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Trump's Coup d'état.

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Skeptic Ginger said:
This has been discussed ad nauseum. The state legislators said they were not going to do this.
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Trust their word if you like; I'm old enough to remember when Republican legislators emphatically insisted they would never push a SCOTUS pick through during an election.
 
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Trump's meritless legal challenges seem to be going down the toilet, and there seems to be very little chance that even our partisan SCOTUS is going to give Trump the relief he demands here.

These legal moonshots aside, that just leaves the more naked power grab options. Eyes on the states with Republican controlled legislatures that Biden won to see if they will refuse to certify the electors. Any such move will have little to do with legality and more to do with the naked use of power by a minoritarian government intent on retaining control.

It should be clear that any such move is the open abandonment of any meaningful Democratic process and the only effective way to counter a coup is widespread public unrest.
 
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The Don said:
If Republican leaders came out and said that Joe Biden is the President elect then there'd be much less traction for this kind of thing. Instead we have them supporting President Trump, echoing his "every legal vote", supporting his lawsuits and making reference to a second Trump term.

People would be more sanguine about an orderly transfer of power if the GOP seemed at all interested in it. Instead they seem to be doing everything they can to obstruct and frustrate. At the moment it's "just" not allowing the release of funds for the transition and not allowing Joe Biden access to security briefings - in part because the US public aren't making a big deal out of it.

If they (they in this case being both the national Republican leadership and the state leaders in those states) think that the blowback will be worth it, then why not take these entirely legal steps ?

edited to add......

We've heard it so many times in recent years, "They won't/can't do that". Whether it's refusing even to consider a SCOTUS nominee and then forcing through another in similar circumstances, the myriad cases of President Trump behaving in ways which would have bene previously unthinkable or embracing groups who would otherwise be anathema to the party, the GOP is breaking new ground all the time. :mad:
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A few GOP leaders have begun to make some cautious noises indicating acceptance of Biden's win- Rubio referred to Biden as President-elect, for one. (The Hill article via MSN) Senator Risch from Idaho came up with an analogy for the transition that kind of struck me-
"This is my second transition where we move from one political party to another in the White House," he said Friday, describing the incoming administration as having "an entirely different feeling or dynamic."

"It is a change in the music that is playing in the background. We go from heavy metal to classical music in one fell swoop," he added.
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(Donald Trump as heavy metal- and not the heavy metal I grew up with, more the cacophonous mess with one-note sludge on guitars and guttural growls passing for vocals that seems so popular these days, and you kids get offa my damn lawn!)

But I think the game going forward will be to paint Biden's Presidency as somehow tainted by the allegations of fraud that they themselves, as a party, are responsible for. It'll become a self-feeding and self-serving narrative- Biden narrowly won- and never mind that his EC count will be the same as the one Trump claimed as a landslide, and his popular vote margin probably close to six million. That specious taint will let them pose piously, when they block his SC nominations or policy initiatives, as the folks who, after all, kept a Senate majority and increased their House share.* This was the rationale they used to block Obama's SC pick in 2016 and to ram through their own this year, and there was never any controversy about Obama's election; imagine what they will do with Biden when they can paint his election as somewhat questionable.

*They've claimed to be the "voice of the American people" through their Senate majority; to me, that particular voice is a deliberately fragmented one, Americans speaking as New Yorkers or Texans, Floridians or Californians, each speaking for its own interests and only superficially resembling a chorus carrying a common tune. It's true enough that the popular vote isn't what elects presidents; but I think it's only fair to remind Republicans who claim to speak with an "American voice" that, when Americans have actually spoken as a whole to elect a representative common to them all, only once in 32 years has the GOP managed a win- Bush in 2004, and that was with a margin that was only about half of what Biden has so far.
 
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cosmicaug said:
Indeed. We should all just be thankful that it will be Biden who gets to replace the SCOTUS vacancy left behind when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died*.


* Because we obviously must have a vacancy since Mitch McConnell said he would not consider a SCOTUS Justice nomination vote close to a presidential election.
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And even if Mitch HAD somehow gone back on his word, he wouldn't have had the votes to confirm. Because senators like Lindsey Graham said explicitly:

I want you to use my words against me. If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination.
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So seriously, people who try to tell me not to worry because republican politicians promised they'd do the right thing can bite my ass.
 
Cavemonster said:
And even if Mitch HAD somehow gone back on his word, he wouldn't have had the votes to confirm. Because senators like Lindsey Graham said explicitly:



So seriously, people who try to tell me not to worry because republican politicians promised they'd do the right thing can bite my ass.
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Yeah, that was supposed to be Lindsay Graham in my post (why do I get those two confused?). also, Lindsay Graham would seem to be perfectly fine with engaging in electoral interference despite not being a thing that one would think to be legal.

angrysoba said:
"Guys relax, it's just an *attempted* coup."

https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/1328483845105016832?s=20
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Again, they are all waiting to see if enough on their side do the thing before they themselves do the thing. They are not doing the thing only because they are not yet sure. What they said they would do is not a part of the heuristic that they are applying.
 
