The Warning

 Wow, I have to say that Liz Cheney, whom I didn't like when she ran against Mike Enzi, and whom I wasn't keen when she ran for Congress the first time, really has guts.

And she's really rising in my opinion as well.

Cheney has been under the gun, everywhere, since she voted to impeach Donald Trump.  Her vote was principled and brave in context.  It's brought her the ire of the national GOP establishment, which remains firmly in Donald Trump's orbit, and which has bought into a false narrative of recent history at a fanatic level.

Her position in the House leadership has been under the gun, and right now she appears likely to fall.  She's not backing down.

In fact, she's penned an op ed for the Washington Post, titled:

Opinion: Liz Cheney: The GOP is at a turning point. History is watching us.

Indeed, the yes of history are on the GOP, and this era in the party's history, should the party survive will not be looked back upon kindly.  It's siding with a revolt.  Cheney flatly and correctly states the situation:

The Republican Party is at a turning point, and Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution. 

And she correctly puts the issue:

The question before us now is whether we will join Trump’s crusade to delegitimize and undo the legal outcome of the 2020 election, with all the consequences that might have.

There's a lot more to what she's said.  All well worth reading.

There's almost no chance that the Republican Party is going to listen to her, however.  Some are going to simply ignore the crisis in the party, afraid that a person can't separate Trump from it.  Others are going to attack her, including GOP hopeful for her seat here in the state.  I think that there's little chance that she'll be removed from that seat, but a high likelihood that she'll be removed from her positions inside the House GOP leadership.

Even a year is a long time in politics.  Over the next year, it's increasingly likely that GOP Trumpism will result in a reversal of Republican fortunes in the House.  They will not gain the Senate.  Left wing Democrats, fully cognizant of their two year window of opportunity and that they're not going to get any help on anything from a Republican Party that is firmly in the grip of Trump's destructive behavior, have now gone full bore on getting a left wing agenda passed, and Joe Biden, for whatever reason, is on board.  By 2022 the economy will not only have rebounded, it stands to be overheated, but at the same time it will likely be above full employment and the US seems likely to have gotten past the pandemic except that it will remain a reservoir of infection concentrated, oddly enough, among the same demographics that support Trump the most.  Befuddlement on the part of the rest of the population will likely turn to contempt and where that reservoir is the deepest, as in Wyoming, that demographic will find itself increasingly on the outs.  No amount of lawsuits or resolutions will end up changing that and the direction of the nation, influenced by the spread of a massive amount of cash, will cement the Democrats in power for a decade, and with them will come a leftward drift to the nation not seen since the Great Society or perhaps the New Deal.

This could be avoided, but it won't be as Cheney's warnings are unlikely to be heeded.

"Bidenomics" and the return of the Great Society. . . and why that isn't good.

Lyndon Johnson in 1915.

I'm linking this in here not because I agree with the article, but because I don't.

How Bidenomics Unites America: A quarter century ago, I and other members of Bill Clinton’s cabinet urged him to reject the Republican’s proposal to end welfare. It was too punitive, we said, subjecting poor Americans to deep and...

As can be seen, Robert Reich, an economist who was in the Clinton Administration, asserts by way of his caption in this piece that "Bidenomics" "unites America".

It'll unite it, alright.  In bankruptcy, dependency and inflation.

Biden's COVID relief bill has been rightly criticized as the enactment of a set of liberal economic wish lists.  It's level of expense, as noted in our last Zeitgeist issue, is beyond that of the last several wars fought by the U.S. combined and, amazingly exceeds the amount spent in Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.  It's as if Lyndon Johnson got every Great Society wish he ever had, and more so.

Billed as necessary relief to the economy during the pandemic, the bill ignores the fact that the American economy was actually little impacted by the pandemic in a universal way.  It was impacted, but only in selective "service" industries.  If you owned an airline, for example, you were hurt.  If you owned a trucking company or a railroad, you weren't.  If you were employed in IT, you were probably not hurt.  If you worked in a restaurant, you likely were. Indeed, almost 100% of unemployment in the pandemic has been in the service industry.

This doesn't mean that we should simply forget people, or industries, in the hurt category, but what it does mean is that spending cash economy wide with wild abandon doesn't send the money where it's needed.  It sends it into an economy that's otherwise doing pretty well, which will superheat it.

Indeed, we're repeating the errors of the late 1960s in all sorts of ways, that being one.  In the 1960s  the US superheated the economy with the combined Great Society and Vietnam War, an expense level which likely didn't match anywhere near what we're currently spending.  We paid for that by inflating our way out of it, robbing the incomes of average Americans and depleting their savings by directly reducing their value.  Some maintain that the high inflation rates of the late 1960s, which got out of control in the 1970s, were brought about intentionally as the inflation reduced the value of loans the government took out to pay for the era's massive military and social budgets.  Nearly any economist who has looked at it has concluded the dual effort of trying to send Ho Chi Minh out of South Vietnam and poverty out of the United States was an economic strain that the US simply couldn't bear.

The dual expenses went on into the late 1970s when Ronald Reagan's presidency began to address them. The defense budget remained high, but Reagan campaigned against the Great Society, which had become unpopular with Middle Class Americans.  The American welfare state came to an end, however, during Clinton.

Now its back, thanks in no small part to Donald Trump and the last four years.

Dating back to Reagan, but not really before then, the GOP was associated with "fiscal conservatism".  Reagan was, of course, also a social conservative, but it's really the Reagan era in which both of these things united in Buckleyite conservatism.  Richard Nixon, for example, was pretty content with big spending on the Vietnam War and social programs as well.  

Reagan has been lauded over the past forty years as a great man, but he was hated in his own era and the latent anger at him really comes through in Reich's post.  Liberals of the 1960s rejoiced in Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program, which did indeed have aspects of merit to it, but which also had elements of real social destruction threaded into its experimentation that the nation has never been able to recover from or ween itself off of.  In some ways, many of the urban social ills afflicting the nation today and particularly afflicting some minority populations can be laid at Lyndon Johnson's posthumous doorstep, even though he very deeply desired to help those populations.

Now, as Reich notes, Reagan is gone, swept out the door by a petulant self loving Donald Trump who preferred to wipe out the GOP's chances of retaining the Senate rather than see himself go down in inevitable defeat.  The only stolen election in 2020 was the one that Trump stole from the GOP in 2021.   Georgia would have remained Republican but for Trump.

Not that Trumpism didn't have a massive, ironic, impact on the GOP over the last four years, although the seeds of that were sewn back as early as 2016.  Whatever else the conservative Reagan GOP may have stood for, it really wasn't a party of the common man in a populist sense.  William F. Buckley wasn't a guy you were going to invite over for a dog and a beer on the Fourth of July and he sure wasn't going to invite you over for one. . . ever.   

The economic sense of that GOP was a "rising all boats" sense of things in which if capitalist were allowed free reign the economy would do well and everyone would do well with a good economy.  By and large, while railed at against the time, that GOP was proven right overall. What it didn't worry much about, however, was the impact that exporting work overseas would have on the industrial laboring blue collar worker or the impact that a massive immigration rate would have on the same class.

The Democrats didn't take that view of the economy but they didn't worry about exporting work or immigration either.  Indeed, their view was that you could always spend your way out of these problems somehow, with money from somewhere.  

Thread through the GOP theme at the time was the belief that you ought to pay for what you agree to spend for, although the GOP was never able to really manage it. With yet another irony, the only President who did during the pre Trump era was Bill Clinton, who ran a budget surplus in at least one year. So, while hated by conservatives, Clinton was the only President since prior to the Great Depression who managed a balanced budget and who eliminated welfare.

When the populist seized the GOP and Trump agreed to fly their flag, he also abandoned any pretext towards budgetary restraint, bringing in a further irony.  Trump played off of populist desires and indeed acted on some, but certainly not all.  One thing he didn't do, however, was to worry about balanced budgets and the GOP simply quit worrying about them as well.

That Trump wouldn't worry about them is no surprise.  People liked to say that "he's a businessman" and they therefore assumed he'd run the government like a business, something that no politician has managed to do that I can recall save for António de Oliveira Salazar of Portugal, who was an economist by training, and dictator by practice, and who didn't think that his governance style would survive himself.  The departure from fiscal conservatism, however, was massively significant in that it destroyed any Republican credence to argue for it.

