I’m not sure it couldn’t fool Pence, the cowardly dumb dumb. Quayle said, “Don’t do it!”
14 Likes
The routes and mechanisms with which they seek to attain power are like an intellectual game with these people; like solving a crossword puzzle or winning at chess. Some people collect stamps or some such, some folks collect money and they can never have enough, even though they have plenty and more. These miscreants collect power and they can never have enough. It’s like hoarding disorder, or cat lady disorder only with rich, white, fascist lawyers.
45 Likes
I wouldn’t be so confident that internal resistance to the Insurrection Act would have been enough to stop Trump from declaring martial law, which seems to have been his plan for ultimate endgame had the Electoral College been thrown out and Trump crowned as President.
Trump would have fired whichever leaders and Cabinet members he needed to in order to get his toadies in charge to execute the plan. Remember that he had Jeffrey Clark ready to go at Justice. If there would be unrest in the streets and mass protests in support of Biden going on, public perception would not have mattered anymore in the face of Trump’s machinations.
15 Likes
I’m not against flushing the EC down the crapper, but before we do can we game out the replacement system first. Put under a stress test now so we don’t stress out later.
4 Likes
“It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.” – Voltaire
21 Likes
Hey but at least the murderer has a mask, and is in a place where wearing it can be enforced.
2 Likes
So will anyone from the press ask Clarence Thomas how he feels about one of his former clerks trying to overthrow democracy, and where he might have been inspired to have such a worldview?
30 Likes
Hubris
6 Likes
I can easily believe that Trump thought it would work, because he’s never had a clear understanding of how much of the country opposed him. He only held campaign rallies in safe Red areas where he’d see minimal counter-protests. He thought big crowds at rallies were somehow representative of the country as a whole. Most of his TV watching was Fox News, and he ignored polls he didn’t like. He never cared about anyone who didn’t support him, so he never realized how large that group was, and never gamed out what would happen if this Eastman memo scheme had succeeded.
As for the “rest of the clowns” like Eastman and Giuliani, they were riding the tiger. Once committed to the overall goal to keep Trump in office, they didn’t have any other option but to keep coming up with cockamamie ideas like this.
All I really care about at this point is whether any of this rises to the level of a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States, and if Garland has the stones to prosecute if it’s actionable.
40 Likes
There’s a common feature of trumpist schemes that I’ve been struggling to articulate for some time - they all seem to contain a willful blindness to other people’s agency; to assume that everyone else is bound by the rules you are going to throw over.
The closest I can come is that it’s fairy-tale logic: you reveal the answer to the riddle that you learned by being nice to the talking fox and the evil sorcerer says “fair cop, here’s the magic talisman”, you then travel home in complete safety, break the curse on the princess and the entirety of the local power structure says “cool, guess the talking cat/shoeblack/woodcutter is the king now. What’s for dinner?”
26 Likes
takes snippets of my work wholly out of context and spins a totally fake web of “law that no halfway decent lawyer would take seriously.
Not halfway decent lawyer would take it seriously, but five people on the SCOTUS could.
Also a good reminder how close we came to a coup on 1/6. Democracy hinged on the good faith of Mike Pence.
12 Likes
How The Newly Revealed ‘Eastman Memo’ Fits Into Trump’s Election Theft Conspiracy | Talking Points Memo
Which election theft conspiracy is that? The one they ginned up to explain away Biden’s victory, or one where the white house tried and failed to overturn the will of the voters?
5 Likes
8 Likes
Yes
9 Likes
You misspelled “cowardice”.
20 Likes
Agreed
9 Likes
I wonder if “rich, white, fascist lawyers” scrapbook their immiserations?
Because that’s all McConnell and TFGs power is.
The ability to immiserate.
6 Likes
I wouldn’t give him that much credit. The system held because Pence knew that all Hell would break loose if he refused the certification, abandoning his very minor Constitutional role in the EC certification.
If he had done that, there would have been an immediate uproar from both sides of the aisle, except for a handful of GOP co-conspirators. The very next thing would have been the Senate Parliamentarian backed up by a majority of Congress, telling Pence he had no authority to do that. A public humiliation in front of the cameras. There is no way it would have proceeded to the end game of the House voting state-by-state to put Trump back in office.
23 Likes
But they put in extra letters and add spaces, they write stuff in even if the words don’t have letters in common, they just do really dumb stuff to make it work because they can’t make it come out right by following the actual rules. It’s Calvinball.
23 Likes
To put it mildly, it can’t help your chances in the next election to have tried and failed to steal the last one. At least, it can’t help in the general. 
19 Likes