All right, I will admit it, I am terrified. I just listened to a discussion with two constitutional law experts about Trump’s plan to challenge the results of the election, presumably on the grounds of some imaginary mail-in ballot fraud. What happens if, on December 8, two competing slates of electors from a number of states are presented to the Senate and the lame-duck Republicans vote to throw the election to Trump? I actually believe that if such a case made its way to the Supreme Court, despite the six – three right-wing majority, the court would throw out the phony claims. But am I confident of that? Good God, no. Since these matters are decided state-by-state, the best possible outcome would be a Biden victory so large that even the defection of several state slates of electors could not change the outcome.
This may actually be the second time – the first was the
Civil War – when the entire future of the American political system is at
stake. No kidding, I am really scared.
27 comments:
So am I.
It now seems like a foregone conclusion that T***p and Barr will challenge the legitimacy of the election if they lose. Their case will be a fraudulent one, so the question becomes whether the rest of the government will swallow what is essentially a massive conspiracy theory about voter fraud in order to keep the current regime in power. If it comes down to SCOTUS, I have no faith whatsoever in Thomas, Alito, or that Amy Coney Barrett person. I have reasonable faith in Roberts, and also somewhat in Gorsuch, who seems principled. Kavanaugh, not really, since he’s already openly proclaimed his vendetta against the Democrats; in the end he’ll be a team player. So the decision will likely be 5-4.
As for the rest of the country, a vast majority simply won’t accept an attempt by the current administration to steal the election. There will certainly be rebellion of some sort. What form will it take? Who knows? But I imagine that talk of a general strike will be on people’s lips. Recall that tongue-in-cheek “friendly divorce” letter you posted a few days ago. All those blue-state industries that drive the country financially are run by actual people. Those people are paying attention; many if not most of them are liberals who despise T***p and see him for what he is. What happens if they decide that an authoritarian takeover won’t go down on their watch. I imagine all this would figure into SCOTUS deliberations as well.
Of course, the flip side of the coin is that roughly 30 to 40 percent of the electorate will believe T***p no matter what he says. I imagine that will be on the lower end, depending on how obvious the lie is. But still, Republican lawmakers will feel pressured to fall in line behind the new dictator. The message will be amplified by the propaganda organs Fox News and Facebook.
It’s hard to accept that this is plausible reality, just a few weeks away from happening. But it is. So please, vote for Biden! Volunteer! Do whatever you can to secure that landslide victory. Don’t be like those people who, in 2016, underestimated the danger of this rotten individual, and who instead spent all their time whinily obsessing over Hillary Clinton’s emails, or her neoliberalism, or some other irrelevant nonsense.
As I have indicated in prior posts, I share your concerns, and they are not the product of paranoid minds. Trump suffers from an egomaniacal personality disorder (I am not a psychiatrist, but those who are have published their diagnoses of him, rejecting the medical rules which disfavors such armchair psychoanalayses) and is capable of any and all measures to remain in power. That is why, as you say, it is imperative that Biden win by large margins in every Midwest state which Trump carried in 2016. If he does not, Trump will claim that mail fraud has compromised the election results and demand recounts. He will file lawsuits in every state where he can question the result, which will tie up the courts for months. He will appeal to his base to take to the streets and protest at the courts, wreaking havoc on our nation.
Last night PBS aired Frontline’s excellent preview of the election and provided profiles of the two candidates. Trump’s niece described what the family interactions were like and stated that they were marked by pronounced racism, misogyny, and mental abuse, promoted by her grandfather. Classmates of Trump at the military academy described how he reveled in the hazing and harassing of plebs. His father was a mentally ill man whose affection and respect Il Duce craved. Mary Trump said that everything he does is aimed at pleasing and impressing his deceased father and proving that he is a “killer,” his father’s term for a successful individual.
Biden, in my opinion, came across quite commendably in the Frontline profile. I did not know, for example that as a boy he suffered from a debilitating stutter, which he was mocked for, and which he worked intensively to overcome by reciting passages from books in front of a mirror. And although he has been blamed for the Anita Hill debacle, he did not attack her during the hearings; it was Sen. Specter who treated Prof. Hill aggressively. Then, when Clarence Thomas gave his “high class lynching” speech, Biden was confronted with the dilemma of calling additional witnesses to support Prof. Hill, and appear to be persecuting a male African-American vs. siding with an African-American woman. From his standpoint, it was a Hobson’s choice. After Thomas was appointed to the S. Ct., Biden sought to make amends by reaching out to the first African-American woman elected to the Senate, Carol Moseley Braun, and asking her to serve on the Judiciary Committee, which she did.
So, yes, we may be in for a very rough ride, and why I urge all those who are unimpressed by Biden to put their misgivings aside and vote for him on Nov. 3 (or prior by absentee ballot). If you do not, things in this country could rapidly deteriorate in very unpredictable ways.
