(By “optimal” I mean from the perspective of the rioters, of course, not from the perspective of others.)
Suppose that the January 6 rioters were a bit more organized and focus-minded than the absent-brained rabble mob they were, and had come with a plan. As I understand it, merely forcing Congress to certify Trump as the winner wouldn’t have done a thing - there were other boxes containing extra copies of the ballots precisely to prevent shenanigans of this sort - and the vote would have been meaningless since the Supreme Court could nullify such a coerced “vote.”
There were two weeks between January 6 and Inauguration Day. If the rioters had somehow managed to keep all of Congress in the building for two weeks (and for whatever reason there were no SWAT raid to free them) and demanded that the Supreme Court - or whatever entity really has the final say - certify Trump as the winner, and demanded that Trump be inaugurated on January 20, - then, if Trump had indeed been inaugurated, under duress, would that inauguration still count? In other words, is the inauguration the final stop on the bus, no recourse after that?
Obviously, most likely, Biden would be inaugurated anyway and the rioters would have been SWAT’d. But if somehow the rioters had demanded a Trump inauguration and gotten to see one after two weeks inside the Capitol building, what then? (Presumably, they’d also demand that Trump issue blanket pardons to all of them too, for legal immunity)
GQ answer: Optimal for them, within the legal bounds of the constitution, would be not being charged and imprisoned for trespassing, rioting, insurrection, etc. Also, not being outed to their friends and fired from their jobs, which has already happened, and not kicked out of their elected positions, which has also happened.
That said, there is no way this thread belongs in GQ, since there is no factual answer. With that proviso, I’ll give you my opinion, and suggest you ask for this thread be moved. I think they were hoping that the police and army would be on their side and, together, they would force congress to accept Trump as the rightful leader, and understand that the election was stolen from him, since he “won by a lot.” Once that happens, proper counting of votes, SCOTUS opinions, etc., don’t matter, because you’re already outside the law and democracy in the US is effectively over.
The talk about not inaugurating Biden is off-topic, in a way – either he’s not inaugurated because congress didn’t bother to certify or he’s not inaugurated because there has been a coup. In the first case, Trump’s term is still over, and Nancy Pelosi is the president. In the second case, you’re again outside the legal bounds of the constitution and democracy is over.
I think they were hoping the pressure of a (mostly peaceful) demonstration would cause Pence and enough Senators to delay certification, while other improper pressures got States like Georgia and Michigan to send a new slate of electors. The insurrection was a result of Pence saying he wouldn’t play along, and everyone got pissed, saw the election finally slipping away, and they decided to storm the Capital with a vague idea to “stop it.”
A small subset of the insurrectionists did come with a plan. And the large mob of disorganized people around them were part of that plan. There were a few dozen people who had exchanged messages and reviewed floor plans in preparation for their invasion, and when they hit the building they immediately sprinted for their targets, arriving at key locations much more quickly than if they’d been randomly roaming like everyone else.
You make the mistake of assuming that because the majority of the crowd was vaguely agitated but otherwise directionless, all of them were. That is incorrect. That majority was consciously intended as camouflage for the hardcore insurrectionists who were very much executing a pre-defined plan.
Mind you, that pre-defined plan didn’t go much further than “take control of key figures and force them to cooperate.” In some ways, if they’d actually managed to achieve the first part of that goal, it would have been sub-optimal for them in the end, because it would have failed and the consequences would have been much more severe. As it stands, the current real-world outcome is probably better for them, because, per the views in your post, they can claim to be a bunch of incompetent boobs who didn’t know what they were doing, and will, they hope, escape the punishment that is proportional to their intended crime.
This seems to have been the administration’s ploy in a sense. Delay certification then send it to the Supreme Court on the technical grounds that it was not completed on the scheduled date. Then hope the Supremes would send it back to congress to be voted on by straight state delegation, where Republicans had an edge.
That presumes that narrow technicality would have carried the day with the SC (doubtful, I think/hope) and I think the administration was caught off guard by the actual capitol breach. They were counting on chaos, but probably not quite that much which pissed off even the R congress in the short term and kinda sealed the deal on certification.
I get the intent, but this requires too much speculation and opinion for GQ. Since you want to avoid a debate, let’s move it to IMHO.
Let’s also avoid political opinions and pot-shots as those are off-topic for this particular thread.
Since this was originally posted in GQ, it’s clear that the intent is for something more than just baseless speculation and opinion, so keep that in mind when responding.
Also the successful use of violence and terrorism to intimidate politicians elsewhere in the future. Leftist politicians sit down and shut up out of fear of being raped, kidnapped and killed. The KKK wanted to inflict enough terror in people that most just stayed home, shut up and didn’t speak out. Same with these people.
Also a blanket pardon for all federal crimes by Donald Trump. I think a lot were expecting that.
