Could January 6 Have Gone On For Two Weeks? That Was Super-Dumb Trump Lawyer's Plan!
Saved by the violent mob!
Let us think back to January 6, 2021, and those blissful hours before a dozen battalions’ worth of militia dorks, Q-Anon burnouts, OAN-addled dipshits, Turning Point USA virgins, emotionally stunted Neanderthals, and adult toddlers dressed like the feral murderous mountainfolk in some 1970s-era drive-in B-movie rampaged through our nation’s Capitol at the urging of their bronzer-smeared God-King, screaming for Mike Pence to be gibbetted and Nancy Pelosi to be drawn and quartered, all in full view of a horrified nation and world that would be justified in wondering if someone had slipped bath salts into America’s water supply.
Talking Points Memo got its hands on a tranche of documents revealing a bit more about how Donald Trump’s flunkies in the legal profession and on Capitol Hill planned to stretch those hours out into days, right up until the inauguration on January 20. It’s a “Rube Goldberg device of a plan,” and one which much of the GOP appears to have been very ready to run with, if only the throngs of used car dealership owners hadn’t decided they would prefer to spend a day cosplaying as the Golden Horde.
The documents come from Kenneth Chesebro, one of Donald Trump’s lawyers who has since pled guilty to being a complete dingus and agreed to cooperate in investigations into the plot in both Georgia and Michigan so he could freely discuss his plan to nullify the Electoral Count Act:
In a wide-ranging interview with TPM in June 2022 — the only time Chesebro has spoken with the press on the record about his role in the Trump legal strategy — Chesebro disavowed the violence of Jan. 6, saying that it was “the worst possible thing that could have happened” for “lawyers that had serious concerns about the election in several states.” He cast his involvement as “what lawyers do.”
PREVIOUSLY!
Chesebro does not appear to have told TPM why lawyers such as himself watched dozens of cases challenging election results get tossed out of multiple courts in multiple states over the course of two months and still had “serious concerns about the election.” Certainly it couldn’t be because he’s a self-serving puke funnel who belatedly realized that he and his co-conspirators got caught with their tiny hands in the proverbial cookie jar.
Here are some more highlights:
During that critical Jan. 6 to Jan. 20 period, Chesebro envisioned the Trump campaign presenting supposed evidence of voter fraud over and over again, capitalizing on the chaos to make its case while proving that Congress was “unable to act.”
That meant ensuring that the Jan. 6 certification session in Congress essentially never ended.
Think about what a goddamn nightmare of civic unrest this country would have endured for two weeks while Trump’s goons tried to convince Congress of something they hadn’t been able to convince something like 60 trial courts of in the weeks after the election. Two weeks of protestors and counter-protestors screaming at each other in multiple locations. Two weeks of round-the-clock images of Fox News anchors trying to keep their erections from tapping against the camera lens. Two weeks of the stock market dropping like a Boeing 737 Max while frantic heads of industry begged Congress to knock off the foolishness and count the electoral votes. Two weeks of America’s foreign enemies laughing hysterically while her foreign allies drank themselves into comas.
And all so Kenneth Fucking Chesebro could have his little intellectual exercise, according to Kenneth Fucking Chesebro.
But yeah, that was one idea: Get Congress to gridlock itself for a couple of weeks, until the Supreme Court decided to be the adults in the room and step in:
By discarding the Electoral Count Act, Trump campaign lawyers suggested, Republicans in Congress could halt the certification and bring forth endless claims of election fraud in swing states, a process that, according to the documents, Chesebro hoped would create a spectacle, revealing the GOP-friendly Supreme Court as the only rational, functioning actor left standing.
And if SCOTUS didn’t act, don’t worry! There was another plan:
Delaying certification of the President for that long may have led to some strange consequences, from the standpoint of the Trump diehards who pushed it: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi becoming “acting president” if the election could not be certified, or the Senate electing Mike Pence in Trump’s stead. […]
[But] if the “dispute dragged on, on January 20, Nancy Pelosi (upon resigning as Speaker) would become the Acting President — unless, of course, the Senate decided to resolve the impasse by electing Pence as Vice President, so that on January 20 he would become Acting President.”
We’re not sure how that one would have worked. The Senate could have unilaterally counted the electoral votes for Vice President only? Sure, why not, everything else about this fever dream is that dumb.
PREVIOUSLY AGAIN!
Our overall takeaway from this is that there is something seriously wrong with Kenneth Chesebro. Either he’s been microdosing massive amounts of psychedelics, or he’s been macrodosing massive amounts of psychedelics. This in combination with reading lots of Gateway Pundit, according to a now-deleted Twitter account that TPM found on Ye Olde Wayback Machine. That alone will turn feeble-minded partisans into turnips.
There’s a lot more, but our blood pressure is already nearing a level known in medicine as “rocket-launch ignition.”
In a weird way, the rioting of January 6, horrible as it was, might have saved this country from even more concentrated and intense instability spread out over weeks. Note to any January 6 participants reading this during their allotted computer time in the prison library: That doesn’t make you the heroes in this opera.
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When your intellectual (snarf, ok, heck of an intellect) arguments come up against actual sedition and the overthrow of democracy, shrug emoji, oh well. No harm, no foul, amirite?
Fuckers. Prison, all of them.
I credit Nancy Pelosi for finishing the certification of the election while the Republicans were still in fear of their lives from their own supporters. If they had time for their short term memory to clear, they would have blocked it.