"Twenty years later, the lesson of that debacle isn't being heeded. Donald Trump and his cronies are quite clearly waging a public-facing campaign designed to create the conditions for the Electoral College process to pull off a coup.
This is a full-scale emergency and yet the Democratic strategy seems to be to try to pretend it isn't happening, in hopes that norms win out, even though nothing at all is normal.
Trump Has A Deliberate StrategyIn the week since the election, Trump's and his Republican allies have waged a public campaign to call the election results into question not just in the courtroom, but in the public's mind. Their lawsuits and Attorney General William Barr's recent memo are designed as much to win rulings and initiate prosecutions as they are to generate headlines. Their tweets asserting fraud, and their high-profile promises of financial reward for evidence of fraud are all designed to do the same thing.
Most ominously of all, Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona are already insinuating the results may be fraudulent.
Why is public perception so important? Because as Ohio State University law professor Edward Foley shows in a frighteningly prescient 2019 article, legislatures could use the public perception of fraud to try to invoke their constitutional power to ignore their states' popular votes, reject certified election results and appoint slates of Trump electors.
In an article that predicted almost exactly what has already happened in Pennsylvania, Foley imagined Trump seeming to be ahead at first, then losing his lead as votes are counted, then making allegations of fraud, setting the stage for this:
At Trump's urging, the state's legislature where Republicans have majorities in both houses purports to exercise its authority under Article II of the Constitution to appoint the state's presidential electors directly. Taking their cue from Trump, both legislative chambers claim that the certified popular vote cannot be trusted because of the blue shift that occurred in overtime. Therefore, the two chambers claim to have the constitutional right to supersede the popular vote and assert direct authority to appoint the state's presidential electors, so that this appointment is in line with the popular vote tally as it existed on Election Night, which Trump continues to claim is the "true" outcome.
The state's Democratic governor refuses to assent to this assertion of authority by the state's legislature, but the legislature's two chambers proclaim that the governor's assent is unnecessary. They cite early historical practices in which state legislatures appointed presidential electors without any involvement of the state's governor. They argue that like constitutional amendments, and unlike ordinary legislation, the appointment of presidential electors when undertaken directly by a state legislature is not subject to a gubernatorial veto.
Foley notes how public-facing politics outside the cloistered legal arena could then come into play."
Jonathan Simon nailed it when he wrote, first to a listserve of election integrity leaders and then in his article, titled, Trump Is Sandbagging to Send Election to the House; Election Integrity Should Not Help Him. Simon says, in his article
""Trump's current strategy is not about actually overturning enough votes to win election legitimately. His own aides have acknowledged that is impossible. Rather it is fixed on delaying certification past the applicable deadlines. The law favors delay and Team Trump knows it. His plan is to prevent certification of 270 Biden electoral votes by tying up several state processes in court past the state deadlines (the "hard" one being 12/14, when the Electoral College votes on slates) and then either importuning friendly state legislatures (the GOP controls Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona) to send Trump elector slates to Congress, or simply throwing the election to the House, where the GOP controls the majority of state delegations (under the Twelfth Amendment, the House votes for president by state delegation) so Trump wins.
Does that look like democracy or electoral integrity to you? To me it looks like yet another right-wing scheme to steal an electionand haven't we been through (and been irreparably harmed by) enough of those? Don't kid yourselvesthis is a clear and present danger."
So, when Democratic legislators or any of the MSM hosts or "experts" say Trump is being foolish, or Joe Biden says Trump is "embarrassing," the reality is that they are naà ¯ve and clueless and have not yet figured out what is really going on.
Once I read Jonathan Simon's thinkingthat Trump didn't need to win, he just needed to delay, my stress level went up and it's still up. And that's how every leader in the Democratic party should be feeling. Joe Biden and his team should be aggressively fighting every delay tactic and they should be coming out swinging. This is not a grudge match or a loser refusing to give in. This is a team of bloodthirsty people like Mitch McConnell, who go for blood and play to win, no matter who, including lady Democracy, gets hurt. It is time to call your legislators at all levels federal and state and wake them up to the reality that Trump is not being a fool. He's trying to pull a Rutherford Hayes over Tilden re-run.
And if the Republicans pull this off, which really just requires a few state legislatures, Trump will successfully steal the election. That will lead to massive demonstrations and cities burning. No wonder Trump just fired the guy who refused to bring in the military to deal with protesters.
An Update. Thom Hartmann tells me that Georgia passed legislation that would prevent an article 2 Hayes/Tilden gambit from happening there. But that still leaves Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Arizona, with their Republican controlled legislatures. Thom also observed that the best defense for an article 2 Hayes/Tilden gambit could be the MSM being smarmy and overly confident in concluding that Biden is the winner, and he notes that even Fox News has acknowledged his victory. But Thom also suggests that this is a warm-up to a 2024 election where true fascist and actual smart man Tom Cotton will probably be running against incumbent Kamala Harris. I don't think ignoring the problem, as the Democratic leadership and their MSM surrogates are doing is the best idea.
David Sirota observes, "We need a vociferous public campaign focused on preventing state legislators from feeling empowered to ignore their own voters," and says, "The Biden-Harris campaign has been proceeding as if everything is fine... as if this is a West Wing episode inanely presuming that any single Republican elected official in the country cares about such things," and Sirota adds,
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
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