Of course, as noted, the Trump presidency didn't only destroy that.  In its late state Trump effectively destroyed the GOP's retention of the Senate and reduced its image in the minds of non populist voters, many of whom have now departed the party.  Right now, it's busy trying to restrict the vote in various states, a strategy that will prove disastrous.  Hoping to take back the House in 2022, my prediction is that the infusion of free money, a rebounding economy, and grasping tightly to Trump will sink those chances and the GOP tide, which was rising but for Trump, will start to recede pretty quickly.  With support for an insurrection dangling above its head, getting out any message will be difficult for an American culture that will rapidly get used to Uncle Sugar sending out cash.

And sending out cash it plans on doing.  This year some parents will receive up to $3600 per child simply because they have children.

$3600 isn't enough to live on, so comments about it being a Universal Basic Income are very much overdone.  But the direct cash payment is a disturbing concept.  There's no imposed restraint on it.  It's well demonstrated that the best indicator that a child won't grow up poor is if the child grows up in a two parent household.  That's proven.  It's also proven that the most dangerous person in a child's life is the non biologically related male who is shacking up, probably temporarily, with the mother of a child.  Tragic proof of that can be provided by a recent toddler murder in Cheyenne.  Linking a payment to marriage, preferably of the parents, or some other sort of logic social control, would make sense, but the Democrats do not believe in social controls.  Lots of the payments will go to deserving parents.  Lots of it will go to underserving parents as well and never make it to the child.  It won't lift many out of poverty and by encouraging marrying the government, in essence, it will make more poor in the end.  The trail is well blazed.

The payment, of course, is limited to just this year, but already Chuck Schumer is seeking to make it permanent, which has another element to it. An enthusiastic Democratic backer on Meet the Press repeatedly claimed that with this payment "we're just giving you back your taxes", but we aren't.  We're giving money from other people's taxes and money that we borrowed from the Chinese who just this week launched a massive cyber attack on the United States and which is preparing for war against us.  The morality of such a payment scheme is, therefore, questionable in the larger sense.

Here I do indeed depart from traditional Republican taxation views.  I'm not opposed to taxation at the higher income rates disproportionally, which of course already occurs.  I'm opposed to massive borrowing (and indeed any borrowing) to pay for the government.  All taxes, in some ways, separate people's cash from their wallets by force.  I'm not of the view that "taxation is theft", but I do think that any taxation based expenditure, which are all government expenditures , should implicitly come with the question of "would I voluntarily pay for that".  If the answer to that is yes, maybe there's a way it could in fact be voluntarily paid for, which in fact most social expenditures were at one time.

Anyhow, this gets back to the concept of Distributism, but if you are going to tax to "redistribute", you aren't going to achieve that in this fashion unless you do it at a Scandinavian level.  And if you are going to do that, you ought to spend the money in a manner which involves just handing people cash.  

Spending it on actual projects that have societal value, like nuclear power plants., electrification of railroads, building a new modern Navy, education in science and engineering, and the like would achieve something needed and valuable.  And indeed, having just passed one massive spending bill a massive infrastructure bill is just behind it.

Reich concludes his post with the following two paragraphs.

The economic lesson is that Reaganomics is officially dead. For years, conservative economists have argued that tax cuts for the rich create job-creating investments, while assistance to the poor creates dependency. Rubbish.

The first item (also a belief of liberal hero John F. Kennedy) may well have been wrong. The second, however, certainly wasn't rubbish.  Indeed, that dependency helped bring about the Trump era.  And, as for rubbish:

Bidenomics is exactly the reverse: Give cash to the bottom two-thirds and their purchasing power will drive growth for everyone. This is far more plausible. We’ll learn how much in coming months.

The bottom two thirds will soon be lower than that, unless the economy really tanks.  But what is far more likely will be that Bidenomics will tank all of the other liberal spending wishes did, just as the Vietnam War did for the Great Society. The damage will have been done by then, however, and we'll be trying to find our way out of a new inflationary cycle that will destroy the savings of the very Middle Class that, in part, Reich asserts he wishes to see helped.  Ironically, Donald Trump will share the blame with Joe Biden for that, and the GOP will be in a poor position to argue anything.

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist Part 5. Scrabble

Scrabble

Brittney Spears, now a long way from being a child being exploited for her appearance, and still subject to a guardianship run by her father, reports that sometimes its fun to make words up when playing Scrabble.

Spears has been the subject of a documentary about her plight recently, although she apparently isn't participating in it herself.  She's also the subject of a popular "Free Brittney" movement.

Spears is a study in pathos, having been really basically exploited for her appearance as a near child and then living in the wake of her prior fame.

Texan Exceptualism

Texas has its own power grid.

That's right. It's own grid.

Most of the Western United States is in one grid, and the Eastern half in another, but Texas has its own.  It goes by the name ERCOT.

This dates back to the 1930s when Texas power companies sought to evade interstate regulation.  Texas was big enough that power companies in Texas could simply operate a grid within it, although in fairness some of Texas is served by neighboring systems.  In 1970 this system became formalized.

The system has been getting a lot of attention recently due to power failures in Texas.  Last year Texas Senator Ted Cruz criticized California's policy on renewable energy but now Texas is having a major problem of its own.  People were quick to focus on the reliance in Texas on renewables, but it turns out that while there were truly failures, failures in the traditional energy sector were at a higher rate.  Wind turbines did ice up and fail to work, but then there were also failures associated with coal and nuclear power sources.

This raises a lot of questions, probably all of which will suggest areas where blame should be focused and not all of which will be correct.  One question which may come up is the desirability of having its own system in 2021.  The system also had problems in 2011, at which time it imported some power sources from Mexico, so there have been problems before.

Of course, this was an extraordinary storm, and that may mean that anything that occurred is really a bad example.  Texas is prepared for heat waves, but not freeze outs.

As posted here the other day, while the U.S. has gone to very large grids, the new energy systems might argue for small localized ones, or at least the incorporation of smaller ones into larger systems.

Laramie County Censures Cheney

And it, like the rest of the Wyoming GOP, better hope that it doesn't look foolish in the eyes of history.

Congress appears set to do a 9/11 style commission on the insurrection.  It's clear that it'll show at least as much as has already been shown, which means that the GOP will of course be free to pretend it doesn't mean anything and that it isn't happening.

By the time this is put up it will be probable that the GOP has lost 200,000 members in those state, far from all, where that can be tracked. Assuming the trend exists elsewhere, it's likely more than 300,000.  For those states where the tally has been close, this is really bad for the GOP in more ways than one.  Mitch McConnell has his eyes focused on 2022, but Trump has his focused on punishing those who opposed him. One of the sets of people punished this go around were Republicans in Georgia, resulting in the loss of their Senate seats.

If the riff in the GOP isn't healed, it may indeed turn out to be "Trump's Party" in 2022 and 2024. But that party will be smaller and therefore that development would be a gift to the Democrats. By leaning increasingly into Trump as the permanent figurehead, rather than emphasizing their issues, the Trump wing of the party is risking dragging it into irrelevance.

On censures, what does that really mean anyway?  So far Cheney has given the "M'eh" reaction and Ben Sasse treated the threat of one from Nebraska's GOP as if they were a bunch of toddlers having a tantrum.  And after all, it really doesn't do anything to the censured person.

Australia blacksout itself.

The Australian parliament passed a bill to make Google and Facebook pay for Australian journalism on its site, resulting in Facebook just blocking the stories, a move which caused some Australian government communications to cease.

Australia called Facebook's move arrogant, but the question may be levied where the arrogance was, or at least the hubris.

2020 Election Post Mortem XII: Where does that leave Wyoming?

I started this right after the election, and last typed on it, before now, on December 8.  

My how things have changed since then.

On December 8, it was easy to suppose that the Republicans would win in Georgia and we'd have divided government.  Even if we didn't, the Senate divide would be so close that it would have been unlikely, we would have supposed, that there's be any really divisive Biden agenda.

