There was a link somewhere suggesting that this is actually sort of the administration’s plan. You ‘delay’ the election so that no republicans vote, then you get an election that looks completely fraudulent because Biden got like 90% of the vote, then you lean hard on the supreme court to call it illegitimate.
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Well, I can’t promise the supreme court would follow the rules, but if that happened the election is supposed to be declared indecisive, in which case the House (democratic-led) chooses the president and the Senate chooses the vice president. It would certainly be interesting to end up with a split democratic presidency/republican vice presidency for sure.
Edit: Turns out the 1789 election failed to give an outright majority to anyone for VP and was decided by plurality, so I’m wrong about that part, see further down the thread
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Billy Bush and Access Hollywood come back to haunt Trump once again:
The “Access Hollywood” segment, filmed as Trump was attempting to vote in the 2004 election, shows Trump alongside TV host Billy Bush visiting multiple New York City polling locations. Trump, however, is blocked from voting at each location because he is not on any of the voter rolls at each stop.
Trump can be seen becoming increasingly frustrated before declaring, “I’m going to fill out the absentee ballot.”
The segment ends with Trump filling out what Bush describes as a provisional ballot in his car.
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It’s happened before (Adams and Jefferson, due to how elections worked back then)…
And Lincoln chose a Democrat for his second presidency, Johnson… (though they formed a 3rd party to do so).
Also, I scrolled all the way to the bottom of the list of Presidents and then had a sad when I saw the current president… 
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One of the reasons I was so depressed in the wake of the 2016 election was the knowledge that no matter what happened from that point forward he would be on that list forever.
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Yep. Even if he’s considered the worst (and I don’t see how he can’t be…), there he still is…
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Also, realize that when he finally kicks the bucket that he’ll be entitled to lie in state at the capitol and receive a state funeral. I’m sure the ratings will be off the chart. A national day of “mourning”.
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Until recently votes from abroad were reliably GOP, and – since transitioning from Republicans Abroad to Republicans Overseas a few years ago – the expat Republicans seem to trend towards Tea Party. I assume that’s because they can enjoy the ‘benefits’ of the ideology (low taxes) without suffering from the consequences (poor government services).
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Yep. They even gave old Tricky Dick a state funeral… I guess you can say that Nixon was an incredibly consequential president, for all his high crimes…
I bet that no other living president would show up to speak, though. And lots of people shuffling through the rotunda to view his casket would also be spitting on it…
I hope we can all at least say that he was the president that brought us to the brink rather than our dear leader who we must weep over…
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They’d be voting by state, so the outcome might be closer than we’d like.
Pretty sure there is no such provision anywhere in the Constitution
If Biden wins by a wide margin then he just wins, there is no special process if he wins by “too much”
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Throwing the election to the Congress can’t happen in 2020, really. The President-elect doesn’t need to carry a majority of the electors’ seats, merely a majority of the electors. There’s precedent for this going all the way back to George Washington’s first election, in which Rhode Island and North Carolina were ineligible to vote (having failed to ratify the Constitution in time), while New York’s legislature deadlocked and failed to appoint a slate of electors. Washington won the Presidency unanimously with 69 electoral votes cast. John Adams was only one vote short of a majority for Vice President with 34 electoral votes (but carried such a strong plurality that his election was uncontested; the next candidate was John Jay with 9 electors. Prior to the Twelfth Amendment, a VP could be elected with a mere plurality in any case.)
Similarly, the votes of the Confederate states during the 1864 election were simply not counted, and Lincoln needed to win only a majority from among the electors whose appointments were accepted.
In a two-candidate election, the only way for it to be thrown to the Congress is the unlikely situation where there is a numerical tie among the electors.
Where the Congress is likely to come in is that any Senator or Representative can raise a written objection to accepting the certificate of election from any state. If that happens, the two houses retire separately to deliberate on whether to accept the certificate. The last time that happened was in 1876, which was an election that was every bit as dirty as 2000 or 2016. (Somehow, our institutions survived the Hayes administration, although the electoral irregularities were a contributing factor in putting an end to Reconstruction.)
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So where did I say that the beliefs of that particular political group were consistent?
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At best he’s got a sort of “dumb AI” process - do random things until he gets positive feedback, then do more of that, with random variations until he gets more positive feedback for one of those variations, etc. Seems like, at this point, he’s getting more and more positive feedback from a smaller and smaller (and increasingly extremist) group. That doesn’t seem like a successful strategy.
The national guard are another thing entirely, really. There were problems with their deployment to crush the protests - military leadership was never happy with it, and increasingly unhappy as it went along and they got a lot of flack, and there was expected pushback from the soldiers as well. I would have been so sure about it a month ago, but given how badly that all went, I think Trump trying to deploy them in their own states for no purpose other than voter suppression is a total nonstarter.
But as I said, there are non-governmental forces that could be manipulated into place with even limited use of federal agents (and right-wing media propaganda, social media, etc.). Like how “militias” and other armed goons ended up in the streets with their guns to respond to (often imaginary) BLM protests and “antifa.” If that happened around the election, they could easily have an impact on voting.
That’s what he was trying to get with his deployment of federal agents. He’ll keep trying variations.
At which point, since all the Republicans in congress up for reelection got screwed over and lost, the only way they can retain power is by backing Trump’s play, however much they don’t like it. Their refusal to stand up to Trump demonstrates that almost all of them care about power rather than principles right now. (At which point, whatever the supreme court said wouldn’t even matter, just as this administration has simply been ignoring their rulings of late.)
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Just based on the profile of the thugs who sign up for ICE and CBP, I think the biggest risk of them being confronted by 1000 National Guard troops with better training and better gear is the risk to the people who have to clean up the puddle of piss where the goon squad was standing. Bullies are cowards when confronted with a fair fight.
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I love Beau. But in his last few videos i cannot decide if he is furious or terrified. I suspect both. I know i am.
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Does that matter, as long as he’s commander in chief?
Yeah, even if they weren’t willing to overtly say, “This is an illegal order, we’re not going to do that” (which, given how Trump has treated the military, I think they might actually say), there’s all sorts of things they could do to undercut the orders.
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