12/31/20: The latest, last-ditch effort to save Lame Duck Don’s useless ass has come into focus. On January 6, the certified electoral votes of the fifty states and District of Columbia will be accepted by Congress, tallied, and the result announced: 306 votes for Joe Biden, 232 for Trump.
Biden then becomes the 46th President of the….
Ah, not so fast! Those votes can be challenged. (See the election of 1876, when Samuel Tilden got stiffed.)
To contest the certified electoral votes of a state, in Trump’s case, you would need one chucklehead in the House of Representatives and one dunderpate in the Senate to lodge protest. In the House, Rep. Louis Gohmert, is one of dozens of chuckleheads who has said he would be thrilled to step to the fore.
Loony Louis has an interesting, one-man-rule kind of theory about how we count the electoral votes. That is: the VP can decide on a whim what to do. Ohio cast its 18 electoral votes for Trump? Sure. Mike Pence counts them. Pennsylvania cast its 20 for Joe Biden? Pence doesn’t feel like counting those.
“Under the Constitution, he has the authority to conduct that proceeding [the tally of the electoral votes on January 6] as he sees fit,” Gohmert argues. “He may count elector votes certified by a state’s executive, or he can prefer a competing slate of duly qualified electors. He may ignore all electors from a certain state. That is the power bestowed upon him by the Constitution.”
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“Adults don’t point a loaded gun at the heart of legitimate self-government.”
Senator Ben Sasse
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Republican fools in the Senate are slightly harder to find, but there are several to pick from. Elected every six years, senators can show a bit more courage and count on most voters to forget if they let Dictator Don down.
No matter. One skull that is numb in the Senate will suffice. And that skull is supplied by none other than Missouri up-and-comer, Sen. Josh Hawley. He has made clear. He will protest the vote!
So far, Sen. Hawley admits he isn’t entirely sure. Should he protest the votes of several states? Or should he contest the electoral votes from one? If he chooses to protest votes in six or more battleground states, he stands a chance of antagonizing millions of voters, and more than a few GOP colleagues.
If he challenges votes in only one state, what’s the point? Trump would have to overturn the votes of Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Nevada, or some other combination, and have those votes handed to him, or this challenge won’t matter.
Either way, both the House and Senate will have two hours to debate. Will they vote to accept the slates of certified electors, pledged to Biden, and already submitted by the states? Or will they vote to accept a slate of electors, say in Pennsylvania, this new slate pledged to vote for Lame D., instead?
To say that this parliamentary parlor trick stands no chance of success, is an understatement on par with saying Donald J. Trump has no chance to win the next men’s New York City Marathon. Team Trump has already filed more than 60 court challenges to election results. In all, probably 150 judges have been involved in saying, in multiple ways, that the current vote counts are fair and accurate. In Georgia, whose 16 votes went to Biden, and whose votes Trump craves for himself, court challenges led to three statewide counts. Those found, in order:
1. Joe Biden won.
2. Joe Biden won again.
3. Okay, for slow learners, Biden still won.
Just to be safe, with Trump supporters clamoring about massive voter fraud, election officials did a signature check in Cobb County to test how the system had worked. Biden won 56% of 387,000 votes in Cobb County, so an audit of 15,000 absentee ballots would surely turn up, according to Trump fans and the president himself, 300,000 dead people who voted.
Alas, only two (2) signature mismatches were found.
Two.
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NO MATTER. Sen. Hawley is expected to stand up in the U.S. Senate on January 6, and claim that the votes of at least one, if not all of the following states, should be challenged and awarded to Donald J. Trump: Pennsylvania. Michigan. Wisconsin. Arizona. Nevada. And, yes, Georgia.
Will this stunt do the American people any good? No. But it might allow Sen. Hawley to leap to the fore when it comes to heading the GOP ticket in 2024.
To overturn the certified votes of any of the challenged states, you would need majorities in both houses of Congress to agree. The Democrats in the House have the votes locked up to block this undemocratic ploy.
This vote “will be the most consequential I have ever cast.”
If all the Republicans in the Senate had skulls that were numb, they could vote in favor of the challenge. Many Republican senators have proven that they do not have numbed skulls and have made clear they will vote against Sen. Hawley’s lame-ass plan.
It’s not often that Senate Leader Mitch McConnell shows any courage. In a phone call today, however, he blasted Hawley’s announcement that he would challenge the vote. “I’m finishing 36 years in the Senate and I’ve cast a lot of big votes,” he told a reporter. “And in my view, just my view, this will be the most consequential I have ever cast.”
It seems likely that Hawley will fail even to get a majority of Republican senators’ votes. Every Democrat is going to vote to accept the certified results. (And, dear Trump fans – if any of you read this blog – and to be frank, I sometimes wonder if some of you read at all – remember that Arizona and Georgia have Republican governors who have said their elections were fair.)
Sen. Pat Toomey, a Pennsylvania Republican, has insisted that his state’s votes were counted fairly. He says Trump lost. If challenges are issued to the Pennsylvania results, he promises to respond in detail and at length. He has called the president’s efforts to throw out his state’s vote, “completely unacceptable.” The outcome has been “clear. Joe Biden won the election.”
Sen. Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican, has been blunt, warning that “the president and his allies are playing with fire.”
“Let’s be clear what is happening here,” he says. “We have a bunch of ambitious politicians who think there’s a quick way to tap into the president’s populist base without doing any real, long-term damage. But they’re wrong – and this issue is bigger than anyone’s personal ambitions. Adults don’t point a loaded gun at the heart of legitimate self-government,” he said.
Only now we know. Guys like Gohmert and Hawley and Trump do. The gun may be loaded with blanks. Even if they fire on January 6, they can’t do any real harm. But now we know. If Trump had a gun loaded with real bullets, he’d shoot democracy right between the eyes.
Fortunately, most Republican senators believe that Mr. Biden won and the election was fair. Those likely to vote down Hawley’s challenge include Mitt Romney of Utah, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Marco Rubio of Florida, Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, Sen. Roy Blount of Missouri, Sen. Shelly Moore Capito of West Virginia, and Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio. “I think,” Portman told reporters, “we need to respect this process the Founding Fathers established, and we must respect the will of the voters. The orderly transfer of power is a hallmark of our democracy.”
Well, before Trump.
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