MS
Sometime in the 1990s I read “I Will Bear Witness,” the diaries of Victor Klemperer, a professor of Romance languages at Dresden in the 1930s. He was Jewish; his wife was not. They had many Gentile friends. When the Nazis came to power the limitations started, each deplored by those Gentile friends, but what could they do? At first the restrictions were relatively mild: he couldn’t ride the tram; he couldn’t buy this or that; he had a curfew. Eventually he lost job. In the spring of 1945, he and his wife were rounded up and taken to a large, underground basement of some kind, awaiting transport the next morning to a death camp. That night was the firebombing of Dresden. They survived, probably because they were in that basement.
A few years after I read Klemperer, 9/11 happened. Our next door neighbor at the time was an Arab woman, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the Nazis and their “slice-the-salami” technique of imposing restrictions. Each slice was enough to be deplored, but not enough to risk your own neck in a futile effort to protest. I knew I would do for my neighbor what the Klemperer’s friends did for them—buy her groceries, run errands. But soon assisting Jews even in that way was prohibited. I wondered how I would react if the Bush Administration imposed some restrictions on Arabs. Fortunately, I didn’t worry long. A day or two after 9/11, Bush visited the DC mosque and said all the appropriate words. To this day, if I happen think of Bush or hear his name, what pops into my mind immediately is not the Iraq war or Katrina or the tax cuts, but his visit to the mosque, probably the only really decent thing he did in his eight years, one that redeems him to a large degree in my mind.
So much of what is happening here now echoes what happened in Germany in the 1930s that I really can’t stand to dwell on it. I don’t watch MSNBC or any other TV news, apart from recording and fast-forwarding to Shields and Brooks on the PBS Friday News Hour. I glance at the headlines in the morning paper and then go straight to the sports section—where all my teams are losing! I read some of the op-ed columns, but frequently skip them. I already know what Eugene Robinson and E.J. Dionne are going to say. The Washington Post comics section carries “Classic Peanuts,” and I follow that religiously: Snoopy reading War and Peace, one word per day; or Snoopy in a race with Hank Aaron to beat Babe Ruth’s 714 home run record. It helps to get my mind off Trump and what is doing, and might do, to the country. But it doesn’t do anything to stop him from doing it.
When I was growing up in New Jersey during the ‘50s, it was commonplace for people to reflect about WWII and blame the Germans for allowing that maniac to gain power. We were confident that such an abomination could not happen here. I wonder if that’s what the decent Germans who despised Hitler thought, that well, he won’t get far. We have been very smug in this country. Well, it is happening here, and the only way to stop it is to vote in such massive numbers that Trump’s lies will fall on deaf ears. I only hope that more Americans come to their senses than did the Germans.
People are terrified because they know how weak of a candidate Biden is - it will not be a landslide defeat of Trump by any means, and whatever the result it will be contested and fought tooth and nail.
"Anonymous said.."
And how's the weather in St. Petersburg?
Moving on: Since the GOP managed to exercise a coup with only five Justices, I don't have much confidence that with six they will do the right thing.
There is no question that the Rethuglican party is sufficiently evil, dishonorable, and unpatriotic to go along with that.
I have come to agree with Kant in the second Critique. Practical reason demands that there be an afterlife in which the wicked get what they deserve. Is it not obvious that Lindsey Graham deserves to burn in hell?
Burning in hell is a matter of hypothetical speculation. Here’s something that could very well happen as he ages: “May all his teeth fall out, except one for pain.” And while we’re at it, throw in Mitch McConnell for good measure.
MS
Quite a miserable, angry lot of folks commenting in here lately.
Yes, I worry about that too. And going by what Trump says, we are right to be worried. A quote from the news today-
“We need nine justices,” Trump said at the White House Tuesday. “You need that with the unsolicited millions of ballots that they’re sending. It’s a scam. It’s a hoax. Everybody knows that. And the Democrats know it better than anybody else. So you’re going to need nine justices out there. I think it’s very important.”
“I think this will end up in the Supreme Court and I think it’s very important to have nine justices,” Trump said on Wednesday of the upcoming election, He added, “And I think having a 4-4 situation is not a good situation, if you get that — I don’t know that you get that I think it should be 8-nothing or 9-nothing. Just in case it would be more political than it should be, I think it’s very important to have a ninth justice.”
If it does happen that Trump disregards the election and the courts go along with it, then I think that Ed Barreras is onto something- a general strike is probably the only way that ordinary people could realistically alter that. If Trump loses and won't leave I don't know what else might work.
