Tonight’s Civics Discussion

Posted on January 5, 2021 by Larry Franz

I wanted to understand what is supposed to happen in Washington tomorrow, when Congress is legally required to formally announce that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the election. The law that describes the proceedings is 3 U.S. Code § 15 – Counting electoral votes in Congress. It’s not easy to read, but this is what it says (with my comments, helpful or not, in italics):

Congress shall be in session on the sixth day of January succeeding every meeting of the electors.

The Senate and House of Representatives shall meet in the Hall of the House of Representatives at the hour of 1 o’clock in the afternoon on that day, and the President of the Senate shall be their presiding officer.

Two tellers shall be previously appointed on the part of the Senate and two on the part of the House of Representatives, to whom shall be handed, as they are opened by the President of the Senate [in this case, Vice President Pence], all the certificates and papers purporting to be certificates of the electoral votes [from the various states and the District of Columbia],

[these] certificates and papers shall be opened, presented, and acted upon in the alphabetical order of the States, beginning with the letter A [reminding us where the alphabet starts];

said tellers, having . . . read the same in the presence and hearing of the two Houses, shall make a list of the votes as they shall appear from the said certificates; and the votes having been ascertained and counted . . . , the result of the same shall be delivered to the President of the Senate, who shall thereupon announce the state of the vote, which announcement shall be deemed a sufficient declaration of the persons, if any, elected President and Vice President of the United States . . .

[BUT WAIT: BEFORE THE FINAL DECLARATION OF WHO WAS ELECTED]

Upon such reading of any such certificate or paper, the President of the Senate shall call for objections, if any. [So after the tellers announce the results from a given state or the District of Columbia, the Vice President will ask if there is any objection].

Every objection shall be made in writing, and shall state clearly and concisely, and without argument, the ground thereof, and shall be signed by at least one Senator and one Member of the House of Representatives before the same shall be received.

When all objections so made to any vote or paper from a State shall have been received and read, the Senate shall thereupon withdraw, and such objections shall be submitted to the Senate for its decision; and the Speaker of the House of Representatives shall, in like manner, submit such objections to the House of Representatives for its decision;

and no electoral vote or votes from any State which shall have been regularly given by electors whose appointment has been lawfully certified to . . . from which but one return has been received shall be rejected [for this election, that’s every state plus the District of Columbia],

[except that] the two Houses concurrently may reject the vote or votes when they agree that such vote or votes have not been so regularly given by electors whose appointment has been so certified.

[The law then explains in convoluted language what happens if a state submitted more than one certificate — but that has never happened]

When the two Houses have voted [on a particular objection], they shall immediately again meet, and the presiding officer shall then announce the decision of the questions submitted. No votes or papers from any other State shall be acted upon until the objections previously made to the votes or papers from any State shall have been finally disposed of.

Unquote.

Thus, after the Senate or House has rejected all of the objections, the Vice President, as stated above, reads the final numbers, declaring who was elected President and Vice President of the United States.

There may be pointless objections to the results from six states, beginning with Arizona and ending with Wisconsin, so the process that sometimes takes less than 30 minutes might not finish until Thursday. That’s if there are objections to all of those states and the Senate or House actually spend two hours discussing and voting on each objection, all of which will be defeated in both houses of Congress, even the one controlled by the odious Republican senator Mitch McConnell.

As we can see, the law requires the Vice President to open the envelopes, ask for objections and read the final result. He has no authority to do anything else. I expect he’ll say something to try to make President Nut Job happy, but perform his assigned tasks. If he grabs the certificates and runs away, or refuses to announce the final result, or announces it in Esperanto, things could get weirder than they already are.

Don’t Ever Call Them “Conservative”

Posted on January 4, 2021 by Larry Franz

It’s not a new idea, but Margaret Sullivan of The Washington Post points out that there’s nothing conservative about today’s radical right (i.e. most of the Gruesome Old Party):

You hear the word “radical” a lot these days. It’s usually aimed like a lethal weapon at Democratic office-seekers, especially those who want to unseat a Republican incumbent. Sen. Kelly Loeffler, the Georgia Republican, rarely utters her challenger’s name without branding him as “radical liberal Raphael Warnock.”

