The USA Political Thread

Young Republican Gives Speech, What Happens Next Is Incredible
Watch Gavin Wax give an inspiring speech while defending a Teddy Roosevelt statue.

.X. said:

The narrative changed about a week ago or a little before that brother, what is taking place isn't about race, religion or nationality, It is about a change of government in the USA.

Click to expand...

I thought the "change of government in the USA" had started the day after Trump got elected!

Here's a Video the BLM idiot Grilled is sure to love...

Another video for the BLM loving scum!

Rapes in Sweden Immigrants and people with an immigrant background make up around 10% of the country's population...


Guess what year Sweden decided to become a "multicultural society"?

The truth is sooo racist... right?

Portland Police Retreat Into Precinct Building as Riot Declared


https://www.yahoo.com/news/portland-police-retreat-precinct-building-141601652.html

GILSAN said:

Young Americans Know Nothing About The 4th of July

Hard to believe believe that TEACHER didn’t know what year the USA became independent. Green teacher needs to be fired...

Totally contradicts the BLM idiot Grilled's theory that younger people are smarter than older folks...

Click to expand...

This is horrifying.

@JB Lions
fooled again.

CNN Cites Study Showing Surprising Success Treating Covid-19 with HCQ — Contradicting CNN In the Process

After Relentlessly Bashing Trump, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer Now Wants a Federal Bailout
China’s favorite governor, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is at it again. This time, after relentlessly bashing President Trump, after her AG told the President he was no longer welcome in the state, now she’s asking for bailout cash for her state.
https://educationblogit.blogspot.com/2020/05/after-relentlessly-bashing-trump.html

I suppose a political detour I like is...


What do you think about the statistics that show 93.2% of the Federal inmates are men? How do you reconcile with your thoughts on group differences about reasons why other statistics aren't always so extreme?

What do you think about the U.S military having no work, whatsoever, for anyone who can't get an IQ score of above 83? ~1 in 10 Americans. What do you think about psychometrics being such a niche thing only available for them and societal stratification?

https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanPete...tary/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

That's enough

How Trump Could Lose the Election and Remain President

A step-by-step guide to what might happen if he refuses to concede.

At the end of his congressional testimony in February, Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former fixer, floated a nightmarish possibility.

“Given my experience working for Mr. Trump,” Cohen said, “I fear that if he loses in 2020, that there will never be a peaceful transition of power.”

Cohen’s comments may seem hyperbolic, but they are worth taking seriously. In the aftermath of 2018, Trump told reporters, “Republicans don’t win, and that’s because of potentially illegal votes.” In a 2016 presidential debate, Trump refused to say whether he would accept defeat. “I’ll keep you in suspense,” he declared. Since that election, Trump has routinely said that his popular vote defeat was the product of “millions and millions” of illegal ballots. Now, facing potential legal jeopardy from ongoing investigations into hush-money payments and any number of apparent financial crimes, he might reasonably conclude that staying in office is the only way to avoid being indicted.

So what would it look like if Trump refused to concede? Is there really a way he could stay in office? It’s unlikely. For starters, successful autocrats rarely lose elections. “They take steps to rig it well in advance,” said Steven Levitsky, a comparative political scientist at Harvard University and the coauthor of How Democracies Die. They pack electoral authorities, jail opponents, and silence unfriendly media outlets. America’s extremely decentralized electoral system and powerful, well-funded opposition makes this very difficult to pull off.

The U.S. also lacks the kind of politicized military that lets some discredited autocrats, like Venezuela’s Nicholás Maduro, hang on. “I can’t imagine the military accepting an effort to turn them into a partisan arm of the executive,” said Robert Mickey, a political scientist at the University of Michigan who researches the history of authoritarianism in the American South.

But while nationwide cheating may be impossible, the Republican Party has proven more than willing to violate democratic norms where it has local control, and not every powerful institution is as neutral as the military. There is a sequence of events, each individually plausible, that would allow Trump to remain president despite losing the election—breaking American democracy in the process.

“I think we know that Trump will certainly, no matter what the result is, be likely to declare that there was fraud and that he was the rightful victor,” said Joseph Fishkin, a law professor at the University of Texas who studies elections.

Let’s assume that Fishkin is right. Here’s what could keep Trump in power.

1. The election is close.
If Trump lost in a blowout, alleging fraud would accomplish little. Even entrenched autocrats are often forced from office when they are heftily defeated.

