Trump and the "Stop the Steal" crowd say the Vice President has the power to discard electoral votes.
OK, Vice President Harris, say you agree.
It is an empty threat because no one remotely thinks that the Democrats would attempt turnabout.
Recent reporting has made clear that the "Stop the Steal" effort was not just idle showboating. Trump had a comprehensive plan and Mike Pence was torn over whether to implement it. Plan A for Trump was to win the election; he came close, but lost. Plan B was for Republican election officials in key states to void or reverse their elections, either by "finding" votes in Georgia, by having a Republican governor in Arizona say the election was fraudulent, or by having legislative majorities in key states do it by claiming plenary power to choose an alternative slate of electors. Trump tried Plan B with phone calls and White House visits to election officials, but enough people with roles in election administration were unwilling to call foul, so that was unsuccessful.
Plan C was to have Pence use unverified accusations of fraud to justify claiming state elections were doubtful and to discard Biden electoral votes. It was expected to cause chaotic civil disturbances, requiring martial law. In that context, Pence would refer the election to the House of Representatives, a Constitutional remedy in the event of a failed election, letting the House with one vote per state choose Trump.
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Plan C, Vice Presidential power to choose the president, sits out there as an idea unchallenged by Republican officeholders and thought leaders. Their silence is validating Trump.
Is this an extraordinarily dangerous precedent, especially when the sitting Vice President is Kamala Harris? If the Democratic candidate lost the election in 2024, couldn't she just discard a few inconvenient electoral votes and elect a Democrat?
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No. She won't do that. Republican officeholders can remain silent about Plans B and C in the secure knowledge that a presidential coup d'état is a one-way street. Trump would try it. Biden would not. The Democratic brand has been locked in: Elections matter. There is one "strong man" candidate, Trump. Biden is a legislator, an institutionalist, a senator who got kicked upstairs because he was too old to be dangerous. Strong man government isn't in Biden's nature.
The validity of elections is on the political table and parties are choosing their sides. Democrats support elections. So do Republicans when it comes to every office but the presidency. Republicans are in process of developing a different attitude on presidential elections. Republicans are praising partisan "election audits." The one in Arizona is the first of many. At Trump's urging the Republican governor of Texas agreed to do election audits in Texas counties that Trump won, even after the Texas governor had averred that the Texas election went smoothly. A new meme is settling in among the GOP electorate: Elections aren't a trustworthy way to choose presidents.
Because Democrats are presenting themselves as virtuous defenders of orderly transitions in government, Republican officeholders are free to ignore the precedents they are setting. No one thinks for a moment that Kamala Harris will discard electoral votes in states that vote Republican to keep Biden in office.
That lets discarding presidential elections be on-brand for Republicans and that idea isn't fading away. It is becoming normalized.
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Republicans are doing their best to end democracy. Don’t they care?
Trump and his chumps did everything possible to overturn a free and fair election, including pressure legislators and election officials to illegally invalidate the results. That’s also known as an attempted coup.
Rather than hold him accountable, Republicans remain slavishly devoted to him. Trump's legacy is best summarized by the pictures of him humping the flag at events like CPAC. This is what now passes for patriotism in the GOP. God forbid that Democrats stoop to that level.
Many fear the US becoming an autocracy. Republicans are losing their constituency as their economic policies devastate the middle class, leaving them with only the wealthy and stupid, so a two class Soviet system is their only path to power.
I see an interim period we are entering where the Republican led states effectively secede and establish their own Regressive governments, with an impotent federal system in perpetual gridlock. Basically we lose the "United" part of the USA.
This does not end well and it will be the fault of the Democrats if they continue to seek compromises with bad faith actors, including those in their own party.
It turns out that the method of choosing a president specified by The Constitution has (from a software engineer’s perspective) some bugs. This leaves that method open to being hacked. Furthermore, eliminating those bugs is impractical since fixing the “software” requires a constitutional amendment that cannot happen in the present political environment.
The only way to prevent these bugs from being exploited is via public opinion. It needs to be made unacceptable for either side to pull that trick. Moving public opinion to that place requires an absolute faith in the integrity of our elections. In that regard, Democrats’ objections to election investigations are counterproductive. When Democrats object to investigations, it looks like they have something to hide. If they don’t have anything to hide, why would they care if someone took a look?
