The Runback: In Writing
There *was* an attempted coup planned for January 6th. But it's not the one you're thinking of.
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Chalk Session
Welcome to Chalk Session, where we break down and analyze political commercials. On this week's show, we analyze a spot from John King, Democratic Candidate for Governor of Maryland
News and Politics
This is the Weirdest Thing on the Maryland Politics Internet: Just when you thought you've seen everything, radical left-winger Max Socol gives us this.
What does “Demonstrate Your Good Faith” mean? When it comes to vaccines, will Dan Cox continue to disobey his conscience, and go above God?
Disunity From Unity: Local High School Collaborates with Left-Wing Political Group. This is the type of chaos and disunity that Anne Arundel County Public Schools are creating with their Unity Days.
Carrying All the Water: The Baltimore Sun Editorial Page is doing what they can to justify Democratic gerrymandering.
Sports
The OCHO: Week 13: Take a look at our newest column about the NFL. Take a look for it every Monday.
NFL Mystery Box: Exploring the NFL weekend in style.
Let's Talk About the Fake Slide: The NCAA should be commended (for once) on acting quickly to stop a problem before it started.
The Monday Thought
A lot of people on my side of the aisle were mad at me for calling the events of January 6th an attempted coup. I did it more than once.
Little did we know how right we were. It’s in writing. And it’s not about the physical coup.
As part of the materials that former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows turned over to the January 6th Committee was a PowerPoint presentation that laid out exactly how they were going to justify it. Somehow, this has been floating around since January and nobody noticed it.
Now that Meadows turned this over to the Committee, it has gained a lot of attraction. So we can tell you exactly how these clowns wanted to execute their coup. And we have the receipts.
Let’s take some time with each one of these five batshit recommendations:
Fine. Brief Congress. Go ahead. Waiting until January 5th to decide this was a stupid time to do it (unless you were up to something), but whatever.
Declare a “National Security Emergency?” Presumably this would be something akin to using the National Emergency Act to declare a National Emergency. There is nothing in law that refers to a “National Security Emergency” in law anywhere. Presumably Trump could have declared such an emergency, he declared eleven of them during his Administration, including one after the Election. And yet, by January 5th , no such declaration was in place. This could also have been a pretext to declare Martial Law under the Insurrection Act.
There is not, has not been any evidence of foreign influence on electronic voting systems. Z-e-r-o evidence.
There is no law that allows anybody to “declare electronic voting in all states invalid”, especially ex post facto as the Administration wanted to do;
We’ve got two things happening here:
Counting only “LEGAL & Genuine Paper Ballots” under the guise of #4 is just as illegal as it is to throw out all the Electronic Ballots;
The “Constitutional Remedy” of course deals with the Counting of the Electoral College ballots on January 6th and using the Electoral Count Act to interfere.
We also get a slide that details exactly what the Administration wanted Vice-President Mike Pence to do in all of this mishigas.
Again, three galactically stupid and morally outrageous options are provided here:
The idea of Pence seated “Republican Electors over the objections of Democrats” is ludicrous and insane. First off, I’m not entirely sure Pence had the authority the Administration thought he had to do that. Secondly, there were no “Republican Electors” to seat. They didn’t exist. They had no legal authority to be Electors:
Once the Electoral College has met and every state’s election has been certified, there is no constitutional provision for an “alternate slate” of electors. A group of people who gather in a room and claim they are electors, as state-party-backed Republicans did in a few states on Monday, have no more authority than if the people reading this article decided that they, too, wanted to be members of the Electoral College.
While the Administration thought this was a cute way to prolong the process, they were very clearly making shit up as they went along at this point.
Rejecting some electors but not others was another instance of “Pence can’t do that.”
Delaying the decision was also not legal under the Electoral Count Act. Also, can you imagine the insane plan this was to start with? The Administration wanted to throw out Electronic Ballots, recount only paper ballots, and have a new Electoral College vote (?) before January 20th? Do they realize how insane that sounds?
This was the process that Meadows and Company wanted to have for the “legitimate ballot counting”
This. Is. Insane. There were 155,485,078 cast during the election. To count all of these ballots in the two week time frame, that’s 11,106,077 a day, 462,753 and hour, 7,712 per minute, and 128 per second if you counted 24 hours a day, seven days a week from January 6th through January 19th.
That’s not taking into account human error, legal challenges, and whatever else naturally happens.
This was an unsustainable, bonkers, and impractical scam on its face. If it was implemented it would have led to Nancy Pelosi becoming Acting President of the United States under the 20th Amendment until the whole mess got sorted out.
Thank God Mike Pence said no.
But let’s take the mechanics out of this.
What we have here is the President of the United States and his administration wanting to uncork a plan that would throw out the votes of those who proportionally voted against him and count only votes of those who proportionally voted for him. A plan that is undemocratic and best, and fully evil at worst.
If a President and his administration attempting to stay in power through dubious extralegal means despite losing an election isn’t an attempted coup, I don’t know what is.
The mere presence of this document isn't the smoking gun everyone is making it out to be. Staffers create dumb and stupid presentations all the time - it's part of the job. Moreso when your boss is a crazy nutjob!
Now - if this was actually presented to Trump or if White House officials actually tried to implement this, then we have a problem! We also have a problem if the White House coordinated in anyway with the protesters. But, really, a PowerPoint on options to stay in power?
As it stands now, we have a thought experiment in how to undermine American democracy. Stupid, idiotic, self-destructive - absolutely. Proof of a grand conspiracy - hardly.