Paging Dr. Kübler-Ross
The knowledge originally researched and published by Drs. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler have become relatively common knowledge. Most people are aware that grief at a profound loss, such as the death of a loved one, moves through five phases: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and ultimately, acceptance. While they most often manifest in this order, individual experiences might come in varying orders, omitting certain phases, vacillating back and forth between them. In most cases, they end with depression moving on to acceptance.
I suppose it makes sense that for people who found fundamentally emotional reasons to support Donald Trump’s candidacies for President, his loss in November of this year would constitute an emotional loss triggering grief. I’ll spare the armchair psychoanalysis of how one or another person might have got there. Suffice to say, for a percentage of people, the lame duck period is a time for grief.
Play The “Pence Card”!
Well, “denial” and “anger” and “bargaining” under these circumstances are forming a potent cocktail of alternative reality narratives. Take, for instance, this:
America, @VP @Mike_Pence MUST do this, tomorrow!
To defend our Constitution from our enemies:
Foreign: China, Russia, Iran
&
Domestic: BigTech Censorship, MSM Censorship, Corrupt Officials at the Federal, State, and Local levels!
Let him know! pic.twitter.com/GvBAlzeGFg
— “Activate Emergency Alert System!” Ivan Raiklin (@Raiklin) December 22, 2020
Which for many reasons (Let’s start with “Why would anyone want the current state of affairs in this nation to persist?”) leaves me invoking Ramona Flowers.
And in case the fellow eventually takes it down, here’s the tweet’s memorandum of law, following the classic law school IRAC format, setting forth someone’s best attempt at a last-ditch means by which Donald Trump might somehow remain president after 12:01 p.m. on 20 January 2021:
Why do I mock the memorandum so? It does, after all, correctly quote a variety of laws including the Constitution, and they are arranged in what appears to be a logical order.
The Kraken That Wasn’t There
First of all, the whole thing is predicated upon the notion that there was MASSIVE FRAUD™ in only the relatively close states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. There are several reasons to be skeptical of such a claim on its face:
- The states where this MASSIVE FRAUD™ allegedly occurred were won by Joe Biden and were relatively close votes (all under 3%; Georgia was around a quarter of a percent). But for some reason MASSIVE FRAUD™ seems to have not occurred in other close states like Florida or North Carolina (which were won by Donald Trump, by 3.36% and 1.35% respectively). Anyone who was paying any attention at all knows that Democrats wanted to carry those states too and tried hard to do so.
- Organizing a conspiracy of three people is dicey enough; organizing the hundreds if not thousands of election workers needed to fabricate the results of not one but six different states’ elections has somehow yielded no squealers, no evidence of actual chicanery, and really awful testimony from election monitors who didn’t bother to show up for orientation or whose testimony was so awful it made people laugh out loud and required insistence from the witness that she wasn’t drunk.
- For some reason the organizers of the MASSIVE FRAUD™ engaged in tremendous, subtle, and difficult efforts to just barely carry six critical states to the Democratic candidate for President, but while they were phenomenally competent at doing that, they were also insufficiently competent at manipulating down ballot races that appeared on the same ballots, resulting in Democrats failing to secure control of the Senate and losing seats in the House of Representatives. The conspirators can’t be ultra-competent and incompetent simultaneously.
- Despite former Trump campaign attorney turned free-radical legal actor and two-legged FRCP 11(b) violation Sidney Powell ‘s promise to “Release the Kraken” and demonstrate MASSIVE FRAUD™, the lawsuits of her “Kraken” have wound up being laughed out of court, often as not by Trump-appointed judges or Trump-endorsed judges. Trump and his allies and his supporters have had over fifty bites at the apple and haven’t yet found anything to back up the claims.
- Attorney General William Barr, quite possibly Trump’s biggest and most important political ally and henchman, has stated that the U.S. Department of Justice has looked hard but found no evidence of election fraud. Possibly at the cost of his own job.
We should look upon the factual premise of this memo with substantial skepticism. It is what Kübler-Ross would call “denial:” a refusal, or at least a failure, to acknowledge that the election was as clean as any of our elections ever are, and to what should have been no one’s great surprise, Trump lost.
Why ought anyone be surprised about that? Biden was consistently leading in the polls and the projections. Trump has been visibly disinterested in doing the job of Presidenting from the beginning of his term. Trump got impeached for corruption and obstruction of Congress, and his defense wasn’t “I didn’t do it,” it was “You didn’t serve enough subpoenas (which I claim you don’t have a legal right to serve) to be able to adequately prove I did it (even though I admitted doing it).” Trump badly mishandled the outbreak of COVID-19 and offered only lies in his own defense. Unemployment reached figures unseen since the Great Depression because of it, and our growing (albeit not particularly robustly) economy tanked because of it; we still haven’t recovered fully and won’t for a long time. The surprise is that the voters didn’t treat him as though he were Walter Mondale or George McGovern.
