Donald Trump knows he lost, but he’s determined to be the most deranged suckbaby loser about it. All of the stupid lawsuits have faded away. Rudy Giuliani is rage-farting in peace. And it looked like Trump was probably putting all of his last-minute ratf–king hopes onto the tender shoulders of Mother’s Husband. Mike Pence is president of the Senate, and he has to be in the Senate on January 6th to certify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. There was some kind of Nazi plan afoot to get Pence to refuse to certify and somehow people wouldn’t notice and Trump would just stay on as president. Apparently, Mother’s Husband isn’t playing that game??
Lawyers for Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) and Arizona’s 11 Republican electors revealed Tuesday that Vice President Mike Pence declined to sign onto their plan to upend Congress’ certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. It’s the first indication that Pence is resisting some of the most extreme calls to reverse the presidential election results, thus relying on his role as the presiding officer on Jan. 6, when Congress meets to finalize Biden’s win.
Gohmert and the Arizona electors sued Pence this week to throw out the procedures that Congress has relied upon since 1889 to count electoral votes. Instead, he said, Pence has the unilateral authority to determine which electors should be voted upon by Congress — raising the prospect that Pence would simply override the choices made by voters in states like Arizona and Pennsylvania that Biden won, to introduce President Donald Trump’s electors instead. But in a motion to expedite proceedings, Gohmert and the electors revealed that their lawyers had reached out to Pence’s counsel in the Office of the Vice President to attempt to reach agreement before going to court.
“In the teleconference, Plaintiffs’ counsel made a meaningful attempt to resolve the underlying legal issues by agreement, including advising the Vice President’s counsel that Plaintiffs intended to seek immediate injunctive relief in the event the parties did not agree,” according to Gohmert’s filing. “Those discussions were not successful in reaching an agreement and this lawsuit was filed.”
On Tuesday evening, U.S. District Court Judge Jeremy Kernodle of the Eastern District of Texas agreed to partially grant the request for an expedited schedule, calling for Pence to issue a response to the lawsuit by Dec. 31 at 5 p.m. and for Gohmert to issue a reply to Pence by Jan. 1 at 9 a.m. Kernodle did not agree to hold a hearing though and said none would be scheduled “absent further notice from the Court.” Kernodle also ordered Gohmert and his fellow plaintiffs to immediately send a copy of the order to an attorney for Pence, the Department of Justice, and the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas.
Yeah… again, I realize how close we came to Donald Trump stealing the election and declaring himself emperor-king of MAGAmerica. Like, we came CRAZY close to that happening. But I feel like even Mike F–king Pence knows the jig is up, and I also think that Louie Gohmert and his batsh-t cohorts never really had a plan that made any sense. Throughout the past five years or so, I’ve come to realize that the only “both sides” statement I agree with is that both sides need to take some really basic constitutional law and American civics classes. There are too many people on both sides who fundamentally refuse to understand how government works, and there’s this magical thinking that happens, like this situation – Gohmert clearly believes Pence can act like King of the Senate and just suddenly introduce MAGA electors and somehow hijack everything with a wave of a magic wand. That’s not how any of this f–king works.
Photos courtesy of Getty.
The Fly should get some kind of award
I love this comment.
I will NEVER tire of the fly photo! lol
The fly is Mother making sure he stays on point. She liberated Jeff Goldblum’s fly transformation gizmo for just this purpose.
NPR had an interview with an author a while back that told a story of how randomly Trump chose Pence as his running mate. It had something to do with an unexpected prolonged stopover in Indianapolis or something like that. Anyway, when Pence accepted Trumps offer, Mother was FURIOUS. Evidently, she wanted him to run for President and not be second fiddle to an idiot like Trump. Anything Pence does from now on is with an eye to the next election. Mother will not be disobeyed a second time.
Manafort pushed Trump into selecting Pence and the stopover in Indiana was not unplanned. The very next day after agreeing, Trump was asking if he could reverse the decision (he didn’t really like Pence) but was told no backsies.
Ohio Republican governor Kasich (who was in the 2016 Republican primary for the POTUS nomination, then spoke at the Democratic convention in 2020 and promoted Biden to get rid of the Trumpster) was asked to be Trump’s VP running mate prior to this. He was promised that he would be in charge of everything, foreign and domestic. Trump apparently planned to just go around Making America Great Again somehow. He declined the kind offer….
Pence, on the other hand, didn’t have much going on. He caused so much damage in Indiana that Republicans in 2016 pretended they had no connection with Pence, who was Governor at the time. I couldn’t find any mention of him in our current Republican governor’s campaign material in 2016.