The way forward would be to let everyone investigate anything they want to. And when they all come up with nothing, faith in our elections will have been established beyond a reasonable doubt. It’s not enough for the entire liberal media to shout, “no evidence.“ Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Michael T.--
Maybe they're not bugs but features?! After all, the long-awaited result of the powerful Cyber Ninja audit in Arizona reportedly is a net gain of a few hundred votes for Biden. Meanwhile, as soon as Republicans regain the House next fall it'll be time to start the next round of impeachment proceedings. All is well.
It wouldn't take a Constitutional Amendment to pass term limits or reduce gerrymandering and the influence of dark money. All it would require is an informed electorate serious about preserving our republic.
Oh well, never mind.
Hunter Biden’s newest purported Libya email dump on Thursday, unrelated to his reported laptop cache, reveals the Biden family’s connections to the “highest level” in Communist China.
The emails by Hunter’s business contact indicate Hunter, “#2 son,” demanded a $2 million dollar retainer plus “success fees” to unfreeze assets in Libya frozen by the Obama-Biden administration. They also noted Hunter’s business relationship with former Secretary of State John Kerry’s stepson Chris Heinz, who founded with Hunter in 2009 Rosemont Seneca Partners, a billion-dollar private equity firm.
The first Libya email is reportedly dated January 28, 2015, nearly two years before the end of the Obama-Biden administration.
“Per phone conversation I met with #2 son. He wants $2 per year retainer +++ success fees. He wants to hire his own people – it can be close circle of people for confidentiality. His dad is deciding to run or not,” the email first read.
The email then described Hunter as an “alcoholic, drug addict” and “kicked [out] of U.S. Army for cocaine, chasing low-class hookers, constantly needs money-liquidity problems and many more headaches.”
But Hunter’s business contact, Democrat donor Sam Jauhari, said Hunter’s redemptive qualities where his connection to Chris Heinz and his “access to [the] highest level” in Communist China:
His positives are he is Chairman of UN World Food Program, son of #2 who has Libya file, access to State, Treasury, business partner SofS [Secretary of State] J. [John] Forbes K [Kerry] son and since he travels with dad he is connected everywhere in Europe and Asia where M. Q. [Muammar Qaddafi] and LIA [Libya Investment Authority] had money frozen. He said he has access to highest level in PRC [China], he can help there.
Another email from Thursday’s report indicates the deal progressed into the following year.
“They are interested in the project,” a Washington lawyer John Sandweg wrote Jauhari, “but emphasized that for them to get involved, the team (lobbyists, lawyers and PR) would need to be a small group of folks they have a tight relationship with.”
The White House, Jauhari, and Hunter’s attorney declined to comment on the Libya emails to Business Insider.
Though the deal appears to not have come to fruition, the emails reveal the Biden’s close ties to China.
Breitbart News senior contributor and Secret Empires author Peter Schweizer told Fox News in 2019 that Hunter traveled to China with Joe Biden aboard Air Force Two. Ten days after the trip, Rosemont Seneca received a $1.5 billion deal, which Schweizer believes was funded by Communist China:
While his father is meeting with Chinese officials, Hunter Biden is doing we don’t know what. But the evidence becomes clear because ten days after they return to Washington, his small boutique investment firm, Rosemont Seneca, gets a $1 billion deal. That’s $1 billion with a “B,” later expanded to $1.5 billion. And that deal is with the Chinese government. It’s a deal that nobody else has in China. Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, nobody.
Despite his lack of experience in financial matters, such as private equity or hedge funds, Hunter and Chris Heinz won the contract over the likes of the big banks.
“Any experience he [Hunter] has in private equity is certainly not the type that the Chinese would have interested in. And the bottom line here,” Schweizer continued, “is that in both the case of Ukraine and China, we have paper trails.
The Democrat-led House passed a radical pro-abortion bill, the Women’s Health Protection Act, which Republicans warn “usurps states rights and legalizes killings of viable unborn American babies up to and including when a mother is in labor.”
The bill, per her office the bill “abolishes several categories of state pro-life laws that”:
1)Protect the mother by requiring that abortions may only be done by physicians;
2)Implement parental consent laws;
3)Prevent the killings of unborn babies who are viable outside the mother’s womb; and,
4)Prohibit the killings of unborn babies based on their sex.
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