Paul Revere by Cyrus Dallin, North End, Boston

~~~

~~~

Tuesday, September 21, 2021

Pence and Trump's Treachery

 

Read this by Charlie Pierce and weep for our Republic. 

The Trumpublicans really, really, really wanted to overthrow our government and install Trump for an illegitimate second term. 

They failed -- Thank you, Dan Quayle, but the anti-American, anti-Constitution Trumpers have not given up: 




"It Shouldn't Be This Easy to Overthrow the American Republic 

CNN got hold of a Trump lawyer's memo that describes a precise six-point plan for then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Trump lawyer, John Eastman’s plan has an evil logic to it that cuts through any institutional safeguards in place through the simple expedient of believing that Pence was both a team player and a coward.  


Here's what the plan was: 

Point #2: When he [Pence] gets to Arizona, he announces that he has multiple slates of electors, and so is going to defer decision on that until finishing the other States. This would be the first break with the procedure set out in the Act.


Point #3: At the end, he [Pence] announces that because of the ongoing disputes in the 7 States, there are no electors that can be deemed validly appointed in those States. That means the total number of “electors appointed” – the language of the 12th Amendment -- is 454. This reading of the 12th Amendment has also been advanced by Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe (here). A “majority of the electors appointed” would therefore be 228. There are at this point 232 votes for Trump, 222 votes for Biden. Pence then gavels President Trump as re-elected. 

Ultimately, the whole plan is summarized by Point No. 6, which is fairly summarized as, “We’re lawless. So fcking what?” 

 Point #6:  The main thing here is that Pence should do this without asking for permission – either from a vote of the joint session or from the Court. Let the other side challenge his actions in court, where Tribe (who in 2001 conceded the President of the Senate might be in charge of counting the votes) and others who would press a lawsuit would have their past position -- that these are non-justiciable political questions – thrown back at them, to get the lawsuit dismissed. The fact is that the Constitution assigns this power to the Vice President as the ultimate arbiter. We should take all of our actions with that in mind."


******************************



No one really believed that Pence somehow grew a spine back on January 6, because he was such a toady to Trump for four years. 

Suddenly he changed? Hah!

So now we know the truth about Mike Pence, failed VP and failed governor of Indiana. Not a profile in courage. In other words, he sought to find a way to obey Trump and launch a coup. 

He came up empty. 

Pence was and is a coward.

23 comments:

Les Carpenter said...

The evil religonist Mike Pence and one of the worlds most narcissistic vessel of pure evil.

Both deserve life im prison or, as an alternative, lined up up in front of a firing squad.

Take your pick. I'd be fine with either.

Les Carpenter said...

Actually, being a coward is not an offense. This time the plan didn't work, he wimped out (a positive in reality), so, simply find a way to bar Pence from EVER holding federal office again. As for tRump, the bastard should receive maximum retribution from the PEOPLE he attempted to defraud by overturning a free and fully far election.

Bluebullamerica said...

They came dangerously close to their goal. how close it a scary as the plot itself, actually I agree with RN - they b9th deserve life in prison.

Dave Miller said...

Sadly, none of this matters to the extremists among us.

They believe the left has cheated for years, and some evidence exists that in fact JFK and his team cheated in Illinois, so they are just rebalancing the scales. In their eyes, it takes a great man like Trump to fix what the left has done to the USA through fixed, rigged and unfair elections.

That said, they are living a "by any means necessary" mentality.

How else to explain this from page one of their memo?

The Electoral Count Act, which is likely unconstitutional...

And this...

VP Pence, presiding over the joint session begins to open and count the ballots... (without conceding that the procedure, specified by the Electoral Count Act, of going through the States alphabetically is required).

They are even arguing against the Constitutionality of the federal government counting electors. This is a win at any cost attitude in response, they believe, to the left employing a steal the vote win at any cost strategy in the states.

It really is breathtaking...

Justice Scalia with whom I rarely agreed, would be rolling over in his grave at this legal strategy.

Dave Miller said...

Treachery?

More like treason. How else to define a group of people, who knew their claims of voter fraud and malfunctioning voting machines were baseless?