Such is the upside-down world we’ve come to inhabit. These days, the true radicals are the enablers of President Txxxx’s ongoing attempted coup: the media bloviators on Fox News, One America and Newsmax who parrot his lies about election fraud; and the members of Congress who plan to object on Wednesday to what should be a pro forma step of approving the electoral college results, so that President-elect Joe Biden can take office peacefully on Jan. 20.

But instead of being called what they are, these media and political figures get a mild label: conservative.

News outlets that traffic in conspiracy theories? They’re branded as “conservative.”

Politicians who are willing to bring down democracy to appease a cult leader? . . . Just a bloc of “conservatives.”

As the Hill put it in a typical headline Monday: “Cotton breaks with conservative colleagues who will oppose electoral vote.”

In applying this innocuous-sounding description, the reality-based media does the public a terrible disservice. Instead of calling out the truth, it normalizes; it softens the dangerous edges.

It makes it seem, well, not so bad. Conservative, after all, describes politics devoted to free enterprise and traditional ideas.

But that’s simply false. Sean Hannity is not conservative. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama are not conservative. Nor are the other 10 (at last count) senators who plan to object.

“There is nothing conservative about subverting democracy,” wrote Tim Alberta, the author and Politico correspondent. He suggests “far right” as an alternative descriptor.
Not bad. But I’d take it a step further, because it’s important to be precise. I’d call them members of the radical right.

Txxxx knows no limits as he tries to overturn the election.

My high school Latin comes in handy here: “Radical” derives from the concept of pulling something up by the roots, which seems to be exactly what these political and media types seem bent on doing to democratic norms.

The dictionary definition says radical means “advocating extreme measures to retain or restore a political state of affairs.”

Bingo.

Members of the radical right won’t like this, of course. They soak in the word “conservative” like a warm bath. Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan — extreme even among the extremists — leans heavily on the word in his official bio. . .

The language problem here points to a larger, more troubling issue: The radicalism of the right has been normalized. It’s been going on, and building, for decades. Don’t worry, this mind-set reassures, it’s all fine. There are different ways of looking at the world, liberal and conservative, and they are about equal.

That, of course, is misleading hooey.

Heather Cox Richardson, a history professor at Boston College, used a more precise phrase as she recently assessed what has transpired over many decades to culminate in today’s election denialism: This is “the final, logical step of Movement Conservatism: denying the legitimacy of anyone who does not share their ideology. This is unprecedented.” She called it “a profound attack on our democracy” and predicted that it wouldn’t succeed.

“This tent that used to be sort of ‘far-right extremists’ has gotten a lot broader,” Georgetown law professor Mary McCord, a former federal prosecutor who oversaw terrorism cases, told NPR. Now, the line between fringe extremists and mainstream Republican politics and right-leaning media is so blurred as to be almost meaningless.

Too much of the reality-based media has gone along for the ride, worried about accusations of leftist bias, wanting desperately to be seen as neutral, unwilling to be clear about how lopsided these sides are.

On Jan. 20, we can still presume, Txxxx will be gone from the White House. But his enablers and the movement that fostered him, and that he built up, will remain. That’s troubling.

We should take one small but symbolic step toward repairing the damage by using the right words to describe it. It would be a start.

Unquote.

The mayor of Washington D.C. has activated the district’s National Guard in advance of Wednesday’s pro-sedition, Txxxx-encouraged protests: “’We will not allow people to incite violence, intimidate our residents or cause destruction in our city’, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said.”

You don’t need the military to protect life and property from conservatives. You do need it for the radical right.

