When the members of the Electoral College met on Monday in their respective state capitals to cast their votes for president and vice president, the only people who could be present and vote were the slates of electors for the candidate who got the most votes in their states.
Trump and his allies have proposed one hare-brained scheme after another to try and stop this and one of their fanciful scenarios was to have the Trump slate show up in the states that he lost and claim that they are the ones who should be allowed to vote. The ‘brains’ behind this crackpot scheme is Trump aide Stephen Miller.
White House senior adviser Stephen Miller announced on Fox News Monday morning that pro-Trump electors were meeting in five states Biden won to declare themselves the rightful electors, an attempt to give Congress a chance to overturn Biden’s win when it meets on Jan. 6 to ratify the results.
…It seems that Miller wasn’t making this up: GOP Michigan state Rep. Gary Eisen told a local radio show that pro-Trump electors planned to meet on Monday in a “Hail Mary” effort to try to certify themselves as the proper electors from the state.
Sure enough, these dead-enders showed up in Michigan but the state capitol building was shut on Monday because of threats and only the legitimate electors were allowed in. These were members of the Democratic slate, of course. But the slate of Republicans turned up anyway and tried to persuade the security guard at the door to let them in. One of them was a lawyer who tried to snow the guard with legalese but the guard was polite but firm in rebuffing him and the others.
The spectacle was both amusing and pathetic.
See this related Jen Sorensen cartoon about the ‘new’ America that these people think they live in.
I really don’t see the problem here.
They already live in an alternative reality with their own alternative facts.
So, nothing stops them from holding an alternative Electoral College with alternative votes.
They then elect an alternative president.
He lives in an alternative White House and rules with an alternative legislature.
It’s alternative everything all the way down.
As long as they don’t try to pay their alternative taxes with alternative money, it all works out.
If we imagine a historical attitude, in 1776, the British would have said all the founding fathers of America were traitors, and would have sentenced them to be hung by the neck until dead. Modern pundits would have said that a reasonable compromise would be that all the founders, including our first four presidents, should have only been hung by the neck until half-dead.
Likewise, every election and every sporting event since then could have been assessed by the pundits as being impossible to say who won, if anyone. Imagine 200 years with no election results and no sports results. Some say it’s not cricket.
I guess we’ll have to leave it there …
So calm yet so damn deluded. Don’t they understand they are useful idiots for some very, very nasty people (Trump, Mueller, Ghouliani).
bmiller, perhaps they do. It certainly seemed performative.