And Trump’s supporters are, it seems, following the cues of Trump himself, the protagonist of a 46-minute long Facebook video offering nothing but debunked conspiracy theories and rants, and rather pathetically seeks out anyone who might tell him there is a chance he can hang on to power. So, these fantabulists are simply following the cues given them by their leader. And he is very good at projecting both Kübler-Rossian denial as well as Kübler-Rossian anger.
Then, there’s the rather inconvenient fact that 49 of the 50 states submitted Gubernatorially-certified slates of electors to the appropriate authorities on or before the statutory “safe harbor” deadline of six days prior to the actual vote of the Electoral College. As the linked article indicates, Wisconsin missed the deadline because of pending Trump nonsense litigation. But as we shall see, this basically seals it even if you think there were problems with the vote.
Rutherford Hayes Needed A Safe Harbor And Didn’t Have One
Where does that “safe harbor” deadline come from, anyway? Why does that tie the hands of Congress and why is Mike Pence supposed to be such a critical player all of a sudden? It comes from the Electoral Count Act, codified mainly in Title 3 of the U.S. Code. This law was passed in the wake of the utter clusterfuck that was the 1876 election dispute of Rutherford Hayes against Samuel Tilden. Tilden got more popular votes, but Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina submitted two competing slates of electors, one for Hayes and one for Tilden, and it’s entirely likely that each competing slate was thoroughly tainted by corruption. Congress deliberated for days and eventually reached a compromise: it would find Hayes’ slates of electors to be valid, and in exchange, Reconstruction in the southern states would end, allowing Democrats to take back power in those areas.
So, after needing to do that, Congress said, “Nope, not again,” and now there are formerly obscure provisions of Title 3 which govern how electoral votes are counted.
One of those provisions is 3 U.S.C. § 5, where the “safe harbor” is found.
If any State shall have provided, by laws enacted prior to the day fixed for the appointment of the electors, for its final determination of any controversy or contest concerning the appointment of all or any of the electors of such State, by judicial or other methods or procedures, and such determination shall have been made at least six days before the time fixed for the meeting of the electors, such determination made pursuant to such law so existing on said day, and made at least six days prior to said time of meeting of the electors, shall be conclusive, and shall govern in the counting of the electoral votes as provided in the Constitution, and as hereinafter regulated, so far as the ascertainment of the electors appointed by such State is concerned.
“But Burt!” the guy who’s posting above might protest. “You’re missing the point! 3 U.S.C. § 12 gives the President of the Senate – that’s Mike Pence – until the fourth Wednesday in December to say, “Hey, I haven’t received any valid slates of electors!”
Well, no. You’re doing what Dr. Kübler-Ross would call “bargaining.” Trying to come up with some sort of transaction or thing you might do to change something that has both already happened and now has become immutable. The statute says … well, let’s just quote the damn statute in full, so we know what we’re talking about.
When no certificate of vote and list mentioned in sections 9 and 11 of this title from any State shall have been received by the President of the Senate or by the Archivist of the United States by the fourth Wednesday in December, after the meeting of the electors shall have been held, the President of the Senate or, if he be absent from the seat of government, the Archivist of the United States shall request, by the most expeditious method available, the secretary of state of the State to send up the certificate and list lodged with him by the electors of such State; and it shall be his duty upon receipt of such request immediately to transmit same by registered mail to the President of the Senate at the seat of government.
So, if nothing has been received by either the President of the Senate or the Archivist of the United States (see below) beginning on the fourth Wednesday in December, either of those officials may are to request slates from (in order) that state’s secretary of state (per 3 U.S.C. § 12), or to the U.S. District Judge sitting in that state selected by the Governor to hold a copy of the slate (per 3 U.S.C. § 13). If they don’t do it, they have to pay a fine of $1,000 (per 3 U.S.C. § 14). The author of the “Pence Card” memo won’t accept any of those slates either, because those slates are going to suffer from the same problem as the gubernatorially-certified slates that have actually been transmitted (viz., Kraken-itis, aka MASSIVE FRAUD™, as evidenced by the fact that these states voted for Joe Biden).
But it’s not up to the Vice President to ascertain whether a purported slate of electors, or the votes of those electors, are valid. 3 U.S.C. § 6 states that a Gubernatorial certification of the identity of Electors is conveyed to the Archivist of the United States, a Presidentially-appointed civil servant within the General Services Administration. The current archivist, David Ferriero, keeps an official blog, so he’s all right in my book! And this has happened as to 49 of the 50 states, and the District of Columbia. Even not counting the one state that missed the safe harbor deadline, Wisconsin, Biden’s victory is now legally sealed. It can’t be stopped; at most, it might be delayed.
