Trump's team screamed about fraud without ever claiming fraud in court because the real play was ALWAYS to get state legislatures to simply disregard the election results and award their electoral votes to Trump. The frenzy that the base was whipped into by the fraud claims was intended to provide cover in the form of a political environ…
Trump's team screamed about fraud without ever claiming fraud in court because the real play was ALWAYS to get state legislatures to simply disregard the election results and award their electoral votes to Trump. The frenzy that the base was whipped into by the fraud claims was intended to provide cover in the form of a political environment where state legislators might better justify what they had done. (If this sounds like just another conspiracy theory, I would love to hear another explanation for why fraud was never even presented in court.) Though cynical, unprincipled and indeed, un-American, had the election come down to just one or two states. it might well have worked. Mere state legislators may not have withstood the pressure that we saw brought to bear on the national legislature last week.
I am by no means a fan of Mitch McConnell, but he got it exactly right with that stuff about sending our democracy into a death spiral. He has seen this phenomenon himself in relation to the filibuster, where the Democrats' use of the "nuclear option" for certain nominations led Mitch to nuke it for Supreme Court nominations, which will almost certainly lead Democrats to eventually nuke it altogether. In the same fashion, if Republicans in either Congress or the state legislatures were to take this presidential election out of the hands of voters, Democrats would do the same thing the first chance they got and soon, we might as well not even bother with presidential elections.
And then there was Mike Pence, along with people like Brad Raffensperger and those two Republican legislative leaders from Michigan who Trump summoned to Washington. All chose country over party in refusing to dishonor the will of the American people, as expressed through our democratic process.
I have been sorely disappointed by my Republican brothers over the past four or five years. Now that the mask has been ripped from your eyes and you see just how dangerous Donald Trumpism is, keep on doing the right thing. Lindsay Graham may have said it best:
Trump's team screamed about fraud without ever claiming fraud in court because the real play was ALWAYS to get state legislatures to simply disregard the election results and award their electoral votes to Trump. The frenzy that the base was whipped into by the fraud claims was intended to provide cover in the form of a political environment where state legislators might better justify what they had done. (If this sounds like just another conspiracy theory, I would love to hear another explanation for why fraud was never even presented in court.) Though cynical, unprincipled and indeed, un-American, had the election come down to just one or two states. it might well have worked. Mere state legislators may not have withstood the pressure that we saw brought to bear on the national legislature last week.
I am by no means a fan of Mitch McConnell, but he got it exactly right with that stuff about sending our democracy into a death spiral. He has seen this phenomenon himself in relation to the filibuster, where the Democrats' use of the "nuclear option" for certain nominations led Mitch to nuke it for Supreme Court nominations, which will almost certainly lead Democrats to eventually nuke it altogether. In the same fashion, if Republicans in either Congress or the state legislatures were to take this presidential election out of the hands of voters, Democrats would do the same thing the first chance they got and soon, we might as well not even bother with presidential elections.
And then there was Mike Pence, along with people like Brad Raffensperger and those two Republican legislative leaders from Michigan who Trump summoned to Washington. All chose country over party in refusing to dishonor the will of the American people, as expressed through our democratic process.
I have been sorely disappointed by my Republican brothers over the past four or five years. Now that the mask has been ripped from your eyes and you see just how dangerous Donald Trumpism is, keep on doing the right thing. Lindsay Graham may have said it best:
"Enough is enough."