And then Donald Trump started to refuse to acknowledge defeat and to spin lies about winning . . .and things in Georgia and the nation started to look different.  So we held off, as the tide was changing

Then came January 6 and a Trump inflamed insurrection in Washington D. C..  The first real strike at the government since 1860 and the first insurrection of any kind since 1917, which came on the same day that Trump's extreme insistence that he won, or his extreme lies on the same, brought the Democrats into control of the Senate.

Things are sure different now.  Indeed, I've just posted on that:

2020 Election Post Mortem XI. The Post Insurrection Administration and Congress.

Here's what I'd last written in this thread, before all the turmoil and the insurrection:

So now that the semi delusional youthful street dancing and spontaneous celebrations are over, the dust settling, and AOC contemplating becoming a homesteader in the realization that the past election wasn't a left wing tidal wave, where does that leave Wyoming?

Wyoming, as has been noted here before, has been a Republicans state since its inception.  Only in the wake of the Johnson County War have Democrats controlled the state, and only then briefly. Still, the state once had a serious Democratic Party and it wasn't all that long ago that it had a Democratic Governor.

Starting in the 1990s, something really began to change, as we've noted before.  During the Clinton Administration, the state's Democratic Party began to die.  It was in real trouble well before Barack Obama became President, but it more or less completely collapsed during his two terms in office.  It rebounded just a bit this cycle, which may or may not mean much.

In the meantime, Wyoming has become a one party state, and that party has been the GOP.  But as with any democratic body, the formation of what George Washington termed as "factions" is inevitable, and during the last eight years the Wyoming GOP has become badly split into two factions, one the old time "mainstream" Wyoming GOP, and another an insurgent nearly alt right GOP.  That latter faction is on the rise and it gained ground in the last election, as it has the last few before it.

Now what?

Well, what we know is that the US opted to go right down the middle of the road.  If we don't have a divided government after the January runoffs, we darned near will.  All politics is local, of course, but the country seems to have moved to the right, sort of, while opting to have a slightly left brake on things.  Or it really moved slightly to the center right and just voted to hold Donald Trump in personal contempt.

What it didn't do, however, is take a giant jump to the right.

If you'd listed to the 2020 campaigns in Wyoming you'd have been justified in believing, at least occasionally, that we were preparing to take Washington D. C. in a Trump populist storm.  Cynthia Lummis campaigned her support of Trump, and against Progressives. The Democrat Progressives are now in disarray but Trump is leaving the White House.

So what does this all mean for Wyoming?

It means we probably better rethink some things.

It probably means that one of the really big issues here, gun control, is amazingly back off the table, which I wouldn't have predicted just two months ago. There's not going to be Congressional support for that, so as an issue, it's probably in the background once again.

It will mean, however, that oil, gas and coal are not going to be favored industries.

It isn't as if they actually were in Washington in the first place.  The Trump Administration did do a good job of addressing a lot of regulatory burdens 

Solid analysis, in my view, in early December.

And wrong now.

Big changes are coming, and the state's in for a gigantic shock. 

The state and its political leadership is largely unprepared to handle any of this.  On the same day that insurrectionist stormed Congress the head of Wyoming's Republican Party, which as steadfastly supported the administrations absurd and dangerous fantasy that Donald Trump would still get a second term after he'd obviously and clearly lost, was in Washington D. C. at the gathering that developed into an attempted coup or something like it.  Cynthia Lummis, the newly elected Wyoming Senator, voted, even after the attempt to force the defeated President into an illegitimate victory, to reject Pennsylvania's electoral vote on a basis that, if it had logic to it, would have made her own election invalid by implication.  On the same day the most conservative members of the Wyoming legislature were at a protest in  Cheyenne demanding that the two remaining members of the Wyoming delegation in Washington, Senator Barrasso and Congressman Cheney, be hauled in front of the legislature in order to explain their allegiance to the Constitution rather than their support for a doomed effort to subvert democracy.  

By todays' date, the new world and what means is starting to sink in.  Ted Cruz of Texas who could imagine himself as the Presidential candidate for the GOP in 2024 is defending himself against cries for his resignation and he is now likely to go down in defeat in his next Senatorial campaign to a candidate much to his left, something he only barely held off during his last election.  Cynthia Lummis is explaining away her actions on the basis that she didn't intend it to actually defeat the Pennsylvania vote.  The head of the Wyoming GOP has urged everyone to wait until the facts are all in, which they have been since the very day of the event, but he's also noting that he was back in his hotel before the insurrection commenced.  The head of the Wyoming Democratic Party has called for Lummis to resign.  Other Republicans are being quiet hoping the storm will blow over.

Democrats are not going to suddenly sweep into office in Wyoming. The party has gone much to far to the left.  There's a reason that Wyoming hasn't elected a Democrat to the Senate since the last one left in 1977.  But that doesn't mean that Wyoming Republicans should take comfort in that.  

Indeed, it may be noticed that two of Wyoming's counties have become Democratic in the last few years, those being Teton County and Albany County.  Fremont County remains a heavily Democratic County as well, a legacy of its earlier blue collar status and also due to the fact that the Wind River Indian Reservation, which contributed a candidate to the House of Representatives race this past year who took about 25% of the vote, a not unimpressive result in context. The Democratic challenger to Cynthia Lummis took about 30% of the vote, which is also impressive in context.  Republicans running form Teton County and Albany County, and perhaps Laramie County, now will face bigger challenges than they did previously.

But beyond that, much more is now going to occur.

Within the Republican Party itself in Wyoming the open spit that now exists in the party nationally had already developed by 2018. The insurrection by the Trumpist populist wing will spill back into Wyoming and quickly.  Chances are that the now minority establishment wing, in the Wyoming context, will hit back and quickly as the insurgent populists, living here in isolation, are going to choose Trump as the hill they are going to die on.

And the party itself may die.  There's a very good chance that in the next couple of weeks to the next year the national Republican Party becomes two parties.  If that occurs, it will occur in Wyoming as well.  The insurgent wing in Wyoming is very well funded, and indeed its funding explains its rise, but if that occurs, the conservative establishment party is likely to become the majority party in Wyoming and the Democratic Party will definitely revive.

Irrespective of that all of the things that the Republican Party has used in Wyoming as talking points and stalking horses are about to actually occur.

Prior to the election The Economist, the respected European center right journal that has wide intellectual circulation in the United States (since the demise of The New Republic) flat out urged for an end to coal as a fuel source.  That will now be the official policy of the United States and there will be steps taken to bring that about.  Coal leasing on Federal lands is now over, at least for four years.

Oil and gas leasing may be over, on Federal lands, as well.  Knowing that this might be coming, and throwing out a bone to part of its industry support, the Trump Administration rushed through a lease sale in Converse County that has already occurred.  However, that's now been challenged in Court.  Should the challenge prevail, that sale is likely dead if the new administration chooses to cease oil and gas leasing.

If both of these things come about, in a state that has as much public land as Wyoming does, the mineral era in Wyoming is effectively over. There will still be oil and gas exploration on private lands and on state lands, but the lands available for the extractive industries will be reduced beyond measure.

All of that sounds dire, and for Wyoming's budget, it will be.  It's possible, of course, that oil and gas leasing, and in particular exploration for gas, will continue on. But it shouldn't be presumed that it will be the same.  In part it will not be the same as the new administration, now unleashed due to the insurrection, will definitely "go green" in transportation.

This is something that is already happening and industry is well aware of it. But the state has been insistent, at the street level, that it just won't.   The common statement that "well you can't go into the hills with an electric pickup" never really was any kind of an argument in a nation where most vehicles haul kids to soccer games.  But the argument is about to simply not matter.  Sympathy for the argument wasn't supporting the industry anyhow, which in actuality gets by largely on its own.  But an administration that's actually hostile to it and which will seek to accelerate the change to a carbonless world, which the Biden Administration will do, will have a real impact on the state.

Indeed, Wyoming hasn't faced a financial disruption of this type since the Great Depression and it hasn't seen an industry disruption like this since World War Two.  We're not prepared to handle it.  The legislature has been struggling with revenue issues for several years but without much success.  There's no reason to believe that they'll be successful this year.  Next year, however, may present a new world that can't be ignored.

