Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas is suing vice-president Mike Pence. Pence is using Department of Justice lawyers to defend himself. Attorney General William Barr resigned just before Christmas. President Trump cut short his Mar-a-Lago vacation by a day to return to Washington. Do I know what it all means?
Hardly.
Beyond it being in some sense the real-life manifestation of Trump’s private delusions and pathologies, it looks like Gohmert wants the courts to award Pence with the power to decide the winner of the 2020 election without any necessary reference to how people voted. Pence doesn’t want this responsibility and the DOJ is still independent enough of Trump to have Pence’s back.
Trump just wants to be declared the winner and knows he needs Pence to play his part for the coup to have any prospect of success.
The president does have some support from congressional Republicans, including some freshmen but Trump cannot be happy that his rudderless DOJ is backing Pence’s reluctance to do his bidding.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is having no part of a coup attempt and is reportedly pissed at Senator Josh Hawley for agreeing to join with renegade House Republicans in challenging the slates of least a couple of states.
This is a lot of drama and I struggle to figure out what it signifies. Our president is sick so our system of government is also sick.
All I really want to know is if we can recover once Trump is no longer president, and, if so, how long will it take?
Our system is sick not because of the president, or the government – but because of the voters. A large fraction of the voters are sick – mentally ill. Otherwise KY would not have voted for MoscowMitch after all his cruelty towards them, SC would not have voted for LeningradLindsey after all his ass licking, ME would not have voted for Collins after all her lies (Trump has learnt his lesson!), Cornyn in TX – the list is long! And 74M voted for Trump after seeing him lighting fire in every way in every part of the government.
NO – THE PEOPLE OF THIS COUNTRY ARE SICK – AND TRUMP AND THE CURRENT THUGS OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY ARE JUST THE FRUITS OF THAT SICKNESS!
PROBABLY THE WORST DEMOCRATIC POLITY IN THE WORLD! AND A JOKE OF A CONSTITUTION!
You might say we live in a make believe democracy where the constitution takes away the democracy part.
I think a lot depends on how successful this effort is, by people like Hawley, to harness the energy and fanaticism of the Trump cult and keep it interested in continuing their work to destroy democracy. If it stays organized and has some kind of leadership within the government that can keep these MAGA’s engaged, then we are in for a long and bumpy road, with no certainty that we escape before the next smarter and more cagy iteration of Trump comes along and puts the final spike in the heart of The Great American Experiment. I think the odds on this happening are better than not, which should scare the living bejesus out of everyone who cares about the country and it’s future.
The Trump GOP is going to do everything in their power to perpetuate the Trump magic, such as it is, by giving the cult all of the red meat they can possibly generate to keep them hungry for more. I expect lots of armed displays wherever Dems dare to congregate and try to govern. I expect that elected GOP officials will continue to encourage shows of implicit and explicit force and violence against anyone not in their camp. After Biden takes office, somewhere in this country there are people, meaning Democrats, who are probably going to die at the hands of the Trump cult. I don’t see how it can not happen, given the level of fearmongering we are seeing, and the ease with which the Trump cult travels in our midst with loaded, high caliber weapons, whenever the urge hits them and they feel it is beneficial to their cause and their message.
One big unknown is how the Democratic Party will choose to function in the new reality of American governance. That thought also scares the shit out of me. So much of what can potentially be done will hinge on the Georgia Senate races. If we win both of those, and Dems still think the wise thing to do is try to tailor their narrative and their efforts in order to convince some imaginary winnable Republicans with tepid and watered down Republican-light efforts and legislation, then we are totally fucked and the game is essentially over before it even gets started. If they even hint that they are going to test the waters of “good faith” with the GOP, then I know the MAGA’s have won. We simply cannot assume there is any such thing as “GOP good faith”.
The Democrats are going to have to maximize every bit of leverage and power they have to get things done and will simply have to ignore the outrage from the Trumpers, the hand-wringing and the calls by the media for “bipartisanship” and “compromise”, and the inevitable calls by some Dems in Congress to move slowly and cautiously. Kind of seems like we get one shot at this, and there is little to no margin for error. We cannot be afraid to make our internal goal the obliteration of the GOP. We cannot get distracted by the Mitt Romney’s, Ben Sasse’s and John Kasich’s of the world and allow ourselves to get rolled by the shiny object they are all going to dangling in front of Democrats. Because the bottom line is those people are either for democracy, or they’re not. I kind of hate to quote Steve Schmidt, but he is exactly right when he said at his announcement about registering as a Democrat,
So let the onus be on the likes of Romney, Sasse, and Kasich to “stand for the ideas and ideals of American liberty”, and not on Dems to try and coax them by ceding the ground on democratic principles in order to curry their favor.
There are estimates that 140 republican “congressmen” will vote against accepting electors. They are purposefully radicalizing 40-50 million people against democracy, and the right wing media that these people will flock to will fan those flames. If Fox isn’t willing to do what they crave then OAN and Breitbart and Newsmax will. I don’t see a way out of this that allows our country to function.
Very nice post and it lays out the truth we now face.