In particular, I call your attention to 3 U.S.C. § 15, which governs the actual counting of the electoral votes. I shall edit the punctuation to make its turgid text somewhat easier to understand, by way of inserting paragraph breaks where commas and semicolons appear in the original.
Congress shall be in session on the sixth day of January succeeding every meeting of the electors. The Senate and House of Representatives shall meet in the Hall of the House of Representatives at the hour of 1 o’clock in the afternoon on that day, and the President of the Senate shall be their presiding officer.
Two tellers shall be previously appointed on the part of the Senate and two on the part of the House of Representatives, to whom shall be handed, as they are opened by the President of the Senate, all the certificates and papers purporting to be certificates of the electoral votes, which certificates and papers shall be opened, presented, and acted upon in the alphabetical order of the States, beginning with the letter A;
and said tellers, having then read the same in the presence and hearing of the two Houses, shall make a list of the votes as they shall appear from the said certificates;
and the votes having been ascertained and counted according to the rules in this subchapter provided, the result of the same shall be delivered to the President of the Senate, who shall thereupon announce the state of the vote, which announcement shall be deemed a sufficient declaration of the persons, if any, elected President and Vice President of the United States, and, together with a list of the votes, be entered on the Journals of the two Houses.
Upon such reading of any such certificate or paper, the President of the Senate shall call for objections, if any.
Every objection shall be made in writing, and shall state clearly and concisely, and without argument, the ground thereof, and shall be signed by at least one Senator and one Member of the House of Representatives before the same shall be received.
When all objections so made to any vote or paper from a State shall have been received and read, the Senate shall thereupon withdraw, and such objections shall be submitted to the Senate for its decision; and the Speaker of the House of Representatives shall, in like manner, submit such objections to the House of Representatives for its decision;
and no electoral vote or votes from any State which shall have been regularly given by electors whose appointment has been lawfully certified to according to section 6 of this title from which but one return has been received shall be rejected,
but the two Houses concurrently may reject the vote or votes when they agree that such vote or votes have not been so regularly given by electors whose appointment has been so certified.
If more than one return or paper purporting to be a return from a State shall have been received by the President of the Senate, those votes, and those only, shall be counted which shall have been regularly given by the electors who are shown by the determination mentioned in section 5 of this title to have been appointed, if the determination in said section provided for shall have been made,
or by such successors or substitutes, in case of a vacancy in the board of electors so ascertained, as have been appointed to fill such vacancy in the mode provided by the laws of the State;
but in case there shall arise the question which of two or more of such State authorities determining what electors have been appointed, as mentioned in section 5 of this title, is the lawful tribunal of such State, the votes regularly given of those electors, and those only, of such State shall be counted whose title as electors the two Houses, acting separately, shall concurrently decide is supported by the decision of such State so authorized by its law;
and in such case of more than one return or paper purporting to be a return from a State, if there shall have been no such determination of the question in the State aforesaid, then those votes, and those only, shall be counted which the two Houses shall concurrently decide were cast by lawful electors appointed in accordance with the laws of the State,
unless the two Houses, acting separately, shall concurrently decide such votes not to be the lawful votes of the legally appointed electors of such State.
But if the two Houses shall disagree in respect of the counting of such votes, then, and in that case, the votes of the electors whose appointment shall have been certified by the executive of the State, under the seal thereof, shall be counted.
When the two Houses have voted, they shall immediately again meet, and the presiding officer shall then announce the decision of the questions submitted.
No votes or papers from any other State shall be acted upon until the objections previously made to the votes or papers from any State shall have been finally disposed of.
Whew. That’s a lot. But, let’s give the Congress of 1887, which wrote this monstrosity of statutory spaghetti, a break. The Hayes-Tilden election was a big mess that they really didn’t want to repeat. And now we don’t ever have to.
Here’s How It Really Works
After the general election is done, it’s up to an individual state to determine, under its own laws, which candidate’s proposed slate of Electors shall represent that state in the Electoral College. If any such dispute can be resolved sufficiently that the Governor of that state (or such other executive as state law may designate like a Secretary of State or a Commissioner of Elections, but by default it’s the Governor) will certify to the Archivist of the United States that “these people are our Electors for this election,” by six days before the date of the Electoral College actually meeting and voting [per 3 U.S.C. § 7 that was 14 December 2020 this cycle], that’s it. Per the clauses I reprinted in bold above, there are no other competing slates of Electors that Congress may recognize.
And in 2020, 49 of 50 states, plus D.C., managed to get this done by the “safe harbor” deadline of 08 December 2020, despite the barrage of frivolous litigation trying to throw chaff up against this. Also, every state has by now conveyed one, and only one, document to the Senate and to the Archivist setting forth slates of Electors and the Electors’ votes.
Pretty pieces of paper in pretty envelopes, one (and only one) from each of the 50 states and one from the District of Columbia, has already been sent to the National Archivist. This has already happened. No amount of denial, anger, or bargaining will change that.
