David Sirota and Julia Rock wrote about the thinking behind this aspect of the ongoing clown coup attempt back in mid-November, How Pence & GOP Senators Could Try To Steal The Election Daily Poster 11/14/2020, relying heavily on an interview with Larry Lessig.
The Trump-Pence Administration will last for another three weeks. But the Biden-Harris era of asymmetric partisan polarization and of the corporate media lazily filtering every controversy through the Both Side Do It frame. The Democratic leadership is fantasizing about harmonious Bipartisanship. While the Republican Party has gone full John Calhoun.
An example of how political journalism keeps failing: treating a direct attack on the republic as just another horse-race story. https://t.co/fEuAhS2uya
— Dan Gillmor (@dangillmor) January 3, 2021
But faced with an actual coup attempt, clownish though much of it has been, I'm underwhelmed by how most of the Democratic officials have responded. If 140 Republican House members, all sworn to support the US Constitution, are planning to vote against accepting the Electoral College vote, that should have consequences for them. Sarah Al-Arshani, House Republicans have virtually no chance of flipping the election results for Trump, but 140 of them still plan to vote against certification of the Electoral College count next week Business Insider 01/01/2021.
The Democrats and the Republicans who are not joining this seditious maneuver should require every Republican associated with this measure to state clearly and publicly that they consider their own elections legitimate. That especially goes for Representatives for states whose Electoral College votes they reject. Without having researched the exact House rules on the matter, it seems to me that if they can't state clearly that they believe their own elections were valid, they should not be seated in the next Congress or expelled outright.
This process has also been a dry run - though that's not all everyone who participated in it was hoping it would be! - for a Republican coup against the Presidential vote in 2024 or 2028. There has to be some stigma attached to those participating in this. The same goes for the Calhoun Twelve reported to be backing Cruz' Senate plan.
This is why I think it was irresponsible on Biden's part to state publicly that he intends to never even embarrass Republican Senators publicly. Embarrassment is the least of the consequences the Calhoun Twelve should face.
The Democratic Party has to face up to the reality of what the Republican Party has become. And not just in rhetorical flourishes in fundraising e-mails.
And part of that means insisting on legal and practical liability for crimes committed by Trump and his officials while in office, including ones involving the clown coup attempt. The American courts and the Justice Department are still capable for holding genuinely independent ivestigations and prosecutions.
Andrew Weissmann discusses the options and the challenges of doing so in Good Governance Paper No. 3: Investigating a President 10/15/2020. As his bio notes, "He served as a lead prosecutor in Robert S. Mueller’s Special Counsel’s Office (2017-19) and as Chief of the Fraud Section in the Department of Justice (2015-2019)." And he discusses the particular difficulty that Mueller's special counsel investigation faced::
To begin, there is the question of how one uses the recent experience to assess the current rules. It is true that the current administration, including the Attorney General, is anything but typical. The president, for instance, has openly sought the indictment of his political opponents, and his attorney general has given favorable treatment to presidential allies and heightened scrutiny to his enemies. This is not a normal situation in America; its scope and boldness is unlike anything we’ve faced in modern times.And his closing warning is one that the President and all Members of Congress not already pledged to sedition in overturning the 2020 Presidential election should take very seriously:
Should the special counsel rules take into account how they work in such an anomalous and extreme situation? I think so. The risk from such a situation, namely, that we would devolve into a banana republic, is so serious that our rules must take the magnitude of the potential consequences into account. And they must recognize that future special counsels may well be challenged even more aggressively, now that Trump’s playbook has proven effective. This may be particularly true when either chamber of Congress is controlled by the same party as the White House rendering the impeachment guardrail largely toothless.
How we uphold the rule of law so that wrongdoing by the president and senior executives can be rooted out is a central challenge posed by our recent history. If not taken seriously, it threatens to undermine our democracy from within. What we do next, or choose not to do, will either repair that damage or tacitly allow the continued corrosion of our ideals. [my emphasis]Democracy and the rule of law really are at stake with this.
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