Additionally, much of the regional conservative and populist (and they aren't the same) projects are about to be frustrated, probably permanently.

The anti Wyomingite "take back the land" movement that's been a feature of the hard right in Wyoming is now dead at the Federal level. That movement was always a horrifically bad idea, but its over.  Indeed, the state can now expect an expanded Federal presence on the Federal domain with some land being permanently "withdrawn" from development.  There will be a renewed emphasis on the "multiple use" aspect of the Federal domain that Wyoming hasn't really seen since the 1980s.

An issue much on the mind of many Wyomingites, gun control, will actually be back for the first time since the Clinton Administration and there will be legislation without a doubt.  Conservatives and populist have long decried Democratic support for gun control but in reality the Democrats have done nothing on the topic since the 1990s and there's been less gun control in the nation since that time since at any point since the 1960s, save for some measures actually brought in under Trump.  That will now end as the insurrection has evaporated Democratic tolerance for this topic overnight.  Gun control will be back and new gun control measures will pass Congress in 2021.

The Democratic Congress will also be a boon to left wing social positions that conservatives have long held, but which they've been uneven in making progress with the public on. These issues are national issues, not unique to Wyoming, but Wyomingites are now going to have to accept a retreat on some conservative advances that have been made over the last twenty years and an acceleration of some liberal or progressive advances that have been made in the last twelve years.  Indeed, if the Democrat's have a worm in their apple, it is that they'll be tempted to push these hard and potentially provoke a conservative counter reaction by 2024.

And its 2024 that all eyes are on now.  The GOP came out of the last election nationally figuring that they might take the House in 2022 and the Presidency back in 2024.  They might do the latter, if they still exist as a party, but its far less likely.  Indeed, they'll likely lose seats in the House and Senate in 2022 as they're likely to still be in disarray at that time.

And locally, it'll be about 2022 when the results of what just occurred  last week really start to sink in here.  The Federal Government doesn't care about Wyoming's budgetary woes and it doesn't care about the economy of a state where fewer people are employed than in a mid sized Mid Western city.  They also don't care about our "lifestyle" and those who have now come into power know that politically we're irrelevant.  It's only in our own self isolation that we imagine that we matter.

And peoples that don't matter have the unfortunate task of making themselves relevant by some means or reinforcing their own irrelevancy.  

It's a new world now.  What we make of it is yet unknown.

2020 Election Post Mortem XI. The Post Insurrection Administration and Congress.

Actions and words, we're told, have consequences. And we're told that because they do.

During Trump's rise to power and during his administration his biggest ally in the press has been Fox News, which for the most part has reliably been on Trump's side.  That started to come apart after the election during which Trump's increasingly extreme efforts to deny the reality of his loss grew, but even then they still supported him when they could conscience it.

A couple of days ago a Fox commentator, Ainsley Earhardt made this observation on her show Fox & Friends:

There are 75 million people that voted for President Trump. And they are scared. They are worried about what the future of this country looks like. They are confused and heartbroken that their candidate didn't win and they don't want to be forgotten.

She was pretty rapidly shouted down in the media.

That doesn't mean that Earhardt isn't right.  Indeed, she largely is, although the 75,000,000 figure for the brokenhearted and scared isn't correct.  Donald Trump did receive 75,000,000 votes, but some of those votes were from lukewarm supporters who won't cry over his departure now.  Quite a few conservative voters felt that Trump was the only option they had, which doesn't mean that they otherwise were his fans.  Catholic and other Apostolic Christian voters often felt they had to vote for him as, ironically, his Catholic opponent seems to stand for principals that are deeply contrary to their moral beliefs, but quite a few of them otherwise found the President to be repulsive.  And Donald Trump's actions following his November defeat have turned quite a few of his former supporters definitively away from him.

That doesn't mean, however, that he doesn't have a lot of support.  The down ballot results for the GOP show that the populist wing of the Republican Party definitely had a lot of support going into the November election, although it lost some in formerly Republican Georgia as a result of Trump's behavior.  It's no doubt lost more now.

Still, Earhardt has a point.

Populist and conservative voters, and the two may overlap but are not the same, have a real reason to be scared, worried, confused and heartbroken.

And the reason for that is that Donald Trump's post election behavior has brought in a united Democratic government that's not only united by party, but united against Trumpism, and licensed for radicalism to a large degree.

In other words, since the election, Donald Trump has machinated for reasons that are difficult to discern, but which seem rooted in narcissism, to bring about the very situation which he claimed to be the one who was protecting against it.

Early after the election we did a series of "post mortems" on where it appeared things were headed, but we did note that the Georgia election would determine a lot of that.  What we didn't see was an insurrection and an administrative support for it that has caused some overseas to regard it as an attempted coup.  

And that changes everything. . . probably.

We really only have three examples of something like this, with one so old as to be probably not worth really discussing in this context. The three would be the post Revolution government of the United States, the second the post Civil War, and the third being the post Watergate.  

The post Watergate is the most analogous.

We don't remember very much of what occurred in the US after the American Congress won the war against the United Kingdom.  What we do tend to recall is the prolonged effort to work out a form of government, which was messy and which involved a lot of infighting.  We won't go into it in detail, but it's worth noting that we commonly hear about the American Revolution was that it was a "conservative revolution".

It wasn't.

The American Revolution was a radical revolution based on the concept, by its end, if the people being sovereign.  It was framed, however, by a largely common culture that had largely shared values and a preexisting governmental structure.  It's overall thesis; monarchs meant nothing and the rights of individuals as expressed through legislators was radical.  The country rejected the concept of monarchy and the rights of monarchs entirely.  It also adopted a type of nationalism that is prior sovereign had not expressed and would not for many years.  It went so far as to see the severance of the dominant church, the Church of England, which claimed apostolic succession, from its acknowledged head, an act of near schism that went along with the Revolution.

Following the Revolution the country did adopt an orderly form of democracy that we retain, with modifications, today.  But it also expelled Loyalist through community action and kept them out through legal process after the war, turning large numbers of Americans into refugees simply because they took loyalty to the legitimate government seriously.  It's not well remembered now, even though it was a dramatic hostile act at the time, and it formed the real origins of Canada, through loyalist refugee communities.

Tory Refugees by Howard Pyle for Harpers, 1901.

Following the Civil War, in contrast, the nation rejected the guidance of the Radical Republicans.  The Radical Republicans would have reformed the South by dispossessing the rebellious large property owners, vested the land in the former slaves, and would have tried significant rebels for treason.  It's often believed that President Lincoln's kindly view of his defeated countrymen kept this from happening, but I frankly doubt it.  Had Lincoln lived the shrewd lawyer and politician likely would have adopted some of the radical desired policies and indeed, the nation should have.  

Most of the Radical's policies were not, however adopted and by the 1870s, a very short time after the war, the nation was giving up on Reconstruction in general. The Compromise of 1877, which has been in the news again, was a result of that as the election of 1876, expressed its final end.  From 1865, or even earlier in some instances, the victorious Union did attempt some reforms in the South, but gaps in their enforcement caused a beaten population to revive, combined with Congress quickly readmitting the recently defeated Southern representatives to Congress.  This had resulted in a tight election in 1876 and the Southern Congressmen, writing the script for which we just witnessed again in 2021, attempted to hold up certification of the results.  

In 1876/77 the effort was much more successful than the one which was just experienced in 2021 and the Republicans compromised by promising, unofficially, to end Reconstruction and withdraw troops from the South.  During the 1865 to 1876 period real progress had actually been made on advancing the rights of blacks and poor Southerners, but it all evaporated over the coming decades and it wasn't until the 1960s that real progress would return.

There are a couple of real lessons from the post Civil War era that should be instructive here.  One is that a victorious side in a real dispute was essentially lead by those only committed in concept to a principal, that being restoration of the Union, and who were only weakly committed to the remainder of what had been fought for.  That is, while the war was over slavery, commitment to reconstruction the South was only barely there a decade after the traumatic event that brought it about.  In 1865-70 the will to really remake things was strong, but by 1871-76 that will had faded.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the failure to really overhaul the South after the Civil War is, in spite of how it might be remembered now, one of the nation's great historical failures.  From 1876 to 1900 the nation crept back into a type of virulent racism that disenfranchised blacks whose legal rights had only barely been established.  The entire civil rights movement of the 1960s would really have been completed during the Progressive Era of the early 20th Century had that not occurred, and the disastrous result of the failure to remake the nation in the late 1860s is something we are still living with today.  Indeed, had we handed the post Civil War reconstruction correctly, we might have avoided what occurred last week.