To me, the more interesting question is how this happened in the first place. As soon as a large group of protestors started heading for the Capitol the National Guard should have been mobilized “just in case”. The Capitol police were badly outnumbered and weren’t prepared, or willing, to shoot anyone who broke through the perimeter. It’s a miracle more of them weren’t injured or killed. For some reason, authorities waited until rioters broke into the Capitol before calling out the cavalry. Given how terribly wrong this could have gone I don’t understand the delay.
We need an independent congressional investigation to explain how it happened. If someone takes one step inside the White House fence they are immediately apprehended and removed without delay or hesitation. If the Capitol police can’t handle a situation there are lots of other federal resources close at hand who can step in and stop a mob no matter how big it is. That’s what the National Guard is for.
I feel a true and honest investigation is going to find that there were efforts by high ranking people in the DOJ and military to prevent any kind of backup from being sent, as well as efforts by GOP senators and congressmen/women who helped give tours of the layout of the capitol building in the days before the riot.
To me its not really confusing why there was a delay. I think it was intentional because Trump supporters in the military and DOJ wanted to prevent the police and national guard from stopping the coup attempt.
Which is why we need an honest and open investigation and to throw the book at anyone who was involved. Life sentences for generals and DOJ officials who blocked efforts to stop the coup should be given out if proven in court.
The President has the authority to mobilize the National Guard, but Trump was happy to let things go as long as there was a chance it might alter the election result.
When things started to unravel did anyone in the White House, including Mike Pence, suggest to Trump that he order the Guard out before things got out of hand? I would like to know what was happening at the White House during this critical time before the perimeter was breached. By the time calls were finally made to mobilize, the “protestors” were inside and could go almost anywhere they wanted. It looks like the President did nothing. Has anyone suggested otherwise?
I don’t know how to put “optimal” outcome into words… words that would be unacceptable in IMHO ( or even in The Pit ).
There is a part of me that longs for Justice for these treasonous brownshirts and Dupes.
…but I would be lying if I said that there wasn’t a small part of me that yearns for Punishment…
This needs a full investigation, my understanding is Pelosi is setting up a select committee that will do just that–but there’s also an investigation ongoing in the DoJ as well. I don’t think any of us have firm answers until those investigations are complete. However the preliminary reporting appears to put a lot of the blame on the Capitol Police leadership, and then once the crisis actually started, on DoD officials.
The last reading I saw of the details is that Capitol Police didn’t make any requests for large scale assistance of other agencies until like right as the building was breached. Due to a comedy of errors a National Guard rapid response team setup for this purpose wasn’t able to respond for hours. The full force of the local national guard takes like 6-10 hours to respond and mobilize once the call goes out. So there wasn’t really some magic way of getting thousands of them to converge on the Capitol when they had not already been pre-staged. So far it’s been indicated that it was a major intelligence failure by Capitol Police leadership, who had lots of clear evidence of major violent intent by organized insurrectionists, and simply waived it away. Because of this they were not setup on the day of the coup attempt to easily mobilize a force to intervene. It ended up being mostly the D.C. Metropolitan Police that quelled the riot.
I think there is also strong evidence of “cultural bias” at work. We all know that the far right, when they protest (even armed) tend to receive a much warmer welcome from law enforcement than left wing protesters. I think a lot of Capitol police officers viewed these protesters as “their people” and weren’t looking to antagonize or fight them back. I suspect by the time they realized the situation was out of control, there were no easy answers. Once the fighting has devolved into a melee and pushed into the Capitol, it’s hard to effectively use most riot control techniques, and at that point the police are way outnumbered.
A lot is still to be investigated as to why this thread wasn’t taken seriously and why the Capitol police were so derelict in their duty. The official excuse their (now fired/resigned) leadership has given is that at a previous protest, the presence of a large National Guard deployment was met with political disdain because it was seen as “heavy handed.” Of course, that deployment was targeted at a BLM/leftist protest, while no such deployment was setup to counter a right wing protest. Was it really because the Capitol police wanted to avoid “drama” (which as far as I can tell, most police forces don’t really care about) or because they simply felt the people coming on 1/6 were the “good guys” and wouldn’t be a problem.
There’s a lot of investigating that does need to be done about the DoD meetings and the approval of mobilizing the national guard, as there are some people who believe Trump or one of his subordinates intervened to stop a deployment. The initial reporting has indicated this was not true, and the decisions were being made by career military officials, but that is why we have investigations, to suss out the truth of that.
Thanks for the replies but I’m not really starting another Jan-6 thread but rather asking the specific question of whether a forced outcome can hold Constitutional legal water.
Suppose the rioters managed to force Congress to certify Trump, the Supreme Court to do so, AND then managed to hold out, un-SWAT’d, all the way til Jan. 20 until Trump was sworn in by John Roberts - what legal recourse does Biden have at that point?
If you’re saying the insurrectionists had somehow coerced the SCOTUS to uphold a bogus certification, then no one has any legal, Constitutional recourse because we no longer have law or a Constitution.