But that doesn’t mean the race would need to be a redux of 2000, when George W. Bush won the presidency with an official margin of 537 votes, to spark a crisis. Given increasing polarization and the Republican Party’s growing impatience with democratic norms, experts told me the party might challenge even a clear defeat. “I am worried now, given the reaction to 2018, that you could get a dispute over a five-digit number,” said Edward Foley, a law professor and elections expert at Ohio State University.

Others suggested the margin could be even wider. When I asked Mark Tushnet, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, just how close the election would have to be for Republicans to support Trump in disputing the results, he said, “ ‘Close’—as Trump supporters define it.”

However you construe the word, a close election is well within the realm of possibility. In 2016, Trump won his three pivotal states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—by five-digit numbers. Indeed, most of the country’s twenty-first-century elections have hinged on a few states with narrow margins.

“[2020] will probably be a nail-biter election where the polls are mixed or indeterminate, where it’s really not clear who is going to win,” said Levitsky. “If it’s close, just as Trump kind of did in 2018, Trump could basically claim fraud. And we don’t really have mechanisms to deal with that.”

2. Trump claims fraud, and Republicans back him up.
It is Wednesday morning, November 4, 2020. At 7:15 a.m., after a stressful night of watching the returns trickle in, the Associated Press projects that the Democratic presidential candidate will win Pennsylvania, and, with it, the presidency. Sure enough, it’s a narrow victory—279 electoral votes to 258. When all is said and done, the Democrat wins Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania by only about 77,000 votes combined, the same amount Trump won those states by in 2016.

Donald Trump, who spent the past five months warning about fraud, has been eerily silent for most of the night. But as soon as the Democrat takes the stage to give her victory speech, he unleashes a barrage of tweets claiming that over 100,000 illegal immigrants voted in Michigan and that Philadelphia kept its polls open for hours later than allowed. “Without PHONY voters, I really won!” he tweets. “This is FRAUD!” Needless to say, the president does not call to congratulate his opponent. At an afternoon press conference, Trump’s press secretary announces he will not concede.

What happens next?

“In the best-case scenario, key Republicans would either talk him down or defect from Trump and say, ‘He’s wrong,’ ” Levitsky said. Most of the academics I spoke with also thought that this was likely. “I’m just having trouble wrapping my head around even this polarized and often radicalized Republican Party going along with that,” said Mickey. “This is kind of the limit condition of scenarios and surprise.”

But they acknowledged that defections were far from guaranteed. “Trump is still far and away the most popular Republican,” Levitsky said. “If Sean Hannity is claiming fraud on television and Rush Limbaugh is claiming fraud and Mitch McConnell is not willing to stand up and say, ‘No, there was no fraud,’ then we could have a real crisis.”

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what takes place. After forty-eight hours of silence, the Senate majority leader issues a terse press release in which he says he “recognizes the president’s serious concerns” about the election’s integrity. Some GOP representatives do break ranks and call for Trump to concede (I’m looking at you, Mitt Romney), but most stay silent or back the president’s claims. In a monumental act of gaslighting, Lindsey Graham tells reporters that Democrats are the ones undermining democracy. “They are afraid of a thorough investigation into the fairness of this election,” he declares. “They’ll stop at nothing to get this president out of office.”

3. Polarized courts side with the GOP.
Almost everyone I spoke with told me that, at this point, the election results would be challenged in court. The Trump campaign might sue Democratic-leaning counties for alleged “irregularities” and ask that judges toss out their results. “I can imagine the litigation in Pennsylvania taking the form of saying voting booths in Philadelphia were held open an excessively long time, an unlawfully long time, or the vote counters in some Democratic-leaning county unlawfully refused to count late-filed absentee ballots,” Tushnet said. Victory for Trump would “mean throwing out the ballots and saying that when those are thrown out, Trump gets the state’s electoral votes.” That, in turn, would allow him to remain president.

This argument, and the many others that the Trump campaign could employ, would almost certainly be specious. But Tushnet cautioned against underestimating the power of creative attorneys and motivated reasoning. The legal justification for challenging the returns would develop, he said, “in some ways that we can’t really anticipate now but that lawyers will come up with when it matters.”

The Republican Party has proven more than willing to violate democratic norms. There is a sequence of events, each individually plausible, that would allow Trump to remain president even after a clear defeat.
The academics I spoke with cited Bush v. Gore as evidence. When the U.S. Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority shut down the Florida recount, giving the 2000 election to George W. Bush, it did so by reading the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause in an expansive manner totally at odds with typical conservative jurisprudence. The Court even told other judges that their decision could not be used as precedent.