Think it's not true?

Well... we now have the memos, direct from the Trump Campaign according to reporting today in the NY Times.

Actual court filings state... "By the time the [Trump] news conference [alleging fraud and vot=ing machine malfunctions] occurred on Nov. 19, Mr. Trump’s campaign had already prepared an internal memo on many of the outlandish claims about the company, Dominion Voting Systems, and the separate software company, Smartmatic. The memo had determined that those allegations were untrue.

The court papers, which were initially filed late last week as a motion in a defamation lawsuit brought against the campaign and others by a former Dominion employee, Eric Coomer, contain evidence that officials in the Trump campaign were aware early on that many of the claims against the companies were baseless.

Why would a sitting president, who supposedly loves America, push a lie his own campaign had deemed was rubbish and baseless? More importantly, why would that president push America to the brink of a constitutional crisis for his apparently own naked gain?

And why are people like the sailors on the HMS Mothership, Skud and others still so reticent to simply state, President trump was bad for America? Period.

I'm not saying anyone has to like, love or even mildly appreciate Biden. But all of America should be able to objectively look at what the former president was doing in November, December and January and determine he was not acting to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Mike said...

The Dems should keep those 6 points in their back pocket for 2024.

Shaw Kenawe said...

Dave

Legally the information presented in the NYTimes article will be of value in various defamation suits and the House Committee investigation of the January 6 insurrection. However, politically, like the new book Peril, it will have no impact on changing the views of the Trumpublicans who know as a matter of faith that the election was stolen, and there is evidence to prove it.

Just read some of the comments at the Mother Ship. They keep saying the evidence is "there" but they can't understand why it hasn't been revealed. They believe in the fantasy of the "stolen election." And nothing will dissuade them. They are cultists and are fully marinated in the lies Trump, Giuliani, Powell, and Lindell have spread far and wide.

Geeez and her followers, at this point, do NOT know truth from fiction. And they never will.

This is the legacy and tragedy that Trump has gifted America.

Ray Cranston said...

From the article link: "When lawyers for the Trump campaign were asked if they continued to believe that the 2020 election was fraudulent, they replied that “we have no underlying definite facts that it wasn’t.”

When lawyers for the Trump campaign were asked if they continued to believe that the 2020 election was fraudulent, they replied that “we have no underlying definite facts that it wasn’t.”

That sounds like good legal practice! When an innocent person is wrongly accused of committing a capital crime, the prosecutor's best tactic, of course is to claim that "we have no underlying evidence to suggest that he didn't."

This is what the "rule of law" is coming to mean in today's United States of America. They teach it at Trump University.

Dave Miller said...

Shaw... regarding the crew of the HMS Mothership of Denial...

Geeez even opined that Pres Biden was sending Haitian refugees back to Haiti and asked others why FOX News was not covering or even mentioning it.

Well..... DUH!

Of course Fox wouldn't mention it. Because it is exactly what Trump would have done. And it made Biden look good to the Fox crowd, so why report on it.

They are willfully ignorant, just ignorant, or purposefully lying. All of them. The entire current iteration of the GOP.

Every. Single. One. Of. Them!

Shaw Kenawe said...

Ray,

All of the Trump corruption is oozing out bit by bit:

"Two veteran Republican campaign operatives — including one who got a pardon from then-President Donald Trump one month before he left office — are charged in a new federal indictment with funneling $25,000 from a Russian national into the Trump campaign in 2016.
"Jesse Benton, 43, and Doug Wead, 75, made brief appearances Monday at a video hearing in U.S. District Court in Washington, pleading not guilty to six felony charges including facilitating a campaign contribution by a foreign national, acting as a straw donor and causing the filing of false campaign finance reports.

"The grand jury indictment alleges that Benton and Wead worked together to accept $100,000 from an unidentified Russian national in order to get the foreigner a meeting with then-candidate Trump at a fundraiser in Philadelphia on Sept. 22, 2016."


Dave Miller said...

Let's add a little more context.

Let's wonder what would have happened had Democrats felt an election had been stolen from them. Oh... hang on, we don't have to wonder, we have evidence.