“But wait, Burt!” a Trumper fantabuslist might protest. “There were alternative, Republican electors who met in places like Georgia and Pennsylvania! They preserved Trump’s bid for re-election! There are competing slates!” No, my dude, there aren’t. None of those so-called slates have been conveyed by the Governors of those states, nor certified as the votes of the states’ Electors, as described in 3 U.S.C. § 6. They don’t count. And under 3 U.S.C. § 13, Congress cannot consider them at all. When those would-be Electors met, that was Constitutional cosplay, not a legally significant event. Kübler-Ross would call this more “bargaining,” and it isn’t helping you come to acceptance.
How We Count The Count
Now, as they’re going through the states, alphabetically, if at least one Representative and at least one Senator is willing to file a written objection to a given state’s purported vote, that objection is to be resolved immediately. Alternatively, it might be the case that two or more documents are received by the Archivist that both purport to be certified slates of Electors, or a state’s votes are the subject of an objection.
In either such event, the House and the Senate split up and vote separately to resolve the dispute. They don’t vote by state delegations, but by membership. Democrats have a majority (slimmer now) in the House and Republicans have a majority (slimmer now) in the Senate.
If the two Houses don’t agree on an objection, the objection fails. If the two houses don’t agree on which of two competing slates of electors to recognize, the slate certified by the Governor prevails.
Congress can’t move on to count the next state’s votes, until the dispute over the state at issue is resolved. And because of what parliamentary procedure is, it appears to me that once the Electoral College count begins, Congress can’t consider anything else at all. It can’t adjourn, it can’t pass legislation, it can’t meet in committees other than for consideration of the Electoral College.
So, the “Pence Card” fails because Pence, in his capacity as President of the Senate, can’t lawfully go to any state other than Wisconsin and say “Hey, I think there’s a problem with this here thing that looks like an Electoral College slate.” It’s certified by the Governor and that’s dispositive. If he tries that with Wisconsin, Wisconsin’s Democratic Governor Tony Evers will inevitably say back, “No, Mr. Vice President, you got the right one. Would you like another copy?” And that will be dispositive.
What Forcing The Issue Will Yield
And as North Carolina attorney T. Greg Doucette points out in this video, explaining essentially what I’ve run through in text above, if either Nancy Pelosi or Mitch McConnell anticipate their body voting in a way they don’t like, they can simply refuse to hold a vote at all and bring the process to a standstill. See below for how that plays out.
There’s one other thing Mike Pence might try to do. As was graphically demonstrated for America about four and a half years ago, good faith discharge of Constitutionally-manded duties is simply not a thing when winning is on the line. So, what if it goes like this:
Teller: Here’s Alabama’s envelope, sir.
Mike Pence, as President of the Senate: [Opens envelope] Looks like 9 votes for Trump and 9 votes for Pence.
Teller: Here’s Alaska’s envelope, sir.
Pence: [Opens envelope] Looks like 3 votes for Trump and 3 votes for Pence.
Teller: Here’s Arizona’s envelope, sir.
Pence: [Puts envelope in pocket] Envelope? What envelope? I don’t see any envelope. Arizona? Never heard of it.
Senator Kristen Sinema: What the actual FUCK?
Pence: What’s the next state, Arkansas? I predict 6 votes for Trump and 6 votes for Pence. Will the teller please hand me Arkansas’ envelope, please?
That isn’t going to work. He can’t move on to Arkansas until Arizona is resolved. He can stand there all day long and pretend like he’s never heard of a magical place called “Arizona” before in his life even as Arizona’s senior senator jumps up and down in front of him waving her purple hair everywhere and its junior senator says “Remember when you did this?” but it’s probably the case that no one has the power to compel him to take that envelope out of his pocket.
More realistically, a Senator and a Representative would at that point interpose an objection. Remember, once the Electoral Count has started, Congress may consider no other business. And Congress may not proceed past the interposition of an objection. And so now, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, and Mike Pence all have to agree that the count should proceed. And at least one of them in this scenario doesn’t want to proceed, because the result would be adverse to their side.
And so, they would sit there. All of Congress. Doing nothing. For fourteen days.
Why fourteen days? Because this would be happening on 06 January 2021, the date prescribed by the first sentence of 3. U.S.C. § 13 for the Electoral College Count, and at noon Eastern time on 20 January 2021, Mike Pence’s term of office as Vice President of the United States will expire. 3 U.S.C. § 101. At that instant, he will cease to be Vice President, and therefore he will also cease to be President of the Senate. In fact, in the case of Mike Pence, he will become a private citizen, as he has been elected to no other office at all. Presumably, he would accept being escorted off the floor of the House with dignity, but if not, the Sergeant at Arms would remove him.