“The justices, along with everybody else, seemed to view disputed facts through the lens of the place where they have been ideologically,” said Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California Irvine School of Law.

Still, it’s one thing for the courts to interfere in an election with a three-digit margin. It’s something else to invalidate a five-digit win. That would be truly extraordinary.

But it is not unthinkable. Autocrats abroad often rely on packed courts to cling to power, and while the U.S. judiciary is far more independent than that of Honduras or Venezuela, there’s no doubt that Trump has made a substantial imprint. He has appointed a historically high number of federal appeals court judges. He has added two justices to the Supreme Court. One of them, Brett Kavanaugh, has been outwardly partisan, raving during his confirmation hearings that he was the victim of an “orchestrated political hit” designed to function as “revenge on behalf of the Clintons,” fueled by “millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.” He obliquely warned, “What goes around comes around.”

4. Alternatively, Republicans play extreme constitutional hardball.
The courts aren’t the only mechanism Republicans might use to keep Trump in power. The Constitution gives state legislators free rein to decide how to select electors. Currently, most states legally require electors to vote the same way as the people. But in a state with complete Republican control over the government, the legislature and governor could, in theory, pass a bill that strips this power away from citizens between the election and the actual casting of electoral votes. (Indeed, in some instances, the state legislature alone might be able to usurp its constituents.) If this sounds far-fetched, recall that GOP governments in North Carolina, Michigan, and Wisconsin have all recently pulled lame-duck attempts to limit the power of incoming Democratic governors, with varying degrees of success.

To imagine how this would play out, consider Florida, where the GOP controls the governorship and both houses of the state legislature. If the Democratic presidential nominee narrowly won the state in 2020, Trump might cry fraud and demand an investigation—as he did in the aftermath of the state’s 2018 Senate race, when it wasn’t yet clear that Republican Rick Scott had won. The legislature could establish an investigatory commission stacked with partisans and designed to sow doubt about the outcome. Perhaps Kris Kobach, vice chair of Trump’s erstwhile Commission on Election Integrity (and the patron saint of franchise restrictions), would lead it.

The courts might still refuse to intervene. But Trump allies in the Florida legislature could pass a bill giving themselves direct power to appoint the state’s electors. Governor Ron DeSantis, an outspoken Trump ally, could sign it, claiming that the fraud allegations and “controversy” over the tallies make the popular vote untrustworthy, and that he’s merely implementing the voters’ “real” will.

This might sound too cynical, but in 2000, the GOP-controlled Florida legislature considered something similar. “They were effectively saying, ‘Hey, if it turns out Gore wins in court, we’re not going to accept that, and we’re going to assert an authority to appoint the electors directly,’ ” said Edward Foley, at Ohio State. Such a move would also invite a Fourteenth Amendment challenge, this time on behalf of Democrats. But it’s unclear if the conservative Supreme Court would intervene.

Foley, for his part, is more concerned about this kind of scenario than he is about judicial manipulation. “Judges are fact based and evidence based,” he said. “We know that Justice Clarence Thomas is a very different person than Justice Sonia Sotomayor, but I do think that with most election results they would agree as to what the answer was.” But he worries that politicians might refuse to accept the Court’s decision. “The judicial process is going to be slower than the Twitter process,” Foley told me. “If the Twitter process forces or causes politicians to dig in, then can a unanimous judiciary unstick the politicians?”

The Twelfth Amendment of the Constitution gives Congress final say over who becomes president. In some instances, the procedures for how Congress handles election disputes are clear. If there are three or more candidates and nobody wins a majority of electors, for example, the House decides who wins. But if it’s a two-way race where both candidates claim an Electoral College majority, Foley said, it’s unclear which chamber has the last word.

What would happen next is anyone’s guess. But it wouldn’t be pretty. “I think you could have a long, drawn-out crisis in which our institutions lose credibility,” Levitsky said. Even if Trump were eventually forced out, “we’ll be left with a situation where maybe 30, 35 percent of our population believes the election was rigged.”

It’s in this kind of crisis that Michael Cohen’s fears are most likely to be realized. “I could imagine some rioting, some civil violence,” said John Carey, a political scientist at Dartmouth who studies comparative democracy and who cofounded Bright Line Watch, which monitors the health of American democracy. “We just can’t imagine all the possibilities.”

Hopefully, we won’t have to. Trump may lose decisively, rendering his claims of foul play empty. He may win. Or he may lose a tight race and cry foul, but still ultimately accept defeat. In the aftermath of the midterms, for example, Trump groused about fraud without seriously contesting the outcome.

