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| credit: Sheneman, Star Ledger |
Is the former guy beginning to sweat? He should because the House Select Committee investigating the J6 Insurrection have issued subpoenas to four high officials of the former guy's regime to appear and produce documents. The officials subpoenaed include former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and former Presidential Advisor Steve Bannon. Most likely these demands will be litigated by Herr Trumpillini as a delaying tactic since the legal grounds for objecting are practically non-existent. Bannon was not a government official at the time of the coup, so there is no executive privilege that applies to him, and the current administration controls the application of the privilege. His administration has already indicated that it leans toward not objecting to the production of evidence that could be considered privileged. The former guy, no matter how much he would like to, cannot legally control the privilege after he is no longer in office.
The contours of the coup attempt are becoming increasing clear--allow US Person to briefly explain. There is a memo in existence, referred to as the Eastman Memo after its author John Eastman, a Trump loyalist, that outlines a scenario for the Vice President to follow on January 6th, the day Congress was assembled to open the votes of the Electoral College. Eastman's half-clever plan probably would not have worked had VP Pence agreed to cooperate because in actual fact there were no disputed electoral votes in existence. Nevertheless the memo does reveal the state of play on that fateful day, at least in the fevered mind of the would-be dictator desperate to hold on to power. The plan centers on the role of the VP in counting electoral votes pursuant to the Twelfth Amendment and the Electoral Count Act. The Electoral Vote Count Act, passed in 1887 in the wake of the disputed election of 1876 provides:
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...
Pence was to skip counting Arizona's votes based on an alleged election dispute. Which votes are "regularly given" is determined by the state in the first instance, and ultimately if both houses of Congress cannot agree which votes are legitimate, then by vote of each state delegation in the House of Representatives, Currently the Repugnants control 26 state delegations, so presumably they would vote to install Trump. At the end of the counting of state electors, Pence was to announce that in view of ongoing election disputes in seven swing states, there were no electors in those states whose votes were "regularly given". Therefore, the majority of electoral votes was 228 in those circumstances, and since Trump had 232, he won the election. Of course that decision by the President of the Senate would have been met with howls of derision from Democrats. Pence's fallback position would be to rule that since neither candidate received a majority of electoral votes, the House of Representatives would have to decide the election. Trump wins again.
We know now that Pence refused to be involved in such blatantly anti-democratic manipulation of an antique system that should have been discarded long ago and certainly by 2000 when hanging Florida ballot chads plunged US into a constitutional crisis. The Supremes decided in Bush v. Gore (2000) that the states have the plenary power to appoint electors. The disputes in 2020 were manufactured, not based on law or fact, as numerous courts have held. However, the national effort by Trump loyalists to discredit or control state voting processes is on-going. Mike Pence had no authority to reject electoral votes certified by the respective states on January 6th. Former VP Dan Quayle, who presided over his own defeat, told him so. The improbable scheme dreamed up by Eastman was on Herr Trumpillini's mind when he goaded the mob into marching on the Capitol. He told his minions, "I hope Mike is going to do the right thing. I hope so. Because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win." Reality is not enough to stop a deranged demagogue attempting to usurp power. The Eastman memo despite its twisting of the law, does serve as evidence of Trumpillini's state of mind: he intended to subvert the election and have himself declared the winner with no counted ballots, no lawful transfer of power, but only a continuation of his reign by fiat.
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| credit: R. McKee; Wackydoodle sez: So it is written, so let be done! |