In a case where there were an objection or a disputed slate requiring resolution, if either Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (a Democrat) or Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (a Republican) didn’t like how their body would vote, they could simply refuse to schedule a vote at all, and again, the electoral count would grind to a halt then and there.
There would, at that point, be no President and no Vice President. So, per 3 U.S.C. § 19, the Speaker of the House would at that point begin serving as Acting President of the United States, and the President Pro Tempore of the Senate would begin serving as President of the Senate. The Speaker of the House on 20 January 2021 will be, as it is today, Nancy Pelosi. The President Pro Tempore of the Senate on 20 January 2021 will be, as it is today, Chuck Grassley.
Grassley would then have two options. He could resume the electoral count — which would necessarily result in Joe Biden winning and becoming the forty-sixth President of the United States — or not, in which case Nancy Pelosi would serve as Acting President of the United States. And if Nancy Pelosi didn’t like anything, she too has the power to halt things and assume the powers of the Presidency herself.
One way or another, a Democrat will be holding the power of the Presidency at 12:01 p.m., 20 January 2021. This is now inevitable.
There are no lawful scenarios in which we have either President Donald Trump or President Mike Pence or President Mitch McConnell. None. Can’t happen, not lawfully. In theory Congress might change these laws that I’ve quoted and analyzed elaborately above, but that too requires the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives to agree, and why would it?
The only way Donald Trump stays on as President after noon on the 20th is by extra-legal, extra-Constitutional means. In other words, he has to instigate a coup.
I say he doesn’t have the balls to try it. This is a guy who fires people by Twitter rather than by looking them in the eye. This is a guy who’s put over a dozen businesses through Chapter 11’s rather than face creditors with bills he can’t pay. Vladimir Putin said something mean to him at the Helsinki summit in ’18, and spent the rest of the time there as servile to the swaggering Russian as if he’d been a beaten dog.
Even if he were to try it, it’s pretty clear to me that the military won’t go along with it. I have a fair amount of faith in the young women and men with guns who are ultimately, the dispensers of force on behalf of the government. They’re all pretty damn clear that their oath is to the Constitution, not to a person, and that they will not obey an illegal order. “I declare the Constitution suspended” is as obviously an illegal command as could possibly exist. The Marine Guard and the Secret Service would politely but firmly escort Former President Trump out of the White House and the Biden Administration would move in and that would be that.
And if all that fails, and Trump really gets enough of the military behind him to successfully declare the Constitution suspended, we have way bigger problems than what Mike Pence does with some pretty papers stuffed into some pretty envelopes. Elie Mystal in The Nation put it pithily:
Well, what’s our plan for that?
My dude, I don’t have a plan for “nothing matters anymore.” The end of democratic self-government is not a thing one has a legal plan for. That’s like asking what my plan is for closing a demonic hell mouth that opens in my backyard. Die. My plan would be to die. I’m not Keanu Reeves.
This is the right attitude. Don’t waste a lot of time being anxious about a coup and the civil war that would follow. But do know that Trump is a bully, and bullies are at the end of the day cowards. Like the Proud Boys who stormed the Capitol in Salem, Oregon earlier this week, once faced with the reality of actually confronting people who could do them harm, bullies always back down.
Talk about a “Pence Card” or other bizarre quasi-legal theories are just Constitutional cosplay. It’s LARPing the law, a political pornography intended to excite and please a particular kind of audience, but which is not in any meaningful way a reflection of the way things actually are. Donald Trump is, at long last, out of saving throws.
It’s time to move on to acceptance. Four weeks from now, Joe Biden is going to be the next President of the United States. The only thing anyone can do about it now is maybe make Nancy Pelosi the Acting President of the United States for a little while, and from the perspective of someone who preferred Trump, that’s hardly an improvement.
Like a lot of other things about the real world, you don’t have to like it, but you do have to come to terms with it.
Great analysis Burt, pithy and fun!Report
Good analysis as North said but I am in a cynical mode and think it misdiagnosis the situation. But the situation is much more dire than that. There are tens of millions of people who think everything they have been taught America is and should be is being taken away from them by antifa, or various versions of city dwellers from those people to the (((cosmopolitan elites))) or whomever else and they must stand against this.
This is the convergence of a lot of events which can be both independent and intertwined. Americans under 45 seem to be the first group that largely does not go back to religion once they have kids. This scares the shit out of the still very large group of evangelicals who are finally seeing their pews start to empty after decades. The gambit of Michael Anton’s Flight 93 election wasn’t that Trump was not bad. Michael Anton fully admitted Trump had a lot of bad qualities and might not be reliable. But since we are talking pop culture, the essays statement was ”Perhaps is a good day to die. Prepare for ramming speed!” And the gig paid off for a while. Conservatives won a lot of victories during these years including ram roding the Federal Judiciary with young Federalist Society firebrands being chief among them. They can Four Horsemen progressives for years!