The Dems, united behind Al Gore and announced that George Bush was elected and the new president of the United States of America. And the evidence was pretty credible back then.

None of us, or at least few, Dems believed Gore lost Florida and many to this day believe the SCOTUS stole the election from him and us. But we never initiated a Constitutional crisis that called for people to subvert the norms and Constitution of the US.

How different the parties handle adversity.

One does what is right for the country and the other does what they think is right for them.

Shaw Kenawe said...

The Mother Ship sailors won't read this, but I'm putting in this thread to document it:


"Attorney General Bill Barr took a blunt approach with "President" Donald Trump in April 2020 while discussing his reelection chances.
The crux of the problem, Barr told Trump, was that most suburban Republican voters "just think you're a *ucking as*hole." That's according to a new book by authors Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.

Insider obtained an early copy of "Peril," which is set to be released next week.
"In my opinion," Barr told Trump during a tense Oval Office meeting, according to the book, "this is not a base election. Your base is critical, and you'll get it out. And there are a lot of people out there, independents and Republicans in the suburbs of the critical states that think you're an as*hole. They think you act like an as*hole and you got to, you got to start taking that into account."

The attorney general went on to tell the president that he had become a Beltway "captive" and needed to appeal to a broader group of voters than just his diehard base, the book said.
Barr is said to have debated how best to approach the conversation with Trump last year, while the US was grappling with a deadly and widespread pandemic and as the "president" refused to acknowledge the reality of the threat.

According to "Peril," he decided the best option was to be direct and told Trump that with the way he was handling things, "you're going to lose" the election.

The conversation came at a delicate time for Barr himself, who found himself in the doghouse last year because an internal Justice Department investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation was coming up empty and had found no evidence of wrongdoing by senior DOJ and FBI officials. The lack of bombshell developments infuriated the president, who had long insisted that the Russia probe was part of a so called "deep state" effort to sink his presidency.

Barr reportedly addressed those frustrations, telling Trump that suburban Republican voters "don't give a $hit" about Trump's vendetta against his perceived foes.

"Your base cares about seeing [former FBI director James Comey] and the rest of those guys held accountable, but these other people don't," Barr said, according to the book. "They don't care about your *ucking grievances. And it just seems that every time you're out there, you're talking about your goddamn grievances."


Shaw Kenawe said...

(cont.)

Barr advised Trump to focus more on the US's response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic recovery, "not all this other $hit, not every grievance you have," the book said. But Trump refused to back down, saying, "I need to be a fighter. I've gotten where I am because I'm willing to fight."

"The attorney general was one of several top administration officials who worked to steer Trump in a different direction before the election and tried to stave off a political and national security crisis after Trump lost to Joe Biden.

According to the book, Barr grew so frustrated with Trump's nonsense conspiracy theories about voter fraud that he confronted the president on November 23 and told him his claims were "bull*hit."

Trump's anger with Barr reached a boiling point when, a week later, the attorney general told reporters that the DOJ had not found evidence of voter fraud on a scale that would tip the election results in Trump's favor. Shortly after, Barr resigned from office."


By Sonam Sheth

Jerry said...

It's bad enough what Trump has done to our country over the last six years, but what scares me more is his hold on the Republican party and a possible second Trump presidency.
Pence? What a twit. Trump tried to have him killed and he still kisses his ass.

Shaw Kenawe said...

Re: The video of Moscow Mitch from Twitter. It is useful to understand this so that the complete rotten hypocrisy of him and his fellow hypocrites is clear:

McConnell’s 32 career votes to raise the debt limit increased it by $20.7 trillion

Despite leading three efforts to increase the debt limit under the Trump administration and voting 32 times to increase the debt limit by over $20 trillion himself over the course of his career, Senator Mitch McConnell (R, KY) is threatening to oppose and filibuster an effort to address the looming debt limit deadline that will come due in October.

Debt limit increases are must-pass provisions that ensure that the federal government can pay what it owes on obligations that it has already incurred. Failing to do so would result in an unprecedented default by the United States destroying the country’s full faith and credit, creating chaos in financial markets and the real economy, and costing taxpayers even more by squandering the U.S.’s ability to issue debt at low, riskless rates.