I'll go along with Anonymous at 4:50 PM. Correlated with the anger there seems to be, at least on the part of some, the notion that things should be kept simple and manichean. What, e.g., was so wrong about criticising Clinton's neo-liberalism, esp. since there's surely a case to be made that it was the neo-liberalism of herself and a great many others of the great and the good that helped open the door to the awful trump. Follow that 'keep it simple' approach to its limits and we'll end up with two ignorant but enthusiastic armies clashing. A resigned, lesser of two evils approach, where the two evils are still explored and kept in mind, seems to me the much healthier way to go. Or are we supposed to keep quiet about our understandings and misgivings in case we infect those we view as less capable of thinking with doubt and disengagement? This elitist attitude was also responsible for our present predicaments.
I think someone on this blog referred us to this, but if not, here's the link again:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-if-trump-loses-and-wont-leave/
One small point: the lame-duck Senate cannot throw the election to Trump. It's the new Congress that convenes to attend to the reading of states' certificates of vote. Members of Congress can object to a state's vote count. Both chambers of Congress have to vote to reject a state's vote for it to be rejected.
So in the possible scenario of a contested election, how it will unfold on January 6, 2021 will depend on who controls Congress. We can expect the Democrats to retain control of the House, but if the Republicans retain control of the Senate, then it will be impossible for the two chambers to agree on rejecting states' vote counts. If the Democrats win control of the Senate, then the Democrats will have the power to reject states' vote counts.
One interesting scenario would be if Congress' rejection of states' vote counts caused the election to be decided by the House of Representatives because neither Biden nor Trump had a majority. Here the vote is conducted by state delegation. The Republicans have a slight advantage and could conceivably vote to elect Trump. However, it's possible that Democrats could gain a majority of House delegations. And it's also possible that the House could deadlock, with individual states unable to reach a majority in their delegation or there could be a 25-25 tie. In those cases, the elected Vice-President would become President on January 20.
In the event that no Vice-Presidential candidate has a majority of the electors, then the Senate decides that election by a straight member vote. So if the Democrats control the Senate, they will choose Harris; if the Republicans control it, they will choose Pence. However, it's possible that the Senate could deadlock on January 6, though I believe that to be doubtful. The reason is that there will only be 99 Senators convening on January 6 because Georgia will be holding a runoff election on January 5 to fill Johnny Isakson's seat. Thus, if the Democrats hold an even 50 seats, they will control the Senate on January 6.
One possible, but very unlikely scenario, is that the House delegations could choose Trump but a Democratic Senate could choose Harris. A Trump-Harris administration--now that would be something to behold. Of course, if Trump became incapacitated, Harris would become President.
Finally, the best possible outcome might be if the House deadlocked but the Senate chose Harris. Then she would become President.
Oh, I forgot one scenario. In the event that neither Trump-Pence nor Biden-Harris win a majority of the electors, and the House and Senate deadlock on choosing a President and Vice-President, then the Speaker of the House would become President.
David provides a very interesting analysis. If the Republicans retain control of the Senate, then no state’s electors will be disqualified. If the count of the electors for each candidate does not yield a majority for any one candidate, i.e., Biden and Trump each get 269 electoral votes, then the vote switches to the House, with each state getting a single vote, regardless how many seats in any state delegation are controlled by either party. The District of Columbia does not get a vote. If the composition of the House were to remain the same as it is today, Republicans control 26 states; Democrats control 23; Michigan is tied, with 7 Republicans and 7 Democrats.
So, if one is concerned about the vote going to the House, and wants to avoid the Republicans from retaining its 26-23 advantage, one should find a Republican Congressional seat in Michigan which is a close race, and financially support the Democrat. There are only two other states where it appears to me that there is any chance of flipping the state’s delegation. Florida currently has 14 Republicans and 13 Democrats. So, if there is a Republican seat that is being seriously contested by a Democrat, contributions should be made to the Democrat’s campaign. If this succeeded, this would deadlock the House at 25-25, making Nancy Pelosi President. I know many of you hold your noses when you hear her name, but would you prefer Trump as President over Pelosi?
The second state that might be worth looking into is North Dakota, which has a single seat in Congress and it is Republican. The incumbent is Kelly Armstrong. Her Democratic opponent is Zach Raknerud (a good traditional Democratic name). He is a 26-year old graduate of the University of North Dakota, majoring in communications. He works in management for a retail company in Minot, North Dakota. If he were to win, this would give the Democrats a 26-24 majority, and Biden would be President. Another state which has a 1-0 Republican advantage is South Dakota. The Republican incumbent is Dusty Johnson. There is no Democratic candidate. Johnson is being opposed by a Libertarian candidate, Luallin, who my instincts tell me is more likely to vote for Trump than Biden. (There are several other states that have a 1-0 Republican delegation, but I do not believe that the Democrat is electable in those states: Alaska, Montana, Wyoming.)