But it was not quite good enough. Democrats became more engaged and outvoted the GOP in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020.* So now they need to chose whether to fight for conservatism or accept democracy. In 2018, David Frum predicted they would choose conservatism and here we are now. Aided and abetted by useful idiots who claim not to be conservative but have worked themselves into a tizzy that some part of the Democratic coalition (usually “wine moms”) is the real evil and most be stopped/trolled and that shitposting memes on 4chan is the ultimate goal of all. Nothing about policy, just owning the libs for alleged and/or imagined hypocrisies and inconsistencies.
Plus you have the grift machine which succeeds at separating so many people from so much money. That must be fed. So the claims of fraud and cheating will continue because if you grant the Democrats legitimate victory, you need to concede that maybe people like their policies, and that means telling the people who give you tons of money that they are wrong. And we can’t have such acts of honesty, can we?
There are conservatives who realize that Trump was a bad hombre and the GOP made a terrible mistake in lying with it but these conservatives also delude themselves into thinking that low-government, low-regulation, low-tax Reaganism is still hugely popular like it is perpetually 1980 or 1984. They still follow “conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed.”
And after that there is additional layer of aiding and abetting from the Green Lantern Corps that insists that if only Democrats Aaron Sorkined enough, it will be FDR shaking hands with a miner in a grand coalition of nearly everyone despite all evidence to the contrary. I imagine this delusion is kept up because the alternative is admitting that they will always be Democrats in deep red states and never have power. This means you might as well move or collapse to a heap of resigned depression.
I appreciate all the snark that went into this. I think Trump’s biography was unique enough that it will be nearly impossible for there to be a smarter better more popular Trump 2.0 but the fact is that tens of millions of Americans think that their vision of America is going away and they do not like it one bit and will fight like tooth or nail to make sure it doesn’t happen. I think a lot of them would choose to destroy the United States rather than see the vision they learned in right-wing Sunday School not be right.
*This doesn’t even bring up gerrymandering which creates huge issues like where the Democrats win a majority of the vote in some states but a minority of the seats. Green Lanterism has invented a cottage industry in pooh poohing the successful attempts at Apartheid rule/Herrenvolk Democracy because dealing with that is hard and uncomfortable and might mean tough conversations with friends and family. Screaming ”be Jeb Bartlett and give me grade A deux ex machina” is cheap and easy and avoids such difficult things.Report
Saul, there is no deus ex machina, and no one is coming to save us. In fact, we’re doomed.
But what we’re doomed to is power shifting back and forth from middle-liberal to middle-conservative and back. It’s not ideal and from time to time we’re stuck in gridlock when we really ought to be acting. And we may ultimately doom ourselves to death in the form of slowly roasting the earth because of it.
But that’s who we are as a nation. We want our neighbors to agree with us about everything but at the end of the day we aren’t willing to pull guns on each other to get there.
We are now what we have been for 175 years, and we are likely to be that for a long time to come. It ain’t always great, that much is true. But it ain’t as terrible as it used to be, either.
With any luck at all, we’ll soon again be living in ordinary times.Report
I would be happy if we would shift should middle-liberal to middle-conservative based on various events and failures of parties in power. That is the platonic ideal of democracy! But right now the right-wing has moved very far from the center and I do not see them moving back anytime soon. I know there is no deux ex machina but I am very tired and very angry after a very long year of massive unnecessary errors and suffering because of culture war and I am one of the people who largely did okay!
My hope though is that my theory on Trump being sui generis is correct and there are not any replacements for him and a chunk of his supporters go back to being non-voters.Report
Saul, the more people in the country that don’t feel particularly represented == A Bad Thing.
It leads to, among other things, Trump.
Trump was, all things being equal, Not That Bad. His aesthetics were appalling, of course… but he was a pause button on the left being able to move further from center and not a stop (or, God help us, a reverse) button.Report
Trump was a boon to the Left. It gave them a great and deserving target while they were getting nothing. What will defang the Left is meeting some of there reasonable points since this takes away some of their support. With the D’s having little to no power it lifted the profile of anybody who could breathe fire. Incompetent R’s officials just make any associated with them look like crap ( markets, etc) You want to weaken the Left, have a competent D admin getting some of their priorities.
This is leaving aside the highly questionable idea that the Left has much of any actual power or is a danger.Report
He’s a corrupt piece of shit with no concept that there is such a thing as the rule of law, whose refusal to lead, follow, or get out of the way on COVID killed God only knows how many people. His similar refusal on COVID relief threatens to cause God only knows how much avoidable misery.
But that’s all aesthetics. At least he’s not something truly evil, like a liberal.Report
Mike, he was a bullet dodged.