The bloody flag of treason which has spread in recent years throughout the country.

The final example we have, and the most analogous one, is the Watergate scandal.  And is lessons are the ones that should worry conservatives and populist now.

The entire Watergate break-in episode was a wholly avoidable example of stupidity by overzeals paranoids.  The nation was going to support Richard Nixon's reelection in 1972 and the Democratic Party lurching to the left in the wake of 1968 and all that had occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s was going nowhere.  But the break-in followed by Nixon's complicity in trying to cover it up brought him down and the Republicans with him.  It also swept into power Democrats who were far to the left of their predecessors.

They were there already, but they weren't in control of the overall party.  The Watergate scandal changed that.  Following Nixon's downfall Democrats swept into control of Congress, although ironically the Presidential candidate whom they chose to run in 1976, Jimmy Carter, was really a middle of the road politician.  Carter likely saved the country from going deep hard left in the 1976-1980 time frame, both by the fact that he wasn't a radical, and by the fact that he was a pretty ineffectual President.  Four years of Carter were enough to allow the Republicans to reorganize and come back with Ronald Reagan in 1980, and it also started the formation of the modern Republican Party and its bipolar personality.  Reagan was a conservative, but he stoked the flames of populism and the GOP further abandoned a long standing support of strong civil rights so that it could make headway with Southern voters who remained deeply resentful of changes brought about in their region in the 1960s and 70s.  An ineffectual management of the economy, moreover, by Nixon, Ford and Carter aided in Carter's downfall.

President Carter with Roslyn Carter and Hyman Rickover.

What that lesson tells us is that in a very brief amount of time real left wing Democrats were able to make major inroads into Government.  Some of them still remain there today.  Their period in control was actually surprisingly brief, but it was preceded by an advance in their fortunes during the 1960s and was made real by the collapse of a center right President due to scandal.  Voters were disgusted with Republicans and punished them at the ballot box in 1976.  They got over a lot of it by 1980, which is really amazing in context.

Nixon had his supporters right to the end, and even after, and even today.  But much of that support was lost pretty quickly and Gerald Ford's actions in pardoning Nixon wrecked his chances at reelection.  Democrats in Congress who were mad at what occurred lurched left.  Even during President Ford's administration he didn't attempt to stop that direction as it was unstoppable.

And that's where I suspect we are right now.

Joe Biden goes all the way back to that era, but he's really an East Cost centrist Democrat, just as Jimmy Carter was a Southern centrist Democrat.  Like Carter, however, Biden is going into office with a now invigorated Democratic left.  Right now, while he has a unified government, it's only barely so, but a lot of Republicans, just like Republicans in 1973, have become disgusted with their President.

Moreover, Donald Trump has actually managed to make Richard Nixon look good.  Nixon was paranoid but he didn't attempt to retain power and actually resigned, rather than be impeached and convicted.  He didn't have the support of his party at that time, of course, and he knew it, but Trump has rapidly lost much of his support in Congress as well and doesn't seem to acknowledge that other than to lash out at those who have left him.  Nixon's GOP, however, remained largely intact in 1976 and reorganized, with an insurgent wing that still remains, by 1980.  That new party, part establishment and part populist, just ripped apart and is only barely a single party.  There's a good chance that it will split into two.  

So, here's what I think follows.

At this point, Biden has no reason not to go as left as he wants to and there will be no real hindrance to him going as far in that direction save his own inclinations and those of Democrats who are really in tightly contested regions.  All the warnings and crises about "Socialism" and the like mean utterly nothing whatsoever right now, and they won't for the rest of the year.  Ironically, therefore, Donald Trump has brought about the very situation which he used to stoke the flames of his support.

Moreover, Biden is beholding to his party's left and has now lost the argument he had for not giving it much of what it wants.  He can't maintain that a divided government forces him to play ball with the GOP in the same way he could have before last week.  He can still make that argument, but it's much weakened as the Democrats can get their legislation through unless they themselves do not support it.

And this means that we're going to get a lot of pent up Democratic legislation. There will be new environmental regulation and it will go much further than anything prior to it. There will be gun control.  Policies favoring abortion and new categories of sexual identity are going forward.  The courts are now going to take a giant leap to the left in terms of new appointments.

The country isn't going to be completely made over, but much of it is.  And the people the country can thank or blame for that are those who stormed Congress last week.

The 25th Amendment.

You've been hearing about it, what does it say?

Well. . . :

AMENDMENT XXV   

SECTION 1

In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President.

SECTION 2

Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.

SECTION 3

Whenever the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, and until he transmits to them a written declaration to the contrary, such powers and duties shall be discharged by the Vice President as Acting President.

SECTION 4

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

There's talk of invoking the 25th Amendment.  Frankly, there's good reason to do so. The President is acting contrary to the law and appears to be unable to accept reality.  An inability to accept reality is delusional by definition.

This would assume, of course, that President Trump really believes he won the election.  If he doesn't, and he likely really doesn't, he isn't delusional, he is instead seditious.

Taking Trump at his word, however, would suggest a strong element of delusion. And a delusional person with his finger on the nuclear trigger is a danger to himself, others, and the entire world.  Given that that, the 25th could be invoked.

If invoked today, and there's discussions going on to do just that, President Trump would be immediately removed from office.

He'd no doubt right a letter than he's okay.  

Vice President Pence, who reportedly feels betrayed by Trump due to abuse he received from him yesterday, would have to write a letter back that, no Trump is not okay.

Congress would have to assemble within 48 hours to discuss it.

What would Congress do?

Well, nobody knows.  Clearly at least half of the House and cleanly half of the Senate would uphold the removal.  But upholding it would require about 25% of the Republicans to go along.

Right now, they very well might.

Of course, Congress wouldn't really have to do anything.  It has 21 days, and there aren't 21 days left in the Trump Administration.  Simply scheduling hearing, calling witnesses, and frankly under the current circumstances requiring Donald Trump to undergo a psychological IME, would take more time than that.  Chances are, quite frankly, that the hearings would simply roll through the inauguration and into an ultimate criminal charge if the President was deemed fully in control of his faculties.

There'd be more riots and insurrections.  More absurd claims that Trump won the election, and probably more state legislators making arguments better heard in Munich in 1932 than in the United States at any time in its post 1860 history.

So there's the risk. Does it do more damage, or less, and is it justified?

But here's another factor.  Just like the German army officers who in July 1944 carried out a plot against Hitler as they wanted the world to know that there were Germans who didn't agree with what was going on, the GOP might have to take this action now to save itself.  

We'll look at it further, but right now the GOP has probably less than a 50% chance of surviving the past week.  It's now two parties, one a conservative party and one an insurrectionist populist party.   That can't keep on.  The conservatives either have to bolt or dramatically act.. 

And the 25th Amendment would be a dramatic act.

2020 Election Post Mortem Part X. What do you do with an act of sedition, and who has committed it, and how can the country get over it.

The flag of treason.  It's been flying everywhere.

Sedition.

We've been seeing a lot of it, in a lot of places, and by people who should, and frankly do, know better, those people seeing the citizens of the United States as ignorant dupes.

What exactly, you may wonder, is sedition?  Well, under the current law, it is defined as follows:

18 U.S § 2384 - Seditious conspiracy

If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.

So, the elements are:

1.  Two ore more people who;

2.  Conspire to:

• overthrow; or
• put down; or
• destroy by force.

the Government of the United States; or

• to levy war against it;
• or oppose by force the the authority thereof
• or by force prevent, hinder or delay

the execution of the law; or

• by force seize, take or possess any property of the United States contrary to law.

There's no question that the Insurrection of January 6, 2021 was sedition by those who participated in it.  They are guilty of a lot of other things as well, but sedition is one of them.