Trump, of course, wasn’t on the ballot in 2018. Losing in 2020 would be far more personal. But even if Trump refused to concede, it doesn’t mean he’d manage to remain in office. John Roberts has worried publicly about the credibility of the Supreme Court. It seems unlikely that he would “save” Trump from a less-than-ambiguous electoral defeat. Democratic governors in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin form a formidable roadblock against local Republican power grabs. Faced with incontrovertible evidence that Trump lost—and no plausible pathway to mess with the outcome—Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, and Mike Pence would probably tell Trump to pack his bags.

And if Trump still refused to go?

“I’m not sure which branch it would be, but it must be the case that somebody would be responsible for taking one elbow and somebody would be responsible for taking the other elbow,” Carey said. “I can imagine the feet going kind of crazy. But I like to think that it would be without too much damage to anyone.”

https://washingtonmonthly.com/magaz...could-lose-the-election-and-remain-president/

Another take,

How Trump Could Lose the Election—And Still Remain President

Timothy E. Wirth and Tom Rogers
On 7/3/20 at 6:00 AM EDT
It is increasingly looking as if Joe Biden can beat President Donald Trump in November. The president seems more and more out of step with the national mood, from his handling of the pandemic to his response to racially biased policing, not to mention a wide array of other issues. Even in key swing states, Trump is losing ground that will be difficult for him to make up.

For Trump, there are two broad pathways to maintaining power. First, we can already see very clearly a strategy designed to suppress voter turnout with the purging of registration rolls of large numbers of mostly urban voters; efforts to suppress mail-in ballots, which are more necessary than ever, given COVID-19; a re-election apparatus that is training 50,000 poll watchers for the purpose of challenging citizens' right to vote on Election Day; and significant efforts to make in-person voting in urban areas as cumbersome as possible in order to have long lines that discourage people from exercising their voting rights.

The second pathway to subverting the election is even more ominous—but we must be cognizant of it because Trump is already laying the groundwork for how he can lose the popular vote, and even lose in the key swing states necessary for an Electoral College victory, but still remain president.

This spring, HBO aired The Plot Against America, based on the Philip Roth novel of how an authoritarian president could grab control of the United States government using emergency powers that no one could foresee. Recent press reports have revealed the compilation by the Brennan Center at New York University of an extensive list of presidential emergency powers that might be inappropriately invoked in a national security crisis. Attorney General William Barr, known for his extremist view of the expanse of presidential power, is widely believed to be developing a Justice Department opinion arguing that the president can exercise emergency powers in certain national security situations, while stating that the courts, being extremely reluctant to intervene in the sphere of a national security emergency, would allow the president to proceed unchecked.

Something like the following scenario is not just possible but increasingly probable because it is clear Trump will do anything to avoid the moniker he hates more than any other: "loser."

Trump actually tweeted on June 22: "Rigged 2020 election: millions of mail-in ballots will be printed by foreign countries, and others. It will be the scandal of our times!" With this, Trump has begun to lay the groundwork for the step-by-step process by which he holds on to the presidency after he has clearly lost the election:

1. Biden wins the popular vote, and carries the key swing states of Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania by decent but not overwhelming margins.
2. Trump immediately declares that the voting was rigged, that there was mail-in ballot fraud and that the Chinese were behind a plan to provide fraudulent mail-in ballots and other "election hacking" throughout the four key swing states that gave Biden his victory.
3. Having railed against the Chinese throughout the campaign, calling Biden "soft on China," Trump delivers his narrative claiming the Chinese have interfered in the U.S. election.
4. Trump indicates this is a major national security issue, and he invokes emergency powers, directing the Justice Department to investigate the alleged activity in the swing states. The legal justification for the presidential powers he invokes has already been developed and issued by Barr.
5. The investigation is intended to tick down the clock toward December 14, the deadline when each state's Electoral College electors must be appointed. This is the very issue that the Supreme Court harped on in Bush v. Gore in ruling that the election process had to be brought to a close, thus forbidding the further counting of Florida ballots.
6. All four swing states have Republican control of both their upper and lower houses of their state legislatures. Those state legislatures refuse to allow any Electoral College slate to be certified until the "national security" investigation is complete.
7. The Democrats will have begun a legal action to certify the results in those four states, and the appointment of the Biden slate of electors, arguing that Trump has manufactured a national security emergency in order to create the ensuing chaos.
8. The issue goes up to the Supreme Court, which unlike the 2000 election does not decide the election in favor of the Republicans. However, it indicates again that the December 14 Electoral College deadline must be met; that the president's national security powers legally authorize him to investigate potential foreign country intrusion into the national election; and if no Electoral College slate can be certified by any state by December 14, the Electoral College must meet anyway and cast its votes.
9. The Electoral College meets, and without the electors from those four states being represented, neither Biden nor Trump has sufficient votes to get an Electoral College majority.
10. The election is thrown into the House of Representatives, pursuant to the Constitution. Under the relevant constitutional process, the vote in the House is by state delegation, where each delegation casts one vote, which is determined by the majority of the representatives in that state.
11. Currently, there are 26 states that have a majority Republican House delegation. 23 states have a majority Democratic delegation. There is one state, Pennsylvania, that has an evenly split delegation. Even if the Democrats were to pick up seats in Pennsylvania and hold all their 2018 House gains, the Republicans would have a 26 to 24 delegation majority.
12. This vote would enable Trump to retain the presidency.

