Might as well go back to the old school rules then, or just hand out guns for everyone.
“The Chair recognizes Congressman Based Caneman…”
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Well, compared with Trump managing to engineer a second term via legal or quasi-legal shenanigans, it is a positive outcome.
This video was in response to another by Van Jones arguing that Trump can use entirely legal mechanisms to stay President in defiance of the election result. The presenter here, Greg Doucette (known for, among other things, the Police Brutality Mega-Thread), points out that’s just not true, unless the Democratic majority in the House let it happen.
No, it would not be optimal. But if someone’s on the verge of successfully stealing an election, you passed that exit ages ago.
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This is a coup, the same way a firecracker is an atom bomb.
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Keep not taking this shit seriously, and see where that gets us. Just because it’s not been remotely successful, and our institutions have actually withstood this assault doesn’t mean it wasn’t an attempt to overturn those institutions in favor of a populist autocrat. This whole event should indicate to us where our institutions are weak and that we should shore them up before someone who is fucking competent comes along and pulls this shit again.
If you think “it can’t happen here”, you’re very much mistaken. It could.
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Yep. The video clearly lays out ‘we’re not going to even get to this point’, which I agree with and seems to be borne out increasingly as we head forward.
Like I’m still upset that our elected leader is behaving like a child, flinging around incredibly damaging statements, and generally causing harm to the democratic process. But I also like…want the political system to handle it, because that’s what we have; and a total breakdown of the system is unlikely to be good for anyone in the short term, as seen in basically any country that’s had a radical overthrow lately. Long-term it might be, but that doesn’t mean that the only option for change in a country is radical overthrow.
Ultimately I think that this guy’s take is a really good one though. Trump does not have the support of the military (and hasn’t), so Trump was never going to take over through a violent political overthrow with tanks in the streets (and if he did the election doesn’t matter anyway). It was always going to be through political rule lawyering, and he tried and he failed, utterly.
And because of that, the political rule lawyering defense is important, because it’s what stands in the way of it.
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It’s an attempted coup. Incompetence doesn’t change that.
The first guys who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 didn’t come close to bringing the towers down, but they were terrorists every bit as much as the guys who piloted the planes 8 years later.
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Oh, I’m aware of who he is from the megathread (I have it bookmarked). I’m also not a fan of Van Jones in general based on the works I’ve seem him do.
My point was just that lawyers put a lot of faith in the legal system working as intended to the last layer of defense, and the presentation minimizes what would happen to society if that last line of defense was ever reached. I personally am uncomfortable with the level we reached already without universal alarm, but I don’t think we are over a cliff. I also don’t think that the electoral college will fail in this case - but to say “let’s see how the EC shakes out” is already a rough sign for the shape we are in when the popular vote results are already being questioned openly by political and media figures without substantial push-back aside from our institutions. And I severely doubt Doucette would argue that our courts and legislatures are in a healthy state.
Except he didn’t fail politically, he failed legally. Trump’s support is unchanged after the election, and because that support is unchanged the Republican base has been dragged even further right once more through pretending our democracy is weak and making it a political plank. The political vehicle of the Rupublican party has not been harmed by moving even further right.
The whole point about being disturbed by the erosion of democracy is that it’s presently still being eroded in front of us. Just like how many people are going to claim Joe Biden personally held electoral college voters at gunpoint to vote for him in the way they are intended to.
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Apologies! I didn’t mean to patronise.
But isn’t that kind of his point? Either the legal system works, and you end up with Biden as President (or, absolute worst case scenario, the Speaker of the House as Acting President); or it doesn’t and you have a coup d’état (and, as Greg says, you can go visit him in the gulag). What you don’t get, under any scenario, is Trump legally getting a second term via some loophole with the Democrats powerless to stop it, despite what Van Jones et al. would have us believe.
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But I’m not talking about Trump, I’m talking about 10-20 years from now. Saying the system worked like it was designed to and the attempted coup wasn’t an actual coup this time is the period when we need to reflect on how things got so bad, not when we say things are alright. Yes, the legal system held. No that doesn’t make me feel comfortable about the strength of the US system.
Mind you, I know he is directly responding to much more dramatic scenarios people believe in. I’m more concerned about the 2032 election results when people treat 12/14 like 11/3.
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Well, that’s fair enough.
One final thought, though: I do think this sort of legal analysis is useful for drawing a bright line.* If the worst happens and Trump is re-inaugurated on 20 Jan, then there will have been a coup. Not a technically legal aberration that shows the urgent need for reform; not a piece of extreme partisan gamesmanship that can be described as a coup as rhetorical hyperbole; an actual, prosecutable-as-treason** coup.
* Assuming it’s an accurate legal analysis: I am not a lawyer, still less an American lawyer.
** Assuming anyone is ever again in a position to prosecute it.
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Sparkling authoritarianism, then, but it fell flat. But still…
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