But what about the political leader, the President of the United States, who urged them into the act?

Well, let's consider he not only did that, but he also made a telephone call, with his confederates, trying to pressure Georgia officials into throwing the election for him.

Sedition?

Well, I suppose it depends on what he meant.  During his impeachment trial it was maintained that things he said in his telephone call with the leader of the Ukraine could have meant more than one thing.  Perhaps that's the case here as well.  But a jury could decide either way here. . . and not just on the statements, but also by the collective acts of pressuring and then urging here and there.

And what about local leaders who backed this farce.  The GOP in more than one location, through its state organizations, has been backing the fantasy that the President won the election.  Is that sedition?  Probably not.  But its not very honorable.

But going further, what about legislators who know, or should know better, and who argue that Senators and Congressmen who are not going along with this should be brought before the state legislator to be held into account. Sedition?  No, but again, distressing.*

And this all matters enormously.

Twice in this country's history the nation has let those who committed grave offenses against the democracy of the nation get away with it; once following the Civil War when it did not try the guilty and punish them under the law, and once in the 1970s when an effort to steal an election through actual theft was covered up by the person it was intended to benefit.**  In both of those instances a national act of mercy was misbegotten and lead to further crimes and errors.  The Reagan administration barely got away with unlawful arms sales, for example.  And now Donald Trump has tried to steal an election, wrecked the conservatives party he belongs to, and put the nation in a state of insurrection.

This time, the guilty must be punished. The act is too brazen, the crime too great, and the implications too vast not to do so.  An insurrection has happened. The capitol has been vandalized for the first time since the War of 1812, when at least it was the British, not rebellious Americans, who did it.*** If we do not, we will pay for it as a nation.

So, the first thing that must be done is to try the insurrectionist.  The penalty is clear, and they should get the full measure of the law.

And those seditionist otherwise involved in this sorry scene should pay as well, including Donald Trump.  The soul of the nation depends on it, and the future of the Republican Party.  Republicans should demand it.  And immediately.

And those politicians urging fantasies upon the people, both great and small? Well, they can't be tried, but it's lawful not to seat them.  

Urging an illegal overthrowal of the elected head of state simply because you disagree with him, and deluding others into the idea that the election was tainted, is the end state of democracies.  Not addressing it puts us on the path trod by Mexico in 1910, Russia in 1917,Germany in 1932, and Italy and Spain prior to that.  The choices are stark but the lessons of the failure to act are clear.

Choices have consequences, including bad and deluded ones.  Unfortunately, they have consequences for everyone, not just the person making them.

________________________________________________________________________________

*What about sinful?  At least one of the individuals doing this is my co-religious. Telling lies can be a pretty serious sin from the Catholic prospective. A public official telling them must not only confess his sins, but arguably must rectify the misdeed to the extent he can, which would be a public recanting of his statement.

This assumes knowledge, of course.  A person can't seriously sin if they don't know what they're doing is sinful, from the Catholic prospective. But blinding yourself to the truth may be a factor, perhaps.

And what about the pulpit.  If there's a parishioner in the pews telling lies is there a pastoral duty to correct?  Maybe.

**And in this act of Richard Nixon, it might be noted, there was the irony that his campaign had no need to do this.  Therefore, just as Donald Trump has thrown his party under the bus needless, so had Richard Nixon.

***The Capitol was not even touched during the Civil War, although mostly because the rebellious Southern states didn't have the capacity to do it.

2020 General Election, Part III

 

December 14, 2020

As I noted when I posted Part II of this thread:

We'll we've never had that happen before.

November 13, 1920 cover of Judge.  I mean nothing by posting this at all, including commenting on "ads is ads" or "pigs is pigs", whatever that means.  I just like the illustration and the wry sense of getting back to normal, as if we're getting back to normal.  One thing we can't say about this year is Elections is Elections.

And by that I mean run a second "General Election" thread. Usually I run one, and then the election post mortems.  This year has been dramatically different.

Yesterday Pennsylvania and Nevada certified their elections. The day prior, Michigan did. Georgia already has. There the states that were extremely close have officially called their elections and, while some litigating goes on, it's over.

Or not.  

I went on to note how the election results are known and have been since the day after the election.  In spite of that President Trump has drug this out with a series of lawsuits and spurious claims about election fraud.

Now we have the results of the Electoral College and Biden has "officially" won, right?

Yes. . .but . . . and this year all the "buts" have freakishly come true.

Oddly enough, in the weird 19th Century way that the American Presidential election works, the results still need to get to Congress by January 3 and then Congress needs to certify them by January 6.  A mere formality, right?

Well it sure should be, but this year?

I didn't credit what I thought a wild scenario from The Atlantic that Trump would attempt to reverse the results of the election through the courts and state legislatures, but he did. That would have effectively have been a judicial and legislative coup.  The courts were dismissive of the attempt and legislatures didn't bite, but Texas did sue other states in the effort and a large number of Republican Congressmen signed on to it, perhaps knowing that it wouldn't occur.

Given all of that, however, I'm now not convinced that Trump will actually concede in any form and that there won't be a final effort on January 6 to have Congress reverse the results.  It'd be a tragic absurdity, but we're deep into a tragic absurdity right now.

And, of course, we still have the Georgia runoff yet to go.

Cont: 

Attorney General William Bar is "stepping down".

It's hard to say at this point whether late breaking developments with Barr have caused him to actually resign or whether Trump is firing him.  While it's hardly been noted, Barr wasn't a supporter of efforts to find supposed election irregularities and all but instructed his department not to make too much of the claims.  That seemed unnoted at the time but when it honestly reported that there was in fact nothing to make of the election fraud stories the rift with Trump seemed to grow irreparable.

At any rate, its hugely remarkable as Barr was a diehard Trump supporter. 

December 15, 2020

Joe Biden delivered a speech following the electoral college vote, a transcript of which can be read here.

Also yesterday the Wisconsin Supreme Court rejected the Trump post election litigation bid there.  This was again not a surprise.

Cont:  

Senators Enzi and Barasso, along with Liz Cheney, all indicated that they respect the results of the Electoral College yesterday.  They stopped short of actually stating that they agree the results are fair, which they obviously actually do, but which continues the surreal situation of obviously intelligent Republican figures in the know actually knowing what occurred, but being reluctant to state that publicly as they fear that their base has bought off on the conspiracy theories.

Be that as it may, the move is significant for at least Barasso who was supportive of the doomed legal efforts to overcome the election.  It's been clear for weeks that Cheney didn't buy off on the Trump effort and was simply choosing to be quiet.  Enzi is retiring in January so his silence wasn't too surprising and can almost be taken as the position of somebody who simply doesn't want to be bothered now that he's walking out the door.  Cynthia Loomis is apparently in Georgia for some reason and couldn't be reached.

Cont:  

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell acknowledged Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as the victors in the election and congratulated them on their victory today.

In contrast, Donald Trump issued a tweet stating that there was election fraud, which has been completely disproven.

As the gap between the administrations refusal to acknowledge reality and various Republicans coming around to acknowledging it grows wider it'll be interesting to see if this is the beginning of a Republican severance with President Trump.

December 16, 2020

Cynthia Lummis acknowledged Joe Biden's victory yesterday.

Lummis has been campaigning in Georgia for the GOP candidates in that state's runoff, although its hard to see how a freshman Senator from Wyoming would have much influence there.

Mitch McConnell has been urging Republican Senators to vote no to consider Republican House members challenges to the general election.  McConnell likely senses that the game has run on election challenges and that the mood in that part of the public that supported them is shifting away from them, and the rest of the public is becoming hardened against the efforts to the detriment of the GOP.

December 21, 2020

Sidney Powell and her client Michael Flynn visited the White House on Friday and then Powell was back in the White House over the weekend. Powell is an attorney whose positions in regard to the election were so bizarre that the Trump legal team dumped her.

Reportedly the Friday meeting became a shouting match as members of the Trump administration argued down the more extreme Powell positions.  At some point somebody even brought up the idea of declaring martial law.  Powell's statements have been so bizarre and lacking in credibility that its difficult to see why she was even allowed in the White House, and Trump confidant Chris Christie warned him not to let Michael Flynn in.  None the less she was back in over the weekend.

