On January 5, 2021, President Donald J Trump directly endorsed the idea of the Vice President discarding or negating electoral votes with no standard of evidence, review, or oversight.
This is the most important issue at stake in the upcoming (ongoing, really) election in the USA. It’s easy to get distracted from this by any number of other issues or trapped in arguments over other concerns. For example, what policies would I prefer on tariffs, asylum-seekers and other immigration issues, race, policing, twitter moderation policy, gender issues and abortion, or tax rates? Or, how dishonest has each candidate been - did he really never say he wanted to “lock her up?” Do we really have “not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone?” Even easier to get distracted by whether or not some immigrants occasionally enjoy a sneaky catloaf12 on the side, or whether January 6 was an insurrection or a day of love.
The answers to all of those questions are important in their own right. They can and should be argued about in the public square, in the courts, and at the ballot box. But, on that note, if one person, whose name is on the ballot, has the sole authority to decide which votes to count, then we will still have a country, but there will no longer be any point in calling it America or claiming that we are the home of the free.
Objection!
“He only wants the Vice President to have the power to reject fraudulent votes! Who could object to that except a dirty fraud-lover! You don’t love fraud, do you?”
It matters very much to me that proven fraud be rejected and punished. Yet, claiming fraud when there is no fraud, is itself a fraud! How can we guard against fraudulent claims of fraud? I’m glad so you asked!
The former POTUS tried very hard to prove that there was fraud, in courts of law. And he failed to produce enough evidence to convince them. And then, he tried to convince congress to object to the votes, and failed to produce enough evidence to convince them. So we’re left with the idea that the Vice President can reject electoral votes with no standard of evidence, review, or oversight.
OBJECTION!
“He actually wanted to return the votes to the state legislatures to recertify!”
No, he really didn’t. The first Eastman memo explicitly asserted a plan of simply declaring victory after rejecting the votes in question. There was, later, a tacked-on plan to instead send the votes back to the state legislatures. However, the number of states whose legislatures wanted to recertify was… zero.
We can tell this because none of those state legislatures attempted to actually do so. There was no reason for them to wait for January 6 for any state legislature that wanted to dispute the election to do so! While some individual legislators wanted to, there was nowhere near a majority in favor of doing so in any of the “disputed” states.
And then, of course, there’s his own words again…
So….
As he explicitly put forth in his tweet on January 5, 2021, Former President Donald J. Trump just casually thinks it’s okay to destroy the idea of elections forever.
Some people don’t believe he means it, really.
Some people are okay with it, as long as it owns the libs.
Some people are still just unaware of it.
Some people are just tired. Maybe so tired that they’re ready for the day that the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship.
But not this day.
Thanks for reading.
cat, n. [colloquial] a nice animal, commonly mistaken for meatloaf
this one’s for you, Steve