Now There’s a Tape, Just Like Nixon’s

Posted on January 3, 2021 by Larry Franz

The appearance today of a recording in which the president commits criminal offenses — assuredly not for the first time — moved Jennifer Rubin and Ruth Marcus of The Washington Post to both comment. Below is a mixture of their responses (along with a few italicized comments from me):

When President Txxxx allegedly tried firing special prosecutor Robert S. Mueller III, refused to respond to lawful subpoenas during the investigation into the 2016 election and committed the other acts to obstruct justice documented in the Mueller report, he arguably violated his oath, broke the law and committed impeachable conduct.

When he tried to extort [the] Ukrainian President (“I would like you to do us a favor though …”) to create dirt to use against now President-elect Joe Biden and stonewalled Congress’s demands for evidence, he again violated his oath, engaged in impeachable conduct and broke the law.

In neither case did Republicans recognize the facts before them. In neither case did they act to remove him.

[A president who] began his presidency trying to obstruct justice [is] ending it trying to obstruct democracy, and with an alarmingly large cadre of co-conspirators.

Some of this attempted obstruction is being conducted, as is so often the case with Txxxx, in plain sight; Txxxx’s anti-democratic conduct is so flagrant and so repeated that we become inured to how abnormal and unacceptable it is. Thus he has claimed massive fraud without basis, unleashed a barrage of litigation lacking the facts and the law to back him up, and riled up his believers to subscribe to the mass delusion that the election was stolen from him.

Behind the scenes, things are even worse, with the craziest of Txxxx’s crazy advisers pushing the president to pursue unimaginable possibilities such as declaring martial law or invoking the Insurrection Act to unleash the military to quell violence that he himself has sought to stir up.

That the ten living former secretaries of defense felt compelled to come together in an op-ed decrying any use of the military in an effort to prevent the peaceful transfer of power underscores the peril of the moment. These aren’t just Democratic appointees — they are conservatives such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and the two secretaries Txxxx ousted for being insufficiently compliant, James Mattis and Mark Esper.

And now . . . we have a chilling glimpse of Txxxx’s delusional private arm-twisting in his frenzy to cling to power.

The Post reports: “President Txxxx urged fellow Republican Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to ‘find’ enough votes to overturn his defeat in an extraordinary one-hour phone call Saturday that election experts said raised legal questions.” In the call, Txxxx asked Raffensperger to change the certified vote that was subject to multiple recounts: “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”

In fact he threatened him. The Post reports, “During their conversation, Txxxx issued a vague threat to both Raffensperger and Ryan Germany, the secretary of state’s general counsel, suggesting that if they don’t find that thousands of ballots in Fulton County have been illegally destroyed to block investigators — an allegation for which there is no evidence — they would be subject to criminal liability.” Txxxx, sounding like a mobster as he often does, said, “That’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer.” Nice career, there Brad. Shame if anything happened to it.

Pressuring a campaign official to change the vote is a federal offense [it’s a Georgia offense too]: “A person . . . who in any election for Federal office … knowingly and willfully deprives, defrauds, or attempts to deprive or defraud the residents of a State of a fair and impartially conducted election process …” is subject to imprisonment of up to five years.

Threatening Raffensperger with criminal consequences is also arguably extortion: “Whoever, with intent to extort from any person, firm, association, or corporation, any money or other thing of value, transmits . . . any communication containing any threat to injure the property or reputation of the addressee . . . or any threat to accuse the addressee or any other person of a crime, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.”

Georgia has counted its votes three times, once by hand, but Txxxx told Raffensperger, “There’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.” He warned that Raffensperger and his chief lawyer were running “a big risk” of criminal liability by failing to find voter fraud.

The man who sparked a special counsel investigation by urging the FBI director to “go easy” on his fired national security adviser, the man who triggered his own impeachment by soliciting a foreign leader to help him dig up dirt on Biden — this man will never learn [or change, as Rep. Adam Schiff memorably argued during the impeachment “trial” a year ago].

Really, why should he? There are never any real consequences.

Which brings us to Txxxx’s co-conspirators.

Vice President Pence . . . is constitutionally obligated to preside over [Wednesday’s] joint session of Congress to certify Biden’s electoral college victory. Pence’s chief of staff . . . issued a statement Saturday night saying that Pence “welcomes” congressional efforts “to raise objections and bring forward evidence” at the session. . . .