Pence wants to be President some day and signing off on Cheetos craziness won’t let that happen. I dislike Pence and everything he stands for but at he at least, at the bare minimum, respects the process and the checks and balances of government.
Speaking of which, seeing how this administration abused the fuck out of the system, I wonder if the next administration and Congress will make some adjustments. Because it looks like a lot of rules weren’t iron clad and basically assumed that whoever was in power would be honorable enough to respect the process. It would seem like the founding fathers never anticipated a psychopath like T-Bag ever becoming president.
I think this showshow the US, and any demcracy really, should have a lookout for the weaknesses in the system.
Any country, which has a democracy, should be aware of flaws in its system.
The weakness in any democracy is capitalism…. Clearly this election has shown us the true elite, the true swamp – ie: republicans and their lobbyists, would prefer we peasants go back to being merely serfs in a feudalist system, in which we serve the lords of the manor and their interests.
It amazes me that he thinks people would actually vote for him for President. No one has paid him any attention for the last four years, including the MAGA crazies. They worship Donald, not this cardboard cutout of a person.
Any place reform with how it works needs a functioning Congress. Moscow Turtle already said he’ll table anything when Biden comes aboard. That’s why Georgia needs to flip.
I want to know who gave Moscow Turtle all that power. There’s no such thing as a senate maj leader in the Constitution.
The Congressional Republicans give Moscow Mitch that power. There are ways to force votes over Moscow Mitch’s objections, but they just won’t do it. They also keep him in power as Majority Leader. He has to be elected by Republicans in the Senate, just as the House Speaker has to be elected by the majority Party members in the House.
If you’re into praying, pray that people in Georgia who have had enough of the Republican blockade vote in droves for the two Democratic candidates in the runoff election for Senate. Both Republicans have dubious things by in their background, including oddities about selling and buying relevant stocks just after they received confidential briefings on how bad COVID was (while still saying publicly that there was nothing to worry about). But both Democrats seem to be decent. A win for both is our only chance now to have a real counterweight to the insane behavior of the Senate Republicans.
People have to realize that Biden will not be able to do a lot if Moscow Mitch is in charge. His power must be broken. He openly intends to block every Democratic proposal from coming to a vote and will wreak his usual havoc by delaying and refusing to hold confirmation hearings for Biden’s nominees.
This is also the guy who tried to block votes on the first stimulus checks and when that wasn’t feasible, he insisted it would be the last one. The Democrats have been suggesting $2000 per month for a long time, to keep the economy going and to prevent the massive debt and evictions we face. This is what Canada did. That’s where Trump got the $2000 idea to use as a monkey wrench to toss into the stimulus package negotiated by his own co-conspirators, probably as a distraction from bad reaction to his pardons of his other co-conspirators and the Blackwater murderers of children and other unarmed civilians in a massacre. (Blackwater is a bunch of thugs organized and directed by his Education Secretary’s brother, Eric Prince). The House Democrats put $1200 into the bill because they thought they couldn’t get more, not because they were happy with it. The Senate slashed that to $600.
I think the Republicans are all either incredibly out of touch with the financial chaos caused by the pandemic or are being blackmailed. Refusing to push for a good stimulus check before the election seemed like political suicide. Trump tried to extort voters by saying he would consider the stimulus after he won the election. Not “after the election” but after he WON the election. Then he ignored everything but trying to claim he actually won the election when he obviously didn’t, truly giving new meaning to the term “lame duck”. He’s pretty much a lame duck using an endless supply of flame throwers as he waddles around.
It’s not rocket science. If you need people to stay home during a public health crisis, use that tax money usually wasted on war to keep people afloat and the economy from crashing. No money in the pockets and uncertainty about whatever job you still might have means greatly reduced spending, which means local businesses go under and people in all businesses lose jobs. The US government routinely goes into big debt on pointless wars, debt that takes generations to pay off. Why not do this for a war on a highly contagious virus that has already killed more than 333,000,000 Americans and is still surging to take out more of us?
I’ve always said I didn’t think Pence would personally involve himself in letting democracy die. He’s definitely lawful evil. And that’s probably the nicest thing I’ve ever said about him
Yes. I’m sure he has inwardly cringed a thousand times over what comes out of Trump’s mouth. He has had an eye toward the presidency and was playing the long game.
Lawful evil! So accurate. And Trump is def Chaotic Evil. Definitely.
