Friday, July 31, 2020

White House Update: When is the Election?

-- It will be held on the first Tuesday of November, just as the Constitution stipulates, just as it has been through world wars and depressions and pandemics in the past two hundred and almost-fifty years of the history of our Republic.

Trump's worries are not about mail ballots, as even the Republicans know.


Now if you like your conspiracy theories cooked well done and seasoned heavily to restrict third-party voting, Ted Millar at Liberal America has the recipe'.  My favorite -- there are several there -- is the Twelfth Amendment Stew, extra pickles.

In their Newsweek piece, “How Trump Could Lose the Election–and Still Remain President,” CNBC founder Tom Rogers and former Senator Tim Wirth (D-CO) explain:

“This is how it happens, Biden wins. I don’t just mean the popular vote, he wins the key swing states, he wins the electoral college. President Trump says there’s been Chinese interference in the election. He’s been talking about Biden’s soft on China—China wanted Biden to win so he says a national emergency; the Chinese have intervened in the election.”

This is particularly ironic considering Trump’s former National Security Adviser, John Bolton, documents in his new book that Trump, during trade negotiations with China, pushed Chinese President Xi Jinping to agree to purchase American agricultural products as a means to bolster popularity with U.S. farmers to help with 2020 re-election prospects.

Tom Rogers adds:

“Just ten days ago [June 23] he [Trump] tweeted, he actually tweeted, ‘rigged 2020 election,’ millions of mail-in ballots will be printed by foreign countries it will be the scandal of our times. so he’s laying the groundwork for this. So he does an investigation and [Attorney General Bill] Barr backs this up with all kinds of legal opinions about emergency powers that the president has.”

“Then what happens is it’s all geared towards December 14th. Why December 14th? Well, that’s the deadline when the electors of the states have to be chosen. Why is that key? Because that’s what the Supreme Court used in Bush v. Gore to cut off the Florida counting. They keep this national emergency investigation going through December 14th. Biden, of course, challenges this in the courts and says, ‘hey, we won these states, I want the electors that favored me named. The Supreme Court doesn’t throw the election to the Republicans as it did in 2000; instead it says, ‘look, there’s a deadline here.’ If they can’t be certified in these states because of this investigation going on, there’s a constitutional process for this.”

That constitutional process lies within the 12th amendment, which states:

“If no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice.”

Republican are already running full-tilt voter suppression ahead of November.

All it takes is for only a couple of states -- say, Texas and Florida -- to cast some doubt over the election’s integrity for it to be tossed to the House of Representatives.

That may appear on the surface to be good news since Democrats hold the majority in the House.

But they won’t be the ones to certify the election.

Remember, the 12th amendment stipulates, “The votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote.”

With more Republican-controlled legislatures than Democratic, this means Trump can legitimately lose both the popular vote as he did four years ago and the electoral college, securing re-election.

There is already a precedent for this.

In the 1876 election that pitted Republican Rutherford B. Hayes against Democrat Samuel Tilden, Tilden clinched the popular vote but was one vote shy of the requisite electoral votes.

As Ohio Republican Congressman James Monroe (no relation to our fifth president) published in The Atlantic in October 1893, “The votes of Florida, Louisiana, Oregon, and South Carolina, with an aggregate of 22 electors” would decide the election.

That election happening in the midst of Reconstruction, federal soldiers occupied the three southern states.

Ku Klux Klan presence was also heavy in all four states.

Congressional Democrats claimed soldiers intimidated and suppressed the votes of Southern Democratic voters.

With the threat of re-igniting the Civil War that had only concluded 11 years before, Republicans and Democrats hammered out a backroom deal to hand the presidency to Hayes if he agreed to withdraw Union soldiers from the South.

He did.

He was made president, thus ending Reconstruction.

Judging how this primary season has gone, it isn’t inconceivable for Republican-controlled states to revive the “three-to-five million illegal voters” lie Trump screamed about in 2016.


My, how I enjoy single sentences as separate paragraphs.  They really add a dramatic flair that the content seems to lack.  Have I spent too many pixels on this?  In other postponement news ...

(Trump's) campaign has frozen a majority of its TV spending less than 100 days before the 2020 election. A campaign official said the demotion of former campaign manager Brad Parscale has led them to start a “review” and “fine-tuning” of their re-election strategy.

“With the leadership change in the campaign, there’s understandably a review and fine-tuning of the campaign’s strategy. We’ll be back on the air shortly, even more forcefully exposing Joe Biden as a puppet of the radical left-wing,” a Trump campaign official told NBC News.


Sometimes it's difficult to judge which of Trump's minion's lies are the most ridiculous, but today I'll go with that last one, particularly since ...

-- ... word broke that the DNC voted down a Medicare for All plank in the party platform, insisted upon by a group of Bernie delegates.  (Update: And also getting the corporate money out.)


The very next tweet in that thread lists all the votes.  My response here is very easy.


-- Speaking of wasted votes, let's congratulate Zachary Wolf at CNN, this week's Daily Jackass, who delivered a third-grade teacher's scold of anyone who colors outside the two-party lines.


As you should be able to predict, the response was swift and merciless.


David Collins also got in a retort to last week's Jackass, One 'f' Rouner.

-- Word on the street is that Joementia is going to choose a running mate next week.  The front-runner is Kamala, followed by Susan Rice.  Val Demings and a name I've not seen previously advanced, California Cong. Karen Bass, appear on the finalists list.  Of these -- of all of those under consideration, in fact -- Bass is far and away the most progressive, so I'll be stunned if she winds up on the ticket with Old Joe.

Update: Welp ... maybe I blogged too soon.  Not about the 'stunned' part; Bass seems to have gaffed her way out of consideration.

Harris has perhaps encountered the last white water on her river to the White House.


This could be performative to throw everybody off, but I'll bet a little more on the KHive.  You really don't want to stir up those murder hornets, trust me.

Update: Behind the scenes, Chris Dodd and others in Biden's closest circle -- his wife Jill, his sister Valerie Biden Owens -- are knifing Kamala.  This news really leaves the front-runner status up in the air, unless you believe Susan Rice has the inside track (I don't).

-- Speaking of more interesting veep selections:


-- Trump's visit to the Permian Basin, his new Demon Sperm doctor, and his back-up plan for rigging the Census to screw over states with large immigrant populations like Texas and California are all items I'll put in the week-ending Lone Star wrap, coming later today or tomorrow.

-- I mentioned in the lead to last week's WH Update that we shouldn't be talking about Kanye West any more.  Kat Tenbarge and Connor Perrett at Business Insider make the point that if you're going to talk about him, mention his mental health issues.

His wife traveled to their Wyoming ranch to have a heart-to-heart with him.  It doesn't appear to have gone very well for their marriage.

-- Finally, while I hope that he does, I doubt that Herman Cain is going to be resting in peace.

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