And the dozen or more Republican senators . . .who are turning what should be a ceremonial event into a constitutional circus. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, defending his move to object to the certification, could summon only Pennsylvania’s use of mail-in ballots when the state’s constitution “has required all votes to be cast in person, with narrowly defined exceptions.” The state legislature passed a law allowing no-excuse mail-in voting. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, without getting into the merits, threw out a challenge to the law.

“These are very serious irregularities, on a very large scale, in a presidential election,” Hawley intoned. This man calls himself a “constitutional lawyer” and a conservative? In our federal system, what happens in Pennsylvania is up to Pennsylvania. The legislature acted. The court rejected a challenge. The state certified Biden’s win. Hawley proffered not a scintilla of evidence of fraud. What is he arguing — that the votes of more than 2.5 million Pennsylvanians should now be invalidated?

Not to be outdone — or outmaneuvered in the 2024 presidential sweepstakes — Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, joined by 10 colleagues, is pressing for a commission to conduct an emergency 10-day audit of the election results, again, with no evidence to justify such a last-minute step.

Instead, Cruz, like Hawley, uses the very voter fears that Txxxx so carefully nurtured and his allies have stoked to justify the need for extraordinary intervention. Speaking to Fox News . . . , Cruz cited “unprecedented allegations of voter fraud” — allegations that emanate from Txxxx and his allies — that he said have “produced a deep, deep distrust of our democratic process across the country.” This is the arsonist calling the fire department to put out the blaze that he kindled.

“I think we in Congress have an obligation to do something about that,” Cruz lectured. “We have an obligation to protect the integrity of the democratic system.”

Oh please. No one has done more over the past months to undermine the integrity of the democratic system than Txxxx and his enablers. And if Cruz is actually worried about the integrity of the democratic system, he [should] start with the president.

There must be a response to a president who exploits his office for the purpose of overthrowing an election. The evidence is on tape. The next attorney general should move forward, if for no other reason, to deter further attempts at such reprehensible conduct. I would suggest impeachment as well, which could include a ban on holding office in the future, but we know already Republicans will defend anything Txxxx does [even if he declares himself King Donald the First and makes Ivanka his queen].

[If you choose to endure it, the Post has the audio and a transcript.]

Old Leader, New Leader, Same Country

Posted on January 3, 2021 by Larry Franz

People who know the president predicted that his aberrant psychology wouldn’t allow him to acknowledge defeat — and that he would do everything possible to protect his fragile ego. If his public actions and statements weren’t enough evidence of his diseased mind at work, we now have tape of one of his private discussions.

This afternoon, The Washington Post published an extraordinary story (probably behind a paywall) describing the president’s attempt to force the state of Georgia to declare him the winner of last month’s election:

“‘I just want to find 11,780 votes’: In extraordinary hour-long call, Txxxx pressures Georgia secretary of state to recalculate the vote in his favor”

President Txxxx urged fellow Republican Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to “find” enough votes to overturn his defeat in an extraordinary one-hour phone call Saturday that election experts said raised legal questions.

The Washington Post obtained a recording of the conversation in which Trump alternately berated Raffensperger, tried to flatter him, begged him to act and threatened him with vague criminal consequences if the secretary of state refused to pursue his false claims, at one point warning that Raffensperger was taking “a big risk.”

Throughout the call, Raffensperger and his office’s general counsel rejected Trump’s assertions, explaining that the president is relying on debunked conspiracy theories and that President-elect Joe Biden’s 11,779-vote victory in Georgia was fair and accurate.

I saw online comments to the effect that Georgia state law makes election tampering a crime punishable by up to three years in prison and that the president is guilty of extortion as well. He probably won’t be prosecuted in Georgia after he’s forced out of office in 17 days because Georgia’s governor and attorney general are Republicans. But there is now further reason to investigate and prosecute the crimes he and his administration have committed at either the state or federal level.