President Trump reduced the news stories to being "fake news" but the fact that Trump, whose legal team announced yet another doomed attempt at an appeal to the Supreme Court, would even entertain somebody like Powell at this point is damaging to his credibility.

Indeed, the Atlantic, which turned out to be on the mark in regard to its predictions that Trump would try to use the courts and state legislatures to overturn the election results, has came out with a story yesterday that was headlined "Trump is losing his mind" flatly declaring that the President is descending into a species of "madness".  Twice entertaining Powell in a three day period, whose claims about the election are not only totally discredited but completely bizarre, and the fact that she represents Flynn who has advocated for declaring martial law to "rerun" the election in states that Trump disputes, are disconcerting in the extreme.

Indeed Flynn's statements are among those that meet the definition of sedition in that he's clearly calling for the use of force against the government in order to achieve a political result.  Flynn has only recently been pardoned but something like this is of such a serious nature that at some point serious thought should be given to the legal implications of it.  Even if he is credited with having a sincere belief in the conspiracy theories that have been floated it would not amount to a defense.

The continued maintenance of such extreme theories and the fact that they continue to be entertained does credit them with Trump supporters, however, which gets back to the Atlantic's article. This sort of thing stands to do serious damage to the country.

December 30, 2020

President Trump has been lashing out at his own party as it becomes increasingly clear that the GOP, late in the day, is starting to put some distance between themselves and his efforts to maintain that he won the election.  Indeed, these efforts have been so distinct that they've resulted in a two fold reaction; 1) they simply baffle close election watchers as they're bizarre and 2) they're starting to be widely ignored.

On the latter point, sometime in the last week the President tweeted that he'd heard from a young man with military connections that recently elections in Afghanistan were more fair than those just conducted in the US, and closed his comment by calling Biden a "Fake President".  This is both absurd and shocking, but it received very little attention in the news as for the most part nearly everyone has moved on from these comments.

The fact that they're still made, however, is really hard to figure.  The election was really well conducted and a massive amount of American voters turned out.  At this point the President is really beyond just asserting his rights, but is outright lying.  Commenters on This Week were unable to really land on either, but one expressed the view that he simply didn't understand the process.

This came about as it seems that the President and his allies might believe that the Vice Presidents role in acting as the crier for the delivery of the electoral vote amounts to more than simply delivering it.  It doesn't.  None the less some Republican Congressmen have filed another doomed lawsuit, actually naming Pence as a defendant, which takes the position that he can ignore state elector certification and choose his own electors if there's any sort of a contest.  Following is the prayer for relief from the suit.

PRAYER FOR RELIEF

73. Accordingly, Plaintiffs respectfully request that this Court issue a judgment that:

A. Declares that Section 15 of the Electoral Count Act, 3 U.S.C. §§5 and 15, is unconstitutional because it violates the Twelfth Amendment on its face, Amend. XII, Constitution;

B. Declares that Section 15 of the Electoral Count Act, 3 U.S.C. §§5 and 15, is unconstitutional because it violates the Electors Clause. U.S. CONST. art. II, § 1, cl. 1;

C. Declares that Vice-President Pence, in his capacity as President of Senate and Presiding Officer of the January 6, 2021 Joint Session of Congress, is subject solely to the requirements of the Twelfth Amendment and may exercise the Case 6:20-cv-00660 Document 1 Filed 12/27/20 Page 25 of 28 PageID #: 25 26 exclusive authority and sole discretion in determining which electoral votes to count for a given State;

D. Enjoins reliance on any provisions of the Electoral Count Act that would limit Defendant’s exclusive authority and his sole discretion to determine which of two or more competing slates of electors’ votes are to be counted for President;

E. Declares that, with respect to competing slates of electors from the State of Arizona or other Contested States, or with respect to objection to any single slate of electors, the Twelfth Amendment contains the exclusive dispute resolution mechanisms, namely, that (i) Vice-President Pence determines which slate of electors’ votes shall be counted, or if none be counted, for that State and (ii) if no person has a majority, then the House of Representatives (and only the House of Representatives) shall choose the President where “the votes [in the House of Representatives] shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote,” U.S. CONST. amend. XII;

F. Declares that, also with respect to competing slates of electors, the alternative dispute resolution procedure or priority rule in 3 U.S.C. § 15, is null and void insofar as it contradicts and replaces the Twelfth Amendment rules above by with an entirely different procedure in which the House and Senate each separately “decide” which slate is to be counted, and in the event of a disagreement, then only “the votes of the electors whose appointment shall have been certified by the executive of the State … shall be counted,” 3 U.S.C. § 15; Case 6:20-cv-00660 Document 1 Filed 12/27/20 Page 26 of 28 PageID #: 26 27

G. Enjoins the Defendant from executing his duties on January 6th during the Joint Session of Congress in any manner that is insistent with the declaratory relief set forth herein, and 

H. Issue any other declaratory judgments or findings or injunctions necessary to support or effectuate the foregoing declaratory judgment.

74. Plaintiffs have concurrently submitted a motion for a speedy summary proceeding under FRCP Rule 57 to grant the relief requested herein as soon as practicable, and for emergency injunctive relief under FRCP Rule 65 thereof consistent with the declaratory judgment requested herein on that same date.

To put it more politely than one disgruntled Republican I know defined it, a lawyer filing this is really risking sanctions and I'll be somewhat surprised if they don't result from this.

Stuff like this really needs to stop.  It's discrediting the nation and the people who bring the suits and its completely wiping out any legacy Trump may have had, and he did in fact have one.  Much like Watergate has come to completely define Richard Nixon, the denial of election reality is going to completely define Donald Trump.  And its really hurting the nation at this point.

Beyond that, and this is now starting to happen, it's so odd that some people are questioning Trump's grasp on reality.  The early best theory was that these actions were occurring for strategic reasons and he was simply finding a way to weld the base to himself.  That is probably correct but if its beginning at this point to really fail.

Lots of Republicans are severing themselves from Trump at this point.  His actions in regard to COVID emergency relief funds, no matter what you think of them, is further damaging this as he's now pitted directly against Mitch McConnell, whom he's lashing out at, and he's sabotaging the chances of  the two Republican candidates for the Senate in Georgia who are on record supporting them.  Indeed, while polls have proven particularly unreliable this year, one GOP candidate who had a lead going into next week's race is now neck and neck with the well spoken Democrat.  These races were always extremely tight but early election pundits figured the GOP would win them. There's real doubt now, which perhaps there always should have been as Georgia added 20,000 potential voters between November and next week.  Trump's lashing out at his own party, however, is creating really trouble for the GOP's chances.

Again, on This Week the theory was that this was being done on purpose by an angry President, and nobody, including the Republican Chris Christie, denied that.  Indeed, Christie, a real Trump loyalist, is now making clear signals that the post January GOP really doesn't have a place for Trump. The fact that he's now acting against McConnell suggests that things really are severing, and McConnell has a record as a survivor.

December 31, 2020

2,560,000 votes have already been cast in the Georgia runoff.

As a reminder, the Democrats currently hold 46 seats, the Republicans 50, and there are two independents who caucus with the Democrats.  Two seats in Georgia are up in the election.

The House ended up with 222 Democrats and 211 Republicans.

January 2, 2021

President Trump declared the Georgia runoffs illegal and asserted that "we", by which he presumably means he, won the election there "big".  This is simply false.   By all measures the vote in Georgia was extremely tight and Joe Biden won.

Assertions of this type are now being widely regarded as becoming hugely problematic for the Republican candidates in Georgia who are regarded as being put in the place of siding with the President on demonstrably false claims or facing his ire.

Cont:

Wyoming's Cynthia Lummis is one of the dozen or so Republican Senators who have announced that they're going to vote for a debate of certain state electors and demand an audit of the votes for the same states, an effort that's doomed.  Indeed those backing the effort know its doomed so the effort is for posturing reasons.