This is pretty grim. While I don't see the partisan SCOTUS overturning a state election result, I can easily imagine them cooking up some BS pretext for why it wouldn't be proper to intervene if some state official was throwing out ballots en masse.

They could easily paint abdication of duty as judicial conservatism, even if it was clear that constitutional voting rights were being violated through deliberately ham-fisted "voting fraud" purges that resulted in hundreds of thousands of legitimate ballots getting trashed.

While taking an active part in a soft coup might be beyond the pale, adopting a "there's just nothing we can do" attitude in light of an obvious power grab is much more palatable.
 
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Thermal said:
"Would you mind undermining the very foundation of a free society and skull **** our voting process? Just checking"
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"See, if he'd have said "YES!", I'd have called the cops on him! It was a sting operation!"
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
They could easily paint abdication of duty as judicial conservatism, even if it was clear that constitutional voting rights were being violated through deliberately ham-fisted "voting fraud" purges that resulted in hundreds of thousands of legitimate ballots getting trashed.
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Or, as the Republican Party calls it, 'Tuesday'.

Dave
 
It's the GOP motto: as long as we don't actually manage to destroy the US, what's the harm in trying really hard?
 
The Great Zaganza said:
It's the GOP motto: as long as we don't actually manage to destroy the US, what's the harm in trying really hard?
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There is no attempted murder, only murder!


They have made this kind of insinuation several times, particularly when some of their guys get caught molesting women.
 
alfaniner said:
His Twitter account may be scrubbed but my understanding is that the Tweets have to be archived (whether by Twitter or not, I don't know) as Official Presidential Communications. I have to wonder if all the comments are required to be saved also.
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Guess someone will print out and bind those tweets and donate it to his future library.
 
The Don said:
If Republican leaders came out and said that Joe Biden is the President elect then there'd be much less traction for this kind of thing. Instead we have them supporting President Trump, echoing his "every legal vote", supporting his lawsuits and making reference to a second Trump term.
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Some of them. Others have spoken in private and others have spoken publicly. Trump's welcome is wearing thin.


The Don said:
... If they (they in this case being both the national Republican leadership and the state leaders in those states) think that the blowback will be worth it, then why not take these entirely legal steps?
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What steps are you referring to?


The Don said:
..... We've heard it so many times in recent years, "They won't/can't do that". Whether it's refusing even to consider a SCOTUS nominee and then forcing through another in similar circumstances, the myriad cases of President Trump behaving in ways which would have bene previously unthinkable or embracing groups who would otherwise be anathema to the party, the GOP is breaking new ground all the time. :mad:
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This is the hypothetical. Match it to the evidence.


ponderingturtle said:
You said they would not install Trump but in the event that the coup language moves up to actual coup, would they stand against it or stand asside?

Right now we have the situation where they seem to be laying the ground work for a coup that they seem to be not serious about, but there is no internal blowback from the laying the groundwork for a coup.
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Who is laying what groundwork?


Mader Levap said:
History repeats itself. No one took seriously Hitler or Stalin at beginning too.
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Hitler and Stalin were power hungry dictators. Trump is a pathological narcissist who only cares about himself. Have you seen him take any steps in the last 4 years to consolidate is power?

No. He fires anyone who disagrees or who he thinks makes him look bad. Instead of ending up with a core of strong minions who are loyal to him, Trump fills their seats with people who are less and less qualified. He's down to Giuliani for Pete's sake as his top lawyer.


d4m10n said:
Trust their word if you like; I'm old enough to remember when Republican legislators emphatically insisted they would never push a SCOTUS pick through during an election.
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You continue to conflate state and federal legislators. And with COVID raging in a lot of GOP run states, why would these people back incompetent Trump? What's in it for them? It's not like they are all Trump sycophants.


SuburbanTurkey said:
Trump's meritless legal challenges seem to be going down the toilet, and there seems to be very little chance that even our partisan SCOTUS is going to give Trump the relief he demands here.

These legal moonshots aside, that just leaves the more naked power grab options. Eyes on the states with Republican controlled legislatures that Biden won to see if they will refuse to certify the electors. Any such move will have little to do with legality and more to do with the naked use of power by a minoritarian government intent on retaining control.

It should be clear that any such move is the open abandonment of any meaningful Democratic process and the only effective way to counter a coup is widespread public unrest.
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:rolleyes:

Trump and whose army?

Honestly, don't people have better things to do than this fear mongering? If you believe these things, let's hear the evidence, not the hypothetical.
 
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