When it comes to COVID, I’m one of the people who believes that there’s more to stopping it than merely trying to be more like France, Germany, or Spain (maybe we could have had more European outcomes if we had) but also remembers stuff like “the early months of COVID” where I was told that masks don’t matter, it’s bigoted to not eat out, and I should “get a grippe”.
I remember people, here, complaining about lockdowns against people who were taking it seriously.
Was he *BAD*? Yes.
But he was also a bullet dodged.
Is he awful on COVID? Yes. He is.
But he is not particularly extraordinary.Report
I mean, granted, he’s a historically corrupt and bad President from every dimension and measurement. From the wide lens viewpoint of policy, specifically, it should be acknowledged that Trump has been an astonishingly unproductive president legislatively. His single legislative accomplishment has been a bog standard deficit exploding tax cut. All his other action has been in terms of executive decisions (which can generally be reversed pretty easily) or judicial appointments (any republican with a pulse would have nominated those judges).
A competent republican President could have potentially done a hell of a lot more damage from a left wing perspective.Report
He did not appoint mere Republicans. He appointed reactionary firebrands who think Lochner was decided correctly and will 4 Horsemen Democrats for decades to come.
His malice and incompetence might lead to one million Americans dying unnecessarily of COVID. I would bet that the stuff we here about after he leaves will be even worse.Report
I’m not trying to diminish the import of Trumps judicial appointments. If you want to claim, however, that Jeb! or Lil Marco would have appointed different judges you will need to make your case and show you work and I have very serious doubts.
I’ve already granted Trumps malevolence and general awfulness. That doesn’t change the fact that he’s accomplished virtually nothing in terms of actual legislation and legislation is where lasting change is generally laid down.
A politician who married Trumps corruption and malevolence with actual competence would have accomplished a hell of a lot more (and worse). So Jay is correct that on that measurement we did actually luck out with Trump.Report
I don’t think they would have approved the younger appointments with non-existent trial experience but great partisan credentialsReport
No? I’m shocked Saul, we’ve found an area where you have a higher opinion of the GOP than I do! Hanukkah Sameach.Report
I really wish people would stop saying that Trump has been an unaccomplished President policy wise. Trump through Miller, Barr, and others have managed to basically make the United States immigration system a lot crueler and tougher than it was in the past. Even during the dying days of the Trump administration, they are doing everything they can to destroy asylum and other forms of immigration relief in the United States, Trump also managed to appoint a lot of Federalsit society hacks through the judiciary, destroy environmental regulations, etc.Report
I don’t deny the damage he has done Lee, but can the next President not simply reverse Trumps policies as unilaterally as Trump imposed them?
There’s no denying the importance of Trump’s judges. The point, merely, was that a competent Trump would have accomplished everything Trump accomplished and added legislative victories on top of it. Let us not forget that Trump had unified control of the government for 2 years after 2016.Report
I think the issue is not that trumps orders can’t be rescinded, they can. But the harsh treatment of immigrants and performative cruelty has lessened our appeal as place for people to come to. Can we be trusted? Can immigrants get into Canada or Australia? Some will choose other places.
Certainly actually legislative accomplishments could have made permanent real changes. But our brand is off. It will take a long time for that to change.Report
Agreed. I’m not claiming that Trump was in any way not a calamity- just that a Trump with, say, an Orban level of competence would have been far far worse.Report
DID SOMEBUNNY MENTION IMMIGRATION?!?
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LOL. I’m so owned. Like pwned and owned. Yeah so. I heard that. The biden admin will be much friendlier to immigrants and refuges. The performative cruelty will go and we’ll start taking people in again.
You do know that blowing up every small picture statement into everything is box of rocks level insight.Report
Maybe we’ll return to the kindness of Obama’s presidency.
And we can tell ourselves that, hey, our moral stance worked. We’ll never have to think about kids in cages ever again.Report
Libertarian contranianism cannot fail, it can only be failed.Report
I still have the viewpoint that I had here, for the record.Report
The other thing is that Trump emboldened the most actively harsh immigration officials through out the system. He turned the entire thing into a giant deportation machine. Biden is going to reverse a lot of this but besides taking time, there are still going to be many immigration officials that do their jobs according to Trumpist understanding.Report
Is there a point at which we’ll be able to say “okay, this is now Biden’s government”? 2022?Report
In the second two years, after many of the grifters had left their Secretary or agency head positions, the replacements actually knew how to do rule-making. Many of those will take a couple of years to reverse, because they have to go through the same procedure.
What’s scarier is that the make-up of the SCOTUS has changed, and they may hold that replacing rules with something more stringent oversteps the authority granted by Congress. Gorsuch wasn’t installed to overturn Row v. Wade; he was installed to roll back the whole regulatory state.Report
That sounds alarmingly plausible and is an excellent point. We’ll see what happens.Report
“he was installed to roll back the whole regulatory state.”