Those already in the Senate can take this position with no immediate risks, but those coming in, like Lummis, are taking a risk in that they're bucking Mitch McConnell, who is rapidly becoming a more significant GOP figure than President Trump and who definitely is in the Senate.  In short order there's a good chance that this will play itself out in terms of committee assignments with those incurring McConnell's' ire finding less than plumb assignments, assuming that the GOP retains the Senate.  If they don't, this is almost certain to occur.

All of this is being done for strategic purposes, of course, but is really feeding into a belief in some quarters that the election was stolen.  If this strategy doesn't bear fruit by 2022 it may well haunt the GOP significantly, perhaps fatally.  There's already a strong suggestion it may have swung Georgia's voters to the Democrats in which case the Democrats will take the Senate..  The opposing party usually gains mid term, of course, but these are odd times and this is pretty risky strategy.

January 4, 2021

An election that seeming couldn't get any odder, keeps getting odder.

A bipartisan coalition of ten U.S. Senators issued a letter condemning the effort by a dozen Senators, including Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis, to join Republican Congressmen in questioning the certification of certain electoral votes and submit them to a commission.  Wyoming's Elizabeth Cheney warned that the effort risked setting "an especially dangerous precedent"

In the meantime, President Trump telephoned Georgia officials including Georgia Secretary of State George Raffensperger and pressured them to "find" sufficient votes to give him the state's electoral votes.  It should be noted that even if that occurred, Trump would still lose the election.  Raffensperger has defended his office's work and after the news broke he specifically replied to a Tweet from President Trump denying that his office had done its work improperly and vaguely hinting that there's more to reveal about Trump's effort with "Respectfully President Trump, what your saying is not true. The truth will come out."

Georgia Election Board members have now called for an investigation into the call, which may have criminal implications.  Georgia Senator Perdue, who is in a tight runoff election that goes to the polls tomorrow, indicated that he was "shocked" by the call and termed the efforts by eleven Republicans to challenge the electoral votes "disgusting".  This may indicate that Trump's actions, which have been hurting the two Georgia Republican candidates, may have reached the point where those Republicans and Republicans in general now will feel free to break from the departing President.  At least one other Trump loyalist in the Senate has publicly disavowed the effort.

CNN has a complete transcript of the rambling hour long telephone call on its website.

Chuck Todd managed to end up in the headlines due to Meet The Press.  It's a well known rule of sorts in journalism that the journalist should never become the headlines, although there are exceptions.  Todd was outright confrontational and dismissive of his guest Senator Ron Johnson, terming him an "arsonist" for his role in creating a controversy that he now will be voting to investigate, but Johnson was unable to defend himself and came across as rather dim.  Johnson tried to divert attention to hearings he had on why doctors weren't given greater leeway with alternative treatments early in the pandemic but the effort was anemic at best.  The same episode featured an portion on the QAnon conspiracy theorists which was well done.

As noted, Georgia goes into its runoff tomorrow. The events of the past 24 hours have been dramatic, and are likely to have long lasting impact. What that is right now isn't really known and Trump's followers have been so loyal to him that perhaps it will have no impact.  It will have an impact on GOP fence sitters however and it opens the door, possibly, to criminal prosecution of Trump after he's left office, something that Democrats on the left will likely assert should be done.  Overall, the contents of the call are shocking and show and reveal a clearly improper effort to pressure Georgia's officials and a President who is either completely comfortable with lying or who is believing fantasies regarding the election himself.  At least to the extent that they're on the call, it also shows that some of his staff are willing to be complicit in asserting stories that are false in this effort.

The long term implications for the GOP, as noted, are vast.  Right now there's a fairly good chance that the party will split into two parties and one or both of them will die, leaving a gap until a new conservative party emerges.  That's only one possibility of course but the GOP won't continue on this way and a struggle for its future has really commenced.  The irony is that the GOP had done well down ballot this year and now the defeated President is wrecking his party in real terms.

In the House, Nancy Pelosi secured another term as Speaker, but only barely.  Part of that is simply, and now ironically, because the GOP did well in the down ballot elections and picked up seats in the House.

Cont:

The Lincoln Project, the Republican group opposed to Donald Trump, has taken the interesting approach of identifying large donors to the eleven Republican Senators who are going to oppose accepting the electoral votes and are urging Americans to reconsider their patronage of those entities.  Picking up on the idea, the New York Times sought their comments.  One of those entities, the ExxonMobilPac, was a donor to the Lummis campaign in the amount of $10,000 (not a giant sum in context) and responded to the NYT by congratulating Joe Biden on his victory.  Another, the US Chamber of Commerce, didn't respond to the Times but had earlier congratulated Joe Biden.

This is an interesting approach as embarrassing donors serves to dry up donations in some circumstances, which is a limiting factor with politicians.  

Dick Cheney, father if Congressman Cheney and former Secretary of Defense organized a collection of former Secretaries of Defense who have called for the Republican effort to end.

Trump allies Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham have denounced the Republican Senators efforts to refuse to certify the election.

This is particularly interesting in that both individuals are Trump stalwarts who are abandoning ship.  Graham in particular has been a Trump loyalist even after the election.  If Graham is abandoning the effort its a pretty clear sign that the Republican Party is now breaking away from Trump.

January 5, 2020

Over 170 business leaders issued a leader urging President Trump to accept the election results.

The Mayor of Washington D.C. has activated the city's National Guard units in advance of pro Trump protests scheduled this week.

Two US. Attorneys appointed by Trump have resigned this week.

Georgia election officials were very vocal yesterday, even as Trump was in their state, in their defense of their state's election process.  One official compared what is going on to the movie Groundhog Day.

Kelly Loeffler, an incumbent Georgia Senator filling out a term through an appointment pledged to support the effort of eleven Republican Senators lead by Ted Cruz to challenge the election results. This effort is known to be doomed and is splitting the GOP.  Loeffler has been falling in the polls and this step, which is the polar opposite of the position taken by Senator Perdue of Georgia, is presumably calculated to appeal to hard line Trump supporters, which would have supported her anyway.

January 6, 2021

Raphael Warnock, a Baptist minister in Atlanta, unseated incumbent, but appointed, Kelly Loeffler, putting the Democrats one seat closer to controlling the Senate by the thinnest of margins.  While this was with 98% of the vote in, it was beyond the margin needed for a recall and the net result is that Loeffler lost.

Her loss may be directly attributable to President Trump.  During the runoff campaign Loeffler went from having a margin over Warnock to behind n the polls as Trump continued, and continues, to maintain he won an election he clearly lost.  In the final days of the campaign he pressured, unsuccessfully, Georgia election officials to "find" votes, which they resisted, and then the spectacle of a Ted Cruz lead effort to challenge the electoral vote in the Senate was endorsed by Loeffler while condemned by fellow candidate Perdue.  All  in all, Loeffler generally presented poorly in the election, appearing baffled and lost, while Warnock didn't.  In the end, Trump's machinations and her miscalculation drug her under in the polls.

As this race was to fill the remainder of a term, Warnock will have to run again in two years, making 2022's mid terms all the more dramatic as a result.  While we'll post more on this later, this makes it clear that the GOP needs to figure out how to handle the growing division in its ranks by that time.

Senator David Perdue fell behind candidate Jon Ossoff but the race is too close to call.  Having said that, it now appears likely that Perdue will fall as well.

If this is the case, the Senate will go to the Democrats, but only because it will be, for the time being, evenly split 50/50.  This assumes no Republican defections to independent, which right now is not a safe assumption.  While we'll also deal with this later, this also means that Kamala Harris will be the tie vote.

Prior Threads:

The 2020 General Election

2020 Election Post Mortem I: The Conspiracy theorists.

2020 Election Post Mortem II. A vote for the center

2020 Election Post Mortem III. Democratic infighting

2020 Election Post Mortem IV: A Non Story? Kamala Harris and "firsts".

2020 Election Post Mortem V. Conservatives down ballot, Marching through Georgia, and what it means.

Access to Courts and Contempt of the Law

2020 Election Post Mortem VI. Looking at the Democrats. . . isn't it time that Pelosi and Schumer pack their bags?

2020 Election Post Mortem VII. Joe Biden and the "Catholic vote".

2020 Election Post Mortem VIII. What in the world is Donald Trump doing?

Sowing the wind.

Archbishop Chaput says what should have been said long ago. Scandal.