there is political opposition to oligarchy (How dare these little people ask for equality?!), and they’re a party that uses the displacement that many of their policies have caused to demonize the opposition (We’d give you, White Man, a job, a house - whatever you want - if we weren’t forced by the liberals to give your goods to less deserving brown people).
The general consensus seems to be that the Republicans who are supporting this coup, are doing so because they know it will fail. Are we really so sure that these folks would not be supporting this if they thought it could succeed?
They should have said something a long, long time ago. They’ve been clinging to the idea that the Republican party can be a legacy party again at some point, but beyond that, there’s really nowhere else for these aristocrats to go – they’re not going to become democrats, and being independent strips them of party influence and access. So they’re stuck on that Titanic until sinks to the bottom of the ocean.
To my point above. If not for the accident of happenstance that the Dems control the House, Donald Trump would be assured of a 2nd term despite having lost the popular and electoral vote counts.
I think what Deeg means is that, this isn’t McConnell’s idea, and I agree that it isn’t, but so what?
It wasn’t originally Von Hindenburg’s idea to empower Nazis and make Adolf Hitler the Chancellor of Germany, either, but he went along with it, thinking that it would be a way to ensure that he has influence over the country.
Navarro is right, but not in the way that he wants to be.
If the shenanigans in Congress mean that the vote-count continues past January 20, with each state slate being challenged, perhaps by different pairs of Representatives and Senators, then January 20 rolls around and there’s not been a final decision.
However, that would be a case where “neither a President elect nor a Vice President elect shall have qualified”. Trump and Pence’s terms come to an end: Twentieth Amendment, s. 1. Speaker Pelosi becomes acting President under the 20th Amendment, s. 3, while the Senate pro tem leader replaces former Vice-President Pence in presiding over the vote count.
