Trump Admits To Attempting To Overthrow The Government. Again.

LOCK HER UP.

Herr Dementenführer had quite a weekend. Still high on the fumes after promising to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists and dispatch mobs to cities if he is ever indicted, Trump tapped out an even crazier message to his email followers last night.

If the Vice President (Mike Pence) had "absolutely no right" to change the Presidential Election results in the Senate, despite fraud and many other irregularities, how come the Democrats and RINO Republicans, like Wacky Susan Collins, are desperately trying to pass legislation that will not allow the Vice President to change the results of the election? Actually, what they are saying, is that Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome, and they now want to take that right away. Unfortunately, he didn't exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!

If we have understood this pile of word vomit correctly, he's arguing that attempts to modify the Electoral Count Act are science proof that legislators know that the law as written would allow a vice president to unilaterally "change the results of an election." By this addlepated reasoning, any attempt to clarify the language of the statute is an admission that Pence had the "right to change the outcome" by refusing to accept swing state electors.

Every lawyer in America outside his team of Kraken crackpots was shouting , NO, THIS IS TOTALLY ILLEGAL! — hence Mike Pence's refusal to do it despite intense pressure from Trump and his henchmen. But redrafting the Act so as to remove any ambiguity that might encourage this band of mouth-breathing treason weasels to try to overthrow the government again is evidence that Wacky Susan Collins knows coups are very cool, and also very legal.

Never mind that Trump lawyer John Eastman's Coups 4 Dummies memo says explicitly "The Electoral Count Act of 1887, which is likely unconstitutional, provides ..." before detailing a plot to let Republicans in the House discard the duly exercised will of the voters and certify the slates of cosplay electors for Trump.

Their plan depended on disregarding the provision of the Electoral Count Act which requires both houses of Congress to reject the official slate of electors certified by the governor or secretary of state. Eastman wanted Pence to unilaterally discard the electors and declare that the House would vote by state delegation , meaning the 26 red states would vote to reject the swing state electors for Biden, throwing the election to Trump.

And frankly, it was even more of a brute force attack on democracy than that. They had three additional ways to rig the outcome in Trump's favor after "VP Pence opens the ballots, determines on his own which is valid, asserting that the authority to make that determination under the 12th Amendment, and the Adams and Jefferson precedents, is his alone (anything in the Electoral Count Act to the contrary is therefore unconstitutional)."

If they could get state legislatures to "certify" the slates of illegitimate electors, they were going to count them as if they were real. If the legislatures wouldn't play ball, Pence was supposed to reject the electoral slates outright, reducing the denominator from 270 electoral votes required for victory to 228, putting Trump over the line with 232. If that didn't work, the vice president was supposed to throw it to the House's 26 Republican state delegations. And if all else failed, Pence was supposed to send the "contested" slates back to the states to "investigate" the bogus fraud allegations, and hope that legislatures could either produce a different outcome or at least tie things up long enough that he could say their state had cast no electors at all.

So, yeah , perhaps this law is due a bit of a rewrite.

As Rep. Zoe Lofgren, chair of the House Administration Committee and a member of the January 6 Select Committee, told CNN , "We're taking a look at the Electoral Count Act because it's an old statute and there were some of our colleagues in the House had tried to exploit ambiguities in it. But I frankly think the role of the vice president will probably remain unchanged."

"I guess the former president is saying that the vice president gets to choose the next president, in which case Kamala Harris will be presiding at the counting of the votes, and I guess he's saying she gets to choose who the next president is," she noted. "That's clear, to me, not what the Constitution provides for. He must be kidding."

Kidding. Or admitting to plotting to overthrow the government. Definitely one of the two.

[ CNN ]

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