Yes! Something that became painfully clear during this entire process is how little trump understood about our election process. That is Government 101. I really wonder how many politicians become elected without understanding how any of this stuff actually works. And that’s both sides. Be careful who you elect, make sure it’s someone that seems to at least know what the Constitution is. That’d be nice.
I was outraged when Tommy Tuberville was elected for that reason! My husband asked why I was so mad at it, and I said there’s no way he knows anything about governing and writing laws! Most senators were lawyers or poly-sci majors and this guys expertise is physical education & college football (and corrupt college football at that!). He’s a disgrace to congress as far as I am concerned. And of course first thing he does is start saying the election was stolen from Trump, proving me correct.
A shocking percentage of elected officials have no proper underpinnings in how government works. In my state, practically half the legislature is made up of evangelical preachers who would be super happy to just repeal all prior laws and enact the books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus to replace them and designate Jesus governor for a term of all eternity.
Gohmert was a former judge and atty and yet he still pulled this crap. Was he a cafeteria atty? Nevermind tuberville what about that qanon dummy who got elected?
Which one? There were at least 2 Qanons who got elected to the House.
I wonder if the judge wants Gohmert to formalize his request in writing and get it to the judge and the US Attorney is so that Gohmert’s intentions to subvert the election and disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters can get him arrested, tried, and imprisoned for it later. One can only hope.
I really hope this prediction comes true. I hadn’t thought of it like that before.
Pence wants to be president, but it’s never gonna happen. He’s ruined himself.
Mike Pence wants to run for president someday, and he knows that attempting to overthrow the legitimate president-elect would probably kill that ambition.
So my question is, help me out people who know the fine details, what would happen if Pence agrees?
I have no idea. But my intuition says it wouldn’t work, the coup would still be thwarted. Pence must know this. If he thought it would work, he would do it.
The high powered lawyers who specialize in elections, like Bob Bauer and Marc Elias, say it does not work that way. Marc Elias started the Democracy Docket as an ongoing project to keep democracy alive and I recommend it for everyone. His team has fought and won more than 100 cases this election cycle, starting with repeals of disenfranchising efforts many months ago. Marc also has an adorable dog Bode who sometimes ninjas his way into appearances.
I’m truly scared s**tless. What if DT is able to succeed in stealing the election again?
Politico has an article about Pence’s response – he says that Gohmert’s beef must be with Congress and not with Pence as VP: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/31/pence-overturn-election-results-lawsuit-453207
My reading of the situation is that even if Pence were to try and go along with Gohmert and other turncoats, there are a range of legal arguments and constitutional protections Democrats could turn to, in order to stomp down a last ditch desperate attempt like the one they’re proposing.
Did we ever come that close to Trump stealing the election, though? From what I can tell, it’s just been noise from conspiracy theorists who don’t understand the Constitution and Cult 45 members on Twitter, and crazy lawyers who should be disbarred. I’m not sure at any point we really have been close to the election really being overthrown.
Or am I wrong here?
In my non legal opinion, even if this judge did agree to this hairbrained scheme, the other side would immediately sue and it would be tied up in court. By the time this worked its way through the courts, it would be past January 20 at noon and Pelosi would be the president. None of the lower courts, even with judges appointed by Trump have given any indication they are willing to disenfranchise the American people.
My own feeling is that domestic meddling with machine votes (switching votes from the Dem to the Repub) we have seen signs of since the 2004 election (it was especially a mess in Ohio in 2004, I think that was a trial run) was dampened by the efforts of Chris Krebs and his team to block Russian interference. I don’t know if they were entirely successful, but I haven’t been hearing reports of D to R vote switching seen on screen by voters (timing glitch, I suspect) since 2018, when votes for a straight Democratic ticket were mysteriously switched from the Democrat O’Rourke to the Republican Ted Cruz in Texas just for the Senate race. That was detected because some people actually checked their ballot before confirming it.
Plus the doubling of mail-in voting must have thrown off calculations for any domestic meddlers, if they were still able to get into the system. Vote shifting has to be done to only a small degree which won’t be obvious; in races that will be close enough for it to be beneficial while not being suspicious. This really was likely the most accurate counting of votes in recent US history.
What a mess. GOP have shown their a$$ time and time again over the past 4 years. Why do people still vote for them is beyond me.
Okay I need to point out that “the 11 Arizona Electors” are NOT the official ones. These are the false ones lead by our crackpot GOP Chairwoman.
The actual electors had to go to an undisclosed location with the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, and the Governor, signed off and certified the elector votes.