We cannot let ourselves believe that this is a far-fetched scenario. We have just seen Trump threaten to invoke emergency powers under the Insurrection Act of 1807 to call up the U.S. military against domestic protesters. The remarkable apology by Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley, stating that it was wrong to create a perception that the military would get directly involved in a domestic political protest and intervene against American civilians, underscores the corrupt use of executive powers Trump is willing to employ. As Fareed Zakaria recently said in summing up the lessons of former national security adviser John Bolton's new book: "Donald Trump will pay any price, make any deal, bend any rule, to assure his own survival and success."

So what do we do as citizens to face the impending reality of The Plot Against America? We must "out" this scenario—and do so loudly and consistently. We have an imperative to build a "people's firewall" that reaches deeply across the country and reflects public revulsion at the potential for Trump to undermine our entire democratic system of governance.

Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, should immediately ask the Judiciary, Commerce, Armed Services and Intelligence Committees to hold hearings on how steps can be taken to safeguard against this scenario, especially how to confront any invocation of emergency powers by the president.

There needs to be an outpouring at all levels of society that this will not be tolerated—from government officials and lawmakers at all levels; to civic associations and civil rights groups; to business groups and trade associations, who have to recognize the economic chaos that would result from this kind of coup; to lawyers, academics and student groups practiced in resisting government policies; and, of course, to the editorial voices of the press, both local and national.

The recent resistance of our military establishment is an encouraging sign and necessary component of the "people's firewall." The president has to know there will be overwhelming resistance to any post-election chaos to undermine our constitutional order. He must know that the "people's firewall" will not yield to lawlessness. He has to be confronted with the reality that The Plot Against America must remain a work of fiction.
https://www.newsweek.com/how-trump-could-lose-election-still-remain-president-opinion-1513975

BREAKING: White Couple Charged with Assault After Viral Video Shows Pregnant Woman Defending Herself with Firearm in Confrontation with Black Woman

The black woman was looking to create a viral incident and accused the white woman of racism and hate, but it was her own hatred and intimidating behavior for white people that caused the dissension and confrontation.

Black Lives Matter's violent rhetoric and terrorist activities are actually increasing racism. Particularly since it's obvious that the only black lives that actually matter to BLM are ones taken by whites, not the thousands killed by their own. That's because they are really just a racially based version of ANTIFA, and their objective is Marxism.

It's more than obvious who the biggest racists and most privileged are today... blacks by far!

TDS SCI-FI / Horror.

lennco said:

How Trump Could Lose the Election and Remain President

A step-by-step guide to what might happen if he refuses to concede.

At the end of his congressional testimony in February, Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former fixer, floated a nightmarish possibility.

“Given my experience working for Mr. Trump,” Cohen said, “I fear that if he loses in 2020, that there will never be a peaceful transition of power.”

Cohen’s comments may seem hyperbolic, but they are worth taking seriously. In the aftermath of 2018, Trump told reporters, “Republicans don’t win, and that’s because of potentially illegal votes.” In a 2016 presidential debate, Trump refused to say whether he would accept defeat. “I’ll keep you in suspense,” he declared. Since that election, Trump has routinely said that his popular vote defeat was the product of “millions and millions” of illegal ballots. Now, facing potential legal jeopardy from ongoing investigations into hush-money payments and any number of apparent financial crimes, he might reasonably conclude that staying in office is the only way to avoid being indicted.

So what would it look like if Trump refused to concede? Is there really a way he could stay in office? It’s unlikely. For starters, successful autocrats rarely lose elections. “They take steps to rig it well in advance,” said Steven Levitsky, a comparative political scientist at Harvard University and the coauthor of How Democracies Die. They pack electoral authorities, jail opponents, and silence unfriendly media outlets. America’s extremely decentralized electoral system and powerful, well-funded opposition makes this very difficult to pull off.