Trump’s presidency, in my view anyway, is best understood as a semi- to in-competent attempt to (as Steve Bannon put it) “dismantle the administrative state.” The extent to which the admin was successful will take time – probably many years – to evaluate.
(The best way to understand Trump personally is as a sociopathic malignant narcissist.)Report
comment in mod. it seems to be a length related issue.Report
I think there is a tremendous complacency in these comments, as the Trump presidency winds down.
There is a base of around 75 million Americans who have decided that democracy and the rule of law is their enemy. It’s comforting to imagine that people like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Power are outliers and freaks, but they aren’t.
Again, listen to the dog that isn’t barking, the vast 77 million strong voting base of the Republican Party, all of whom would be perfectly happy to have the election overturned by any means possible. None of them are quitting the party, none are trying to expel Trump.
And after Jan 21?
What, does anyone here think that they will just stuff their hands in pockets and surrender? Like the Ben Domenechs and Charlie Kirks and Jim Hofts will just, somehow magically disappear?
The trajectory of the past 4 or 5 decades of American conservatism is one of increasing radicalization and fixation on identity politics. This isn’t a temporary spell or isolated quirk. It is a persistent pattern with no end in sight.Report
Quickly! Call for more gun control!
Maybe, if we promise to strengthen police unions, we could get them on board with us. Maybe give them bigger budgets? Para-military equipment?Report
For my part, I think Trump leaving office diminishes his role as a cultural leader significantly. That will, I’m hopeful, make room for other kinds of leaders to step up and start guiding Republicans. I don’t imagine I’ll like why they do, either, but maybe it’ll be in more traditional sorts of directions as opposed to Trump’s crass nationalism and reflexive contrarianism.
Doesn’t mean we are certain to get back to normal, but I think it does mean that’s more likely.Report
To this point the longer he feuds with Fox News the more he’ll diminish himself long term, even among conservatives.Report
“Doesn’t mean we are certain to get back to normal”
“Normal” is what brought us Trump though. 🙂Report
“What do you mean this game is iterated? I won!”Report
I hope so.
My argument for pessimism is that the 75 million Trumpistas don’t have a political agenda but a kulturkampf.
By definition, this is not amenable to conventional politics where people argue and compromise.
Notice how even when they win elections, their rage is not abated. Their rage has no political solution.
So long as there exist powerful women like Jill Biden, or open gay people, or drag queens somewhere reading stories, so long as there are black people demanding to be treated with dignity by the cops the Trumpistas will be in a frothing rage.
And the more their rage continues, the more desperate and illiberal their solutions will become.
I would love for this comment to be archived and dug up in 5 years or so and we all have a good laugh at how Chip was so wildly wrong.Report
I’ll play Pollyanna to your Cassandra Chip. Absolutely this group of voters is real, they’re contained mostly within their own custom media ecosystem and they’ve been further poisoned by Trump which is simply a continuation of the degraded bargain the GOP has been upholding for decades now (at least since Gingrich from my own point of view).
All that being stipulated this population has some general characteristics that suggest some cautious optimism is warranted: they’re generally well off materially and they’re much older than the general population. Old people don’t usually riot and commit to violence and generally neither do people who’re well off. The typical movers for mass political violence- the young and/or the poor are generally left leaning.
So, I don’t doubt we’ll continue to see the right devolve deeper and deeper into ever higher acts of internet madness where they’ll no doubt find plenty of leftists eager to match them kooky statement for kooky statement but I’m somewhat confident that that attitude will only spill over into meat space occasionally.
That doesn’t mean that the left shouldn’t continue to seek ways to address what actual genuine grievances the right has- especially the poor among the right who have genuine problems that they need help with. They are obligated to both as political common sense and moral necessity, but if the left can keep things in order and deliver modest improvements and stability they can, in theory, wait those 75 million Trumpistas out. Especially as, sans Trump, there’s a very high chance that the Trumpistas will schism into competing charismatic camps.Report
If we had a +1 or a thumbs-up feature for comments, I’d give one to this. It strikes me as a probable and credible broad-brush forecast.Report
High praise coming from you, Merry Christmas counsellor.Report
+1!Report
I think I agree with this.Report
Post-publication revisions by author: cleaned up an ambiguous reference to Trump’s disinterest in governing in the 14th paragraph; revised a reference to the effects of Wisconsin not having a gubernatorial certification of the names of Electors within safe harbor deadline in the 23rd paragraph (previous iteration stated that all 50 states had turned in gubernatorially-certified Electoral votes; as previously drafted this read ambiguously as to the identity of the slates of Electors, which is a separate document that bears a separate certification).Report
“Lack of interest”; he’s never acted disinterestedly in his life.Report
Excellent post, Burt; thanks for writing it. If I had one complaint, it would be how you dared to profane the 1st Edition masterwork that is “Keep on the Borderlands” by putting it in that goblins hands!Report