He had abandoned all pretensions of protesting the election results. He just wanted the whole election itself discarded and the office of the president awarded to him by judicial decree.
The US Supreme Court refused. Now he wants individual state legislatures to appoint electors who would vote for Trump in the electoral college--regardless of the actual election result in their states. He is fairly realistic though, he did not call for all fifty states to do it, just four: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin---battle ground states where he lost to Joe Biden. But since those states are not minded to do that, he got one state--Texas--to file suit against these four seeking to compel them to do it by mandatory injunction.
It is a laughable legal theory--one state complaining about how another state conducts its own affairs. That the Supreme Court rejected the attempt is a no-brainer.
Now true constitutionalists are worried he might try to resurrect his dead-and-embalmed "massive electoral fraud complaint" on the floor of the Electoral College. That's not possible.
The Electoral College is not an actual assembly, it's a political construct. On a common date--this time it is December 14--the electors of each state would meet in their respective state capitals to cast their votes for President. So there's not a single venue where all these electors unionwide would be present in the same room participating in one common session. There will be fifty sessions held in fifty different venues. Thus it is impossible to disrupt all fifty proceedings at the same time to derail the voting.
Except for a handful of states, the general policy is to award all the electoral votes of each state to the candidate who won the popular vote. This means the electors will be casting their votes based on the official results certified by the board of election supervisors in each state. Those results have been finalized and "locked in" last December 8--the so-called "safe harbor date." Beyond that date no more protests against those results could be instituted.
In other words, Donald Trump can no longer change the results. What he can try to do is to block the submission of those results to the electoral colleges. That was the first Supreme Court case, when a Republican lawsuit in Pennsylvania wanted to delay the certification until enough votes could be shaved off Biden's lead through multiple recounts, each recount cycle using a different Biden vote filter. Unfortunately, the "case" was a non-starter because it was aborted right at fetal stage by the US Supreme Court refusing to give it due course.
The nine justices who voted unanimously to throw out the first case did not even bother to explain. There was nothing to explain. Technically, they did not even issue a Decision--only something called a "minute resolution" which was not authored by any justice. It was a single sentence written by a Supreme Court record clerk after reading the minutes of an en banc session wherein one item in the agenda was the nine justices agreeing to toss out the case. That was recorded in the minutes of the session. So the one-page one-sentence document thwarting the case was just a reporting out of that particular agenda item.
It would have been more sporting for the Supreme Court to have, at least, said to Trump, "What part of NO don't you understand?"
Evidently, the Supreme Court must have surmised that Donald Trump's answer even to a rhetorical question like that would have been, "All of it. I don't understand ALL of it."
This is evident from after being flatly denied his ambition to have multiple-cycle recounts, Donald Trump's think-tank came up with a novel new concept: let's forget recount. Let's just pick the winner from any point along the contest where Donald Trump was still ahead in the game. So they sought to have the four states who innovated on their voting procedures to make COVID-19 wary voters avail of mailed-in ballots, in effect, WAIVE their election.
For those who are not lawyers, the best analogy is this: let's say NBA Team One beat NBA Team Two, with the final score being 120-100. But let's suppose Team One was actually trailing by ten points late in the Third Quarter and only rallied in the Fourth Quarter to win. Trump's second Supreme Court case is saying, "No, wait, let's proclaim the team that was ahead in the Third Quarter as the Champion!"
By throwing out the election results from the four battleground states because those results were heavily determined by mailed-in ballots--the fourth quarter scoring rally of Joe Biden--Trump wants to be declared winner as of election evening, when less than forty percent of the ballots cast unionwide have been canvassed.
Do you know why?
Donald Trump does. All year long poll after poll have pegged his "base" at less than forty percent of general respondentship. That's why his consistent approval rating for four years had always been below 35 percent. This means if he was winning when only less than forty percent of votes have been counted, that's the best it could ever get for him. It can never get any better from there. Stop the counting right there!
Of course, they didn't stop counting--they couldn't. So when the Biden rally came in the fourth quarter, all Donald Trump could see were torrents of Biden votes, relentlessly coming in wave after wave. He called them "dumps."
Game over? Not for Trump! After all, even if a team has won the championship, so long as they have not been handed the trophy, the confetti and colored balloons have not dropped from the ceiling, there is no champion yet. In Trump's mind, if I didn't score more points, I'll shave points from the opponent. If I can't shave points from the opponent, I'll pull the plug from the P.A. system so the results can't be announced. If I can't pull the plug from the P.A. system, I'll try to stop the awarding ceremonies. If I can't stop the awarding ceremonies, I'll tackle the guy bringing the trophy up the stage to the ground...
So now Donald Trump's coterie of walking brain donors are thinking of resurrecting his "massive electoral fraud" narrative on the floor of Congress when it meets to receive the report of votes from the electoral colleges on January 6, 2021. Again that would be futile because Congress is not an election administering body. It's not even a vote counting body. And it is not an election protest court. All the US Constitution empowers Congress to do is consolidate the reports submitted by the electoral colleges, do a simple arithmetic comparison of the electoral votes received by Donald Trump and Joe Biden and see who got more than 270.
Donald Trump vowed that he would never concede. Unfortunately, nobody cares if he concedes or not. He lost. He cannot "un-lose" by not conceding.
What is worrisome is not Donald Trump himself, but the cult of political zombies behind him--the better part of 74-million voters, although it is highly doubtful if the monolith is really that big in practical terms. The average voter gets back in his or her life the day after the election--it is a scant few who can hold on to their unrighteous indignation for longer than a few days. But even if only 35 percent of the combined popular vote were to continue to blindly follow Donald Trump, that would still be a mind-boggling number, around 54-million. That number is still more than the population of half the member states of the United Nations.
The question then becomes no longer, Can Trump hold on to his so-called "base" but rather would he be bold enough to create a "Trump country" out of it? The spectre of a post-modern secession crisis is the most peacful scenario Americans could hope for. If these 54-million Trump zombies all lived in say ten or so contiguous states, all you have is a clamor for secession. It's a geographical issue, easily solved by military versus militia channeling the historical battles between Union and Confederate soldiers during the Civil War.
The problem is, these 54 million are dispersed throughout the 50 states, no doubt more densely in some states than others. But a confrontation between elements of the dispersed 54-million and the rest of the general population would be the TRUE CIVIL WAR in the sense of civilian-versus-civilian. There would be no localized flash points, but a frightening federation-wide free-for-all which could yet be the bloodiest internal conflagration in modern political history.
And you'd never think it would happen n the United States of America. All it takes is a selfish, narcissistic, sycophant like Donald Trump who has demonstrated that he can short-circuit the normally indomitable instinct of self-preservation and lead millions of Americans literally to their deaths in COVID-19 ignorance.
If he can lead throngs of Americans to ignore mortal danger and refuse to wear a facemask--and especially be defiantly proud to do it--what can stop him from leading them to internal ideology-less revolt?
The most frightening question to ask therefore is, will enough Americans follow Donald Trump to Civil War?
My answer is YES.Ⓒ 2020 Joel R. Dizon
NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:
Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON
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