Rachel is aware of the legal barriers to trump's scheme to overturn the election and Rachel is correct to be worried. trump is going to test these legal barriers and there are no gurantees that trump will not be successful Remember that trump is still an idiot and I doubt that he can pull this stunt off but this does not mean that a future intelligent authoratarian might not be successful.
Having lost over and over again in court, Trump and his team have switched to their Plan B, which, as longtime Democratic strategist Chris Marshall spelled out in detail in Salon on Thursday, is to delay the certification of the vote in certain states and try to get Republican legislatures to assign electors to vote for Donald Trump instead of the actual winner, Joe Biden. This is based on the theory that if they can create enough chaos around the election results, Republican loyalists will rise to the occasion and “save democracy” from the Democrats, who are allegedly stealing the election.
This idea has been pushed by conservative talk show host Mark Levin and picked up by the right wing as a way to keep their beloved president in office for at least four more years. It’s a theory that is very unlikely to prevail, particularly since the Supreme Court just decided a case on “faithless electors” last July, in which the justices made it very clear that whatever the founders may have anticipated in the 18th century, our democracy today demands that electors express the will of the people. It will take some convoluted intellectual gyrations for them to conclude that state officials can simply change the results at their discretion.....
If that doesn’t work, the “strike force” are also talking about a Plan C, which would be to delay the vote certification for so long that the states can’t send Biden’s required 270 electors to Congress by the deadline, which under the 12th Amendment to the Constitution would throw the election to the House, where every state’s delegation gets one vote. As luck would have it Republicans hold 26 of the 50 delegations. Surprise!
Is any of this remotely possible? Sure. It’s unlikely, but it’s possible. It’s tempting to think this is all so nuts that it could never possibly happen, but we thought everything Donald Trump has done over the past five years was nuts, and here we are. All our hand-wringing about this plot being un-American and destructive to our democracy is sadly irrelevant — not just to the preposterous Giuliani and the equally preposterous Trump but to the entire Republican Party. They have learned the power of total shamelessness, and it is profound. I would never count them out.
Like Rachel, I am worried. Legal barriers work only to the extent that the courts and the public respect such barriers. trump is going to push against these barriers and I believe that he will lose.
I note that Prof. Michael Beschloss is also worried
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-uses-power-of-presidency-to-try-to-overturn-the-election-and-stay-in-office/2020/11/19/bc89caa6-2a9f-11eb-8fa2-06e7cbb145c0_story.html?fbclid=IwAR0sEwKAVH0_rdY6g9ZGpqxB6hgurlz8U16J97Vp23g53e03m_x2_hRa6-g
These are the words and actions of an attempted coup, according to historians and other experts.
“We have never seen anything like this before,” historian and author Michael Beschloss said. “This is a president abusing his very great powers to try to stay in office, even though it is obvious to everyone that he has been defeated in the polls. That is a prospect that terrified most of the founders.”
Beschloss added, “I don’t want to be alarmist, but I do think it’s our job as citizens to keep watch on every one of these things with an eye to that ultimate dread of the founders, which is that a president rejected by the voters would use his powers to try to stay in office anyway.”
Rachel and Beschloss are correct to worry. I personally believe that these efforts will fail. The fact that Georgia certified the vote was important today. However we need to heed Rachel and be prepared to fight back.
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