The Post story has a remarkable ending:

. . . [The president] continued to make his case in repetitive fashion, until finally, after roughly an hour, [Secretary of State] Raffensperger put an end to the conversation: “Thank you, President Txxxx, for your time.”

I guess that could merely be an example of Southern hospitality, or maybe Secretary of State Raffensperger said it sarcastically, but at least once I’d like to hear somebody speak to this maniac without the deference due his office.

In this case, Raffensperger might have responded with something like “Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us, Mr. President, but the God’s honest truth is that you should never have been president. After they drag you out of the White House kicking and screaming a couple weeks from now, you should seek treatment for your narcissism, your delusions, your willingness to lie about everything to everybody and your profound corruption. Psychiatrists can do wonders, although sociopaths are hard to treat. In your case, it’s still worth a try. You might be able to use an insanity defense to avoid prison.”

One other thought. Various Republican politicians have promised to play the fool for the president’s rabid supporters on Wednesday. That will somewhat delay the moment when Congress declares Biden the winner of the Electoral College. I think the only thing left for the president to do at that point is to declare a national emergency, based on the premise that the election is being stolen. Fortunately, the military has sworn to defend the Constitution, not a particular president, so I think we’ll be in safe hands. After four excruciating years, we’ll have a new leader, although we’ll still be the same screwed up country.

Small States and Minority Rule

Posted on December 14, 2020 by Larry Franz

Every four years we elect a president. Almost every four years, we discuss the Electoral College. From Jesse Wegman of The New York Times:

As the 538 members of the Electoral College gather on Monday to carry out their constitutional duty and officially elect Joe Biden as the nation’s 46th president and Kamala Harris as his vice president, we are confronted again with the jarring reminder that it could easily have gone the other way. We came within a hairbreadth of re-electing a man who finished more than seven million votes behind his opponent — and we nearly repeated the shock of 2016, when Dxxxx Txxxx took office after coming in a distant second in the balloting.

No other election in the country is run like this. But why not? That question has been nagging at me for the past few years, particularly in the weeks since Election Day, as I’ve watched with morbid fascination the ludicrous effort by Mr. Txxxx and his allies to use the Electoral College to subvert the will of the majority of American voters and overturn an election that he lost.

The obvious answer is that, for the most part, we abide by the principle of majority rule. . . .

In the last 20 years, Republicans have been gifted the White House while losing the popular vote twice, and it came distressingly close to happening for a third time this year.

Since 2000, we’ve had six presidential elections. The candidate who got the most votes only won four of them. This year, shifting 44,000 votes to the loser in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin would have resulted in a 269-269 tie in the Electoral College. That would have moved the election to the House of Representatives, where each state’s delegation gets one vote, regardless of population. Since most states have Republican-majority representation in the House — even though the House has more Democrats — DDT would have presumably been re-elected, hard as that is to imagine.

Among the comments the Times article received, one person said the Electoral College is fine, since we’re a collection of states, the United States of America, not a collection of citizens. He said it’s only fair that we pick a president based on which states the candidates win, not how many votes they get. Besides, he added, votes in the Electoral College are “roughly” assigned by population.

I don’t agree that because we’re called the United States, we should ignore majority rule when it coms to picking a president. After all, the states we live in are supposed to be “united”. But his statement about the Electoral College being “roughly” based on population made me wonder.

How would the 2020 election have turned out if votes in the Electoral College were “precisely” assigned by population, instead of “roughly”? Today, the largest state, California, gets 55 electoral votes and the smallest state, Wyoming, gets 3. But California’s population is 68 times Wyoming’s. So if the Electoral College were precisely allocated by population, California would get 204 electoral votes, not 55. Quite a difference. The next largest state, Texas, would get 150 instead of 38.

Would that have made the result in the Electoral College much different? It was surprising to see that it wouldn’t. If you do the same precise arithmetic for all 50 states and the District of Columbia, Joe Biden receives 974 electoral votes instead of 306 and DDT gets 730 instead of 232. That looks like a big difference, but the percentages are about the same. Biden would get 57.2% of the electoral votes with the precise arithmetic and 56.9% with the rough arithmetic. It works out that way because some big states, like California and New York, went for Biden and some, like Texas and Florida, went for DDT. When you average it all out, the Electoral College result would be about the same either way.