MS
Please spare me the lectures against anger. How else to respond to a party that is causing many additional deaths in a pandemic due to its lies, that is driving the planet toward environmental catastrophe while denying there is a problem, that is perfectly happy to further eviscerate the poor in order to enrich the ultra wealthy? Anger is the appropriate response.
MS,
Also note that Pennsylvania currently has a 9-9 delegation. If it stays that way, then Pennsylvania would be deadlocked and not get a vote.
For the Democrats to get to 25, it would need to win Amash's open seat in Michigan, flip a seat in Pennsylvania to break the tie, and win something else. That something else might just be the House race in Alaska, where in the most recent Public Policy poll, Independent Galvin is running two points ahead of the Republican Young. Here's the Alaska poll:
https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/AlaskaResults20200709.pdf
So, if you want to flip House delegations in the event of a 269-269 tie or in the event that the Senate and House invalidate electoral results and no candidate gets to 270, then these might be the best House candidates to support:
* Alyse Galvin in Alaska's at-large seat.
* Hillary Sholten in Michigan's 3rd.
* Eugene DePasquale in Pennsylvania's 10th.
With regard to the issue of Manicheanism, I would point out that our system is Manichean in the sense that only one of two outcomes is possible. I was a Sanders supporter who criticized Biden, but, like Mr. Sanders himself, I’m all about doing the hard pivot and making this campaign solely about defeating the current occupant of the White House — which means constantly sounding the alarm about the many threats he poses and also, yes, playing up Biden’s virtues (or at least the benefits that would come from a Biden administration). Whatever it takes to win.
When I said that Clinton's neoliberalism was irrelevant after she became the nominee, it’s because she was then the only possible alternative to T***p. (Jill Stein was not ever going to be elected. Sorry) We were just going to have to live with her. Which brings me to the second sense in which the situation in which the situation we find ourselves is Manichean: Donald T***p is now literally announcing his plans to steal the election; we are under serious threat of living under an illegitimate authoritarian who will show no restraint whatsoever if he’s allowed to hold on to power. Compared to that, I’d say, yes, the Biden/Clinton/Obama axis looks like the form of Pure Good. And what is more, all of this was entirely foreseeable in 2016.
MS,
Sorry, I forgot about Montana's at-large seat. The high-quality poll from Siena College/NY Times upshot has Democrat Kathleen Williams running three points ahead of Republican Matt Rosendale. Here's the poll:
https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/mt-crosstabs/4da3e297acefb561/full.pdf
So add Kathleen Williams as a candidate to support in the 1/100 event that the House elects the President.
"Please spare me the lectures against anger. How else to respond to a party that is causing many additional deaths in a pandemic due to its lies, that is driving the planet toward environmental catastrophe while denying there is a problem, that is perfectly happy to further eviscerate the poor in order to enrich the ultra wealthy? Anger is the appropriate response."
Geeze. Step away from the Rachel Maddow show and try going for a walk or something.
"Geeze. Step away from the Rachel Maddow show and try going for a walk or something."
Please stop pathologizing commenters here. The content of what I said is correct.
David,
Thank you for that update. My apparently outdated had Pennsylvania at 9-8, Democratic.
Is Florida, at 14-13 Republican, out of reach, or is that information also inaccurate?
MS
I want to join Hey Man in condemning Anonymous at 10:53 P.M. whose snarky belittling trivializes the serious threat to our democracy that Il Duce’s behavior presents us.
MS
David,
A post-script.
Hillary Scholten is running in Michigan’s 3rd Congressional District, which includes Grand Rapids. Her predecessor was Julian Amish, who, unfortunately, decided not to run again. Amish, a Republican, was strongly critical of Trump, and indicated that he should be impeached when the Mueller report was released. He then switched parties, and declared he was a Libertarian. His decision not to run was based on his conclusion that he could not get re-elected in solidly Republican Grand Rapids. Had he run as a Libertarian, and won, then Michigan would have been 7-6-1, Democratic, and in the event of a House vote, would have voted for Biden. Scholten’s opponent is Pete Meijer, the scion of the wealthy Meijer’s retail store chain in Michigan. I will make a contribution to Scholten’s campaign to boost her chances, but I am not optimistic.
MS
Interesting article in the Atlantic about T***p refusing to concede and the breakdown of U.S. institutions:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/what-if-trump-refuses-concede/616424/?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20200924&instance_id=22476&nl=the-morning®i_id=118903071§ion_index=2§ion_name=four_more_big_stories&segment_id=38913&te=1&user_id=0b6dfffc769d9df6db6ed3d9473e8530
MS,
Florida is 14-13 Republican. The open seat in the 15th seems to have the best potential for flipping to the Democratic side, but it is a stretch. On the other hand, there isn't much polling data for that race, so who knows?
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