McConnell recognized the danger of a potential default during the last debate around a debt limit increase as Senate Majority Leader during the Trump administration:

“[The debt limit suspension] ensures our federal government will not approach any kind of short-term debt crisis in the coming weeks or months. It secures our nation’s full faith and credit and ensures that Congress will not throw this kind of unnecessary wrench into the gears of our job growth and thriving economy.” [Senate Floor Remarks, August 1, 2019]
He knew then the Senate had a responsibility to do its job, and urged all Senators to vote for the August 2019 debt limit increase. Only four Democratic Senators voted against the increase, while 24 Republican Senators joined them.

“I certainly don’t think Senators are rooting for a debt limit crisis… that means every one of our colleagues should vote for it… it’s our turn to do the job.” [Senate Floor Remarks, July 31, 2019>"

Shaw Kenawe said...

Sorry skud, Your comment was a litany of complaints about President Biden and Vice President Harris. It had nothing to do about the post's subject: Pence and Trump's treachery.

Is that because you can't defend what the post is about, so you attack the POTUS VPOTUS?

It seems you can't defend Trump. And for your information, it is important to continue to follow the emerging story on how Trump tried to lie, cheat, and steal his way back to the presidency. It has nothing to do with hate and everything to do with love of country and being appalled at what Trump and his lackeys tried to do!

Nothing like this every happened in my or your lifetimes, and you have nothing to say about it? Really?

Incredible to believe this of my fellow Americans!

Dervish Sanders said...

None of us, or at least few, Dems believed Gore lost Florida and many to this day believe the SCOTUS stole the election from him and us.

Gore won Florida. The presidency was stolen from Gore via a scotus coup.

As for Pence, he thinks he can be the "GOP" potus nominee in 2024. I seriously doubt it. Given the fact that he betrayed Dotard. Apparently he got advice from both God and Dan Qualye... and decided to listen to Dan Quayle??

skudrunner said...

Ms Shaw. I forgot this was all about trashing a president who has been out of office for nine months not about the multiple crisis created by the current president and VP.


Dervie, pence doesn't have a chance to even get the nod. He is more capable that danny bu has not personality. The only way he could win is to stay on his couch during the campaign.

Shaw Kenawe said...

skud, you label reporting the facts on Trump's disgraceful presidency "trashing a president...?"

That what burying one's head in the sand or sticking one's fingers in one's ears and yelling "NAH! NAH! NAH! NAH! looks like.

Apparently you have zero interest in wanting to know if Trump and his allies were behind the insurrection of January 6. That was an attempt to overthrow the government -- may I point out that THAT was something magnitudes worse than getting BJ in the Oval Office, yet you and your buddies on various far right wing blogs dismiss what happened on January 6.

Nothing President Biden has done comes close to what Trump and his thugs did that day.

Les Carpenter said...

Apparently nearly 35% of Americans are curently living in self made political delusions as they continue to tell themselves stories they wish were true. A very dangerous and destructive energy force that usually results in evil being unleashed.

Oh yeah, that's right, it already has been, Janusry 6th 2021.

Ray said...

"Nothing President Biden has done comes close to what Trump and his thugs did that day."

And nothing Biden will do will compare to what Trump instigated and his mobs carried out on January 6. Skuddy calls talking about what happened "hate?" Yeah. Right. That's what him and his pals want to forget or move on from because they KNOW how bad it is for Trump and the party he leads.


Dervish Sanders said...

Surprisingly, the Cyber Ninjas confirm Joe Biden's win in Maricopa County AZ. Will that satisfy Minus FJ? I doubt it.

Shaw Kenawe said...

Derv: "Will that satisfy Minus FJ? I doubt it."

Of course not. Trump cultists are impervious to facts and logic. He'll probably double down and claim that somehow the Cyber Ninjas' audit was hijacked by the Deep State so the audit didn't have access to the material they needed -- or some such idiocy.

Like their idol, Trumpy, the can never accept defeat.