There would be a big difference, however. Big states would be much more important in the Electoral College than small states. If California got 204 electoral votes instead of 55, it would make even less difference who won a bunch of little states like Wyoming, Vermont and Alaska. In fact, assuming precise arithmetic, the 25 largest states would get 1,423 electoral votes vs. 288 for the 25 smallest.

What this shows is that the current Electoral College is significantly skewed to benefit smaller states. Voters in those states play a bigger role than they should, based on how few of them there are. Being precise about population wouldn’t necessarily change the winner every time, but a more accurate Electoral College would reflect where people actually live in these “united” states. It would also reflect the cultural divisions in this country, since smaller states tend to be more rural.

Unfortunately, it’s not just the Electoral College that is skewed toward smaller states. According to the Constitution, each state gets as many votes in the Electoral College as it has members of Congress. Wyoming gets three electoral votes because it has two people in the Senate and one in the House of Representatives. California gets 55 electoral votes because it has two senators and 53 representatives in the House. If seats in Congress were precisely allocated by population, California would still have two senators, but it would elect almost four times as many members of the House of Representatives as Wyoming. The ratio in the House would be California’s 202 to Wyoming’s one, not 53 to one.

If the makeup of the House of Representatives isn’t unfair enough, consider the US Senate. Each state, regardless of population, gets two senators. It was designed to give small states the same representation as big states, so each state, regardless of population, gets to elect two. Maybe that made sense when there were only 13 states and they were relatively close in population. Now we have 50 states with a very wide range of populations.

In 1790, for example, the largest state, Virginia, had 13 times as many people as the smallest, Delaware. Today, as noted above, California has 68 times more people than Wyoming. Furthermore, the 50 members of the Senate from the largest 25 states represent almost 275 million people. The 50 senators from the smallest 25 states represent 49 million.

The imbalance is made even worse by the fact that the Senate is responsible for approving nominations to the Executive Branch (including all the officials in the president’s cabinet) and the federal judiciary (including the Supreme Court), as well as approving treaties. Because of the way senators were to be chosen, the authors of the Constitution assumed that members of the Senate would be more responsible than the unruly members of the House of Representatives. That’s hardly the case today.

In addition, smaller states, which tend to more rural, tend to vote for Republicans. Of the 25 largest states, 15 voted for Biden and 10 for his opponent. Of the 25 smallest, 10 voted for Biden and 15 for the other guy. That’s why the Senate is where progressive legislation goes to die and liberal nominees fall into comas waiting to be approved.

Add this all up and it’s easy to see that a Constitution written in 1789 doesn’t work very well for a large, complicated country in 2020. The Senate is skewed to benefit smaller, more Republican states, while the House of Representatives and the Electoral College, which chooses the president, are skewed the same way, although less so. This unfairness explains why Hillary Clinton could beat her opponent by 3 million votes and lose, why Joe Biden could beat the same opponent by 7 million votes but not necessarily win, and why forward-looking legislation that would make the United States a much better place to live has so little chance of success. Maybe shifting demographics will eventually help, but in the short run, we have to assume the United States will be subject to minority rule from Washington in important ways and much too often.

Whereof One Can Speak 🇺🇦

Nothing special, one post at a time since 2012

Tag Archives: 2020 Election

Tonight’s Civics Discussion

Don’t Ever Call Them “Conservative”

Now There’s a Tape, Just Like Nixon’s

Old Leader, New Leader, Same Country

“‘I just want to find 11,780 votes’: In extraordinary hour-long call, Txxxx pressures Georgia secretary of state to recalculate the vote in his favor”

Small States and Minority Rule

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“‘I just want to find 11,780 votes’: In extraordinary hour-long call, Txxxx pressures Georgia secretary of state to recalculate the vote in his favor”

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