At least a couple of Dems are on record (Manchin, for one) that they won’t support elimination of the filibuster, so winning those two Georgia seats, while important and essential, will not prevent the minority led by McConnell from preventing Democratic governance – unless “the likes of Romney, Sasse, and Kasich” decide they need to separate themselves from McConnell’s control.
Yes, he could well be on the record about the filibuster. But if we win those two seats, Manchin’s nuts are going to be in a vise tighter than he could have ever imagined in his most repressed nightmares. We are talking about the potential death of democracy here. The pressure is going to be unprecedented to do whatever is necessary to keep the whole thing from going into the shitter, forever. We are talking a situation and set of circumstances that have not been faced in this country since at least the 1860’s. The old rules are no longer in effect. Standards Democrats in Congress are used to observing in the “collegial” world of governance no longer apply. The Trump Party has completely flipped the gameboard and scattered the pieces of democracy all over the floor. The rules are now what those with power say that they are. If Democrats end up with power, and don’t use to it’s fullest extent, and beyond, then we are absolutely and eternally fucked. We are nearing a zero sum game here. If we fail to have that reckoning, then we will have to forever live with that shame and awful responsibility. If we end up in charge, Democrats have to be Mitch McConnell on steroids, from day one to the absolute final day, wall to wall. No prisoners. It will be very ugly, but it will be necessary.
There are two parts to this. One is, is it possible assuming we get 50 seats, to change the filibuster rule for one off bills like a new Voting Rights Act? I don’t know how the Senate rules work to even know if that is possible. The second is, Manchin obviously is opposed to it for now. But even he might not be, if McConnell proceeds to block anything and everything and prevents functioning of the administration. In fact I’m not even sure Manchin is running in 24. Potentially he can be bought off. Earmarks are expected to make a comeback too.
If Manchin refuses to vote with his party at this particular time he is lost to us and should be shunned forever. Joe needs to find another way to object or simply get the fuck out. It would be better if he used his power to voter no on the legislation than to hide behind a filibuster rule.
We’re fucked and we’re gonna be fucked for a long time. Are we irrevocably fucked forever? Well as my father used to say, “Forever is a very long time.” I’m not a young man though and a long recovery is heartbreaking to contemplate.
I think your first sentence is a precise statement of the “new normal”.
What the Republicans are doing with the electoral college certification is just the logical extension of what they have already done with the Supreme Court. The McConnell Rule is that no D president gets to seat a SC justice while the Republicans control the senate. The Gohmert/McCarthy codicil is that no D president gets to take office while the Republicans control the Congress.
And all this follows from the core principle of the modern republican party: Power in the hands of Republicans is always legitimate; power in the hands of Democrats never is.
I confess to not understanding how this certification process works. But for anyone who knows, if the republicans somehow decertify Biden’s win, can that vote be taken to the Supreme Court? The whole thing sounds insane to me. Surely all the safeguards in the constitution cannot be aimed at taking away an election for which there is zero evidence, and for which the states have already certified. It simply cannot be possible for someone like Trump to literally steal an election. And if the Supreme Court upholds Trump’s win do we really have a government under a constitution any longer or is it a declaration of war for reds v blues. And if the Court refuses to intervene is that not effectively the same result, literally no defense of the constitution unless you pervert the meaning of the electoral college. Then again Alito and Thomas may have the perfect logic to do just that, which has to be akin to being a traitor.
Like Karl Rove said – they are creating their own reality – for a very long time, starting with Roy Cohn.
Today when I was going on 101 North (Thousand Oaks, CA) there were MAGAts on an overpass with Stop the Steal signs. That had slowed down traffic (one way) for people to gawk at the spectacle. So they have adopted the jujutsu technique – if we say they are stealing the election, they say we are stealing the election. Now they are saying that unless Perdue and Loeffler win by large margins in GA runoff, Democrats will steal that election. That is precisely what we said about the general.
The thing is facts and reality don’t matter to the current avatar of this party of thugs. It was slowly evolving to this final state, but Drumpf hastened the phase change. He showed them the way that despite their absolutely vacuous morality and arguments why people should vote for them, they can manufacture reality and maintain their grip on power. The 2020 results in SC, KY, ME, TX, and other states was the final reveal – that a majority of electorate in these states are stupid enough to vote against their own rights.
What forces are there to push water uphill?
I don’t think the Supreme Court would review it. If Hawley, Cruz et al. succeeded, the result would be a breakdown of our constitutional system. The republicans would that Trump had won. The democrats (and anyone sane) would say that Biden had won. We would have a pure crisis of legitimacy…sort of like when the Catholic church had two popes. It would be the end of the Republic.
Sounds like we will have legalized sedition. Thus far this issue has never presented itself, lucky I guess, But Biden has 8 million more votes than Trump. So if the thugs had a majority of congress those 8 million would be a dead issue and the thugs would go merrily on their way. That is hard to accept. And just maybe many would not or could not accept it. Then what? The church has two popes now but only one acting.
The election was Nov 3 but the republican overlords now want ten days to audit the count – – – again. I am hoping the dems have the balls to tell them to take a hike and end this shit.