The U.S. also lacks the kind of politicized military that lets some discredited autocrats, like Venezuela’s Nicholás Maduro, hang on. “I can’t imagine the military accepting an effort to turn them into a partisan arm of the executive,” said Robert Mickey, a political scientist at the University of Michigan who researches the history of authoritarianism in the American South.

But while nationwide cheating may be impossible, the Republican Party has proven more than willing to violate democratic norms where it has local control, and not every powerful institution is as neutral as the military. There is a sequence of events, each individually plausible, that would allow Trump to remain president despite losing the election—breaking American democracy in the process.

“I think we know that Trump will certainly, no matter what the result is, be likely to declare that there was fraud and that he was the rightful victor,” said Joseph Fishkin, a law professor at the University of Texas who studies elections.

Let’s assume that Fishkin is right. Here’s what could keep Trump in power.

1. The election is close.
If Trump lost in a blowout, alleging fraud would accomplish little. Even entrenched autocrats are often forced from office when they are heftily defeated.

But that doesn’t mean the race would need to be a redux of 2000, when George W. Bush won the presidency with an official margin of 537 votes, to spark a crisis. Given increasing polarization and the Republican Party’s growing impatience with democratic norms, experts told me the party might challenge even a clear defeat. “I am worried now, given the reaction to 2018, that you could get a dispute over a five-digit number,” said Edward Foley, a law professor and elections expert at Ohio State University.

Others suggested the margin could be even wider. When I asked Mark Tushnet, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, just how close the election would have to be for Republicans to support Trump in disputing the results, he said, “ ‘Close’—as Trump supporters define it.”

However you construe the word, a close election is well within the realm of possibility. In 2016, Trump won his three pivotal states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—by five-digit numbers. Indeed, most of the country’s twenty-first-century elections have hinged on a few states with narrow margins.

“[2020] will probably be a nail-biter election where the polls are mixed or indeterminate, where it’s really not clear who is going to win,” said Levitsky. “If it’s close, just as Trump kind of did in 2018, Trump could basically claim fraud. And we don’t really have mechanisms to deal with that.”

2. Trump claims fraud, and Republicans back him up.
It is Wednesday morning, November 4, 2020. At 7:15 a.m., after a stressful night of watching the returns trickle in, the Associated Press projects that the Democratic presidential candidate will win Pennsylvania, and, with it, the presidency. Sure enough, it’s a narrow victory—279 electoral votes to 258. When all is said and done, the Democrat wins Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania by only about 77,000 votes combined, the same amount Trump won those states by in 2016.

Donald Trump, who spent the past five months warning about fraud, has been eerily silent for most of the night. But as soon as the Democrat takes the stage to give her victory speech, he unleashes a barrage of tweets claiming that over 100,000 illegal immigrants voted in Michigan and that Philadelphia kept its polls open for hours later than allowed. “Without PHONY voters, I really won!” he tweets. “This is FRAUD!” Needless to say, the president does not call to congratulate his opponent. At an afternoon press conference, Trump’s press secretary announces he will not concede.

What happens next?

“In the best-case scenario, key Republicans would either talk him down or defect from Trump and say, ‘He’s wrong,’ ” Levitsky said. Most of the academics I spoke with also thought that this was likely. “I’m just having trouble wrapping my head around even this polarized and often radicalized Republican Party going along with that,” said Mickey. “This is kind of the limit condition of scenarios and surprise.”

But they acknowledged that defections were far from guaranteed. “Trump is still far and away the most popular Republican,” Levitsky said. “If Sean Hannity is claiming fraud on television and Rush Limbaugh is claiming fraud and Mitch McConnell is not willing to stand up and say, ‘No, there was no fraud,’ then we could have a real crisis.”

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what takes place. After forty-eight hours of silence, the Senate majority leader issues a terse press release in which he says he “recognizes the president’s serious concerns” about the election’s integrity. Some GOP representatives do break ranks and call for Trump to concede (I’m looking at you, Mitt Romney), but most stay silent or back the president’s claims. In a monumental act of gaslighting, Lindsey Graham tells reporters that Democrats are the ones undermining democracy. “They are afraid of a thorough investigation into the fairness of this election,” he declares. “They’ll stop at nothing to get this president out of office.”

3. Polarized courts side with the GOP.
Almost everyone I spoke with told me that, at this point, the election results would be challenged in court. The Trump campaign might sue Democratic-leaning counties for alleged “irregularities” and ask that judges toss out their results. “I can imagine the litigation in Pennsylvania taking the form of saying voting booths in Philadelphia were held open an excessively long time, an unlawfully long time, or the vote counters in some Democratic-leaning county unlawfully refused to count late-filed absentee ballots,” Tushnet said. Victory for Trump would “mean throwing out the ballots and saying that when those are thrown out, Trump gets the state’s electoral votes.” That, in turn, would allow him to remain president.

This argument, and the many others that the Trump campaign could employ, would almost certainly be specious. But Tushnet cautioned against underestimating the power of creative attorneys and motivated reasoning. The legal justification for challenging the returns would develop, he said, “in some ways that we can’t really anticipate now but that lawyers will come up with when it matters.”

The Republican Party has proven more than willing to violate democratic norms. There is a sequence of events, each individually plausible, that would allow Trump to remain president even after a clear defeat.
The academics I spoke with cited Bush v. Gore as evidence. When the U.S. Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority shut down the Florida recount, giving the 2000 election to George W. Bush, it did so by reading the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause in an expansive manner totally at odds with typical conservative jurisprudence. The Court even told other judges that their decision could not be used as precedent.

“The justices, along with everybody else, seemed to view disputed facts through the lens of the place where they have been ideologically,” said Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California Irvine School of Law.

Still, it’s one thing for the courts to interfere in an election with a three-digit margin. It’s something else to invalidate a five-digit win. That would be truly extraordinary.

But it is not unthinkable. Autocrats abroad often rely on packed courts to cling to power, and while the U.S. judiciary is far more independent than that of Honduras or Venezuela, there’s no doubt that Trump has made a substantial imprint. He has appointed a historically high number of federal appeals court judges. He has added two justices to the Supreme Court. One of them, Brett Kavanaugh, has been outwardly partisan, raving during his confirmation hearings that he was the victim of an “orchestrated political hit” designed to function as “revenge on behalf of the Clintons,” fueled by “millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.” He obliquely warned, “What goes around comes around.”

4. Alternatively, Republicans play extreme constitutional hardball.
The courts aren’t the only mechanism Republicans might use to keep Trump in power. The Constitution gives state legislators free rein to decide how to select electors. Currently, most states legally require electors to vote the same way as the people. But in a state with complete Republican control over the government, the legislature and governor could, in theory, pass a bill that strips this power away from citizens between the election and the actual casting of electoral votes. (Indeed, in some instances, the state legislature alone might be able to usurp its constituents.) If this sounds far-fetched, recall that GOP governments in North Carolina, Michigan, and Wisconsin have all recently pulled lame-duck attempts to limit the power of incoming Democratic governors, with varying degrees of success.

To imagine how this would play out, consider Florida, where the GOP controls the governorship and both houses of the state legislature. If the Democratic presidential nominee narrowly won the state in 2020, Trump might cry fraud and demand an investigation—as he did in the aftermath of the state’s 2018 Senate race, when it wasn’t yet clear that Republican Rick Scott had won. The legislature could establish an investigatory commission stacked with partisans and designed to sow doubt about the outcome. Perhaps Kris Kobach, vice chair of Trump’s erstwhile Commission on Election Integrity (and the patron saint of franchise restrictions), would lead it.

The courts might still refuse to intervene. But Trump allies in the Florida legislature could pass a bill giving themselves direct power to appoint the state’s electors. Governor Ron DeSantis, an outspoken Trump ally, could sign it, claiming that the fraud allegations and “controversy” over the tallies make the popular vote untrustworthy, and that he’s merely implementing the voters’ “real” will.

This might sound too cynical, but in 2000, the GOP-controlled Florida legislature considered something similar. “They were effectively saying, ‘Hey, if it turns out Gore wins in court, we’re not going to accept that, and we’re going to assert an authority to appoint the electors directly,’ ” said Edward Foley, at Ohio State. Such a move would also invite a Fourteenth Amendment challenge, this time on behalf of Democrats. But it’s unclear if the conservative Supreme Court would intervene.

Foley, for his part, is more concerned about this kind of scenario than he is about judicial manipulation. “Judges are fact based and evidence based,” he said. “We know that Justice Clarence Thomas is a very different person than Justice Sonia Sotomayor, but I do think that with most election results they would agree as to what the answer was.” But he worries that politicians might refuse to accept the Court’s decision. “The judicial process is going to be slower than the Twitter process,” Foley told me. “If the Twitter process forces or causes politicians to dig in, then can a unanimous judiciary unstick the politicians?”

The Twelfth Amendment of the Constitution gives Congress final say over who becomes president. In some instances, the procedures for how Congress handles election disputes are clear. If there are three or more candidates and nobody wins a majority of electors, for example, the House decides who wins. But if it’s a two-way race where both candidates claim an Electoral College majority, Foley said, it’s unclear which chamber has the last word.

What would happen next is anyone’s guess. But it wouldn’t be pretty. “I think you could have a long, drawn-out crisis in which our institutions lose credibility,” Levitsky said. Even if Trump were eventually forced out, “we’ll be left with a situation where maybe 30, 35 percent of our population believes the election was rigged.”

It’s in this kind of crisis that Michael Cohen’s fears are most likely to be realized. “I could imagine some rioting, some civil violence,” said John Carey, a political scientist at Dartmouth who studies comparative democracy and who cofounded Bright Line Watch, which monitors the health of American democracy. “We just can’t imagine all the possibilities.”

Hopefully, we won’t have to. Trump may lose decisively, rendering his claims of foul play empty. He may win. Or he may lose a tight race and cry foul, but still ultimately accept defeat. In the aftermath of the midterms, for example, Trump groused about fraud without seriously contesting the outcome.

Trump, of course, wasn’t on the ballot in 2018. Losing in 2020 would be far more personal. But even if Trump refused to concede, it doesn’t mean he’d manage to remain in office. John Roberts has worried publicly about the credibility of the Supreme Court. It seems unlikely that he would “save” Trump from a less-than-ambiguous electoral defeat. Democratic governors in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin form a formidable roadblock against local Republican power grabs. Faced with incontrovertible evidence that Trump lost—and no plausible pathway to mess with the outcome—Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, and Mike Pence would probably tell Trump to pack his bags.

And if Trump still refused to go?

“I’m not sure which branch it would be, but it must be the case that somebody would be responsible for taking one elbow and somebody would be responsible for taking the other elbow,” Carey said. “I can imagine the feet going kind of crazy. But I like to think that it would be without too much damage to anyone.”

https://washingtonmonthly.com/magaz...could-lose-the-election-and-remain-president/

The Reichstag Fire 1933​

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So how many babies will there be in early 2021 in the U.S?

All those physically mature adults with high mortality salience who have been isolating in quarantine for covid ... Will there be a new baby boom?

lambo.com said:

So how many babies will there be in early 2021 in the U.S?

All those physically mature adults with high mortality salience who have been isolating in quarantine for covid ... Will there be a new baby boom?

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LOL... We were just laughing about this the other day.

We were wondering whether filings for divorces would skyrocket and whether there would be another baby boom - and would that boom then result in some divorce filings be retracted (at least for a little while.)

GILSAN said:

Black Lives Matter

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#DontBeADomesticTerrorist

GILSAN said:

BLM

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GILSAN said:

BREAKING: White Couple Charged with Assault After Viral Video Shows Pregnant Woman Defending Herself with Firearm in Confrontation with Black Woman

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Disgusting. The Marxists and their brainless minions are winning. They will divide the country by race and by creed. Reading in the comments how many white people say they go out of their way to avoid black people now - because they don't want this kind of trouble.

Imagine being an employer. Would you want to hire a worker who can bring your whole business down if he becomes dissatisfied? All he has to do is shout racism and your life is over.

Her husband was fired from Oakland University as well - for defending his pregnant wife!

Completely depraved and cowardly people in charge.

Anyone who thinks a country like this will still be a leading nation in 20 years is living in dreamland.

German Politician Forcibly Removed from Parliament after Slamming Left-Wing Stuttgart riots
Independent Member of Parliament Dr. Heinrich Fiechtner was forcibly removed from Stuttgart Germany’s state parliament by police on Wednesday after he slammed the left-wing parties running Germany.

Dr. Fiechtner accused them of “having blood on their hands” for flooding the country with migrants who screamed “Allahu Akbar” as they took part in the massive riots in Stuttgart last week. Fiechtner’s powerful speech has been widely condemned by left-wing politicians and media as “hate speech“. “Hate speech” is the Marxist version of Islamic blasphemy laws.

State Parliamentary President, Turkish Muslim Muhterem Aras from the communist Greens Party, went so far as to expel the politician during the debate over the Stuttgart riots, even calling the police to remove him. He was also suspended for five sessions of parliament.

Hilarious, the Germans try to put their Nazi past behind them but 70 years later they stop the free speech in Parliament...