These Insurrection Jan 6th Capitol Hearings

[thugler]

Isn't someone like tucker Carlson more of a threat than a run of the mill republican candidate? Name recognition and star quality were what made trump work. He was from outside the republican system. I see more non traditional candidates becoming more common in future. Carlson vs the rock or something like that.

[Ferris]

Several wrestlers have had careers in national and state level politics. It does all come down to name recognition - trump didn't invent it but he's the most obvious beneficiary.

[shoulders]

This is a guy who joked about sexually assaulting people, promoted white supremacists openly, mocked the disabled in front of an audience of thousands.

People still voted Trump because they thought he was going to give them what they wanted.

Finding out (from their political adversaries) that he disobeyed some rules and incited a riot is going to make no major difference. If anything it reinforces his maverick get things done approach in their eyes.

People want to break down the barriers of intransigence and institutional power that the Democrats represent... And they're not wrong to desire that. As usual they are just mugged off into backing the wrong horse.

This is what happens when you barely allow left wing politics into a national conversation.

To end the dynamic there is only the shift to the real fight, people vs. capital.

[wrec]

As a non-expert casual observer my expectation is that even if Trump is barred from running and/or abandoned by the party, 2024 will see an extreme MAGA-type candidate in place anyway, and against a background of gerrymandering etc, in many areas Republican losses will be challenged by unprecedented armed protest and legal challenges. I think the Republicans are prepared to go to any lengths to seize national power and won't let it go again (while not worrying about unshakably blue states), and Biden will be the last Democrat president. Is that scenario, or any part of it, unlikely?

[Ferris]

As a non-expert casual observer my expectation is that even if Trump is barred from running and/or abandoned by the party, 2024 will see an extreme MAGA-type candidate in place anyway, and against a background of gerrymandering etc, in many areas Republican losses will be challenged by unprecedented armed protest and legal challenges. I think the Republicans are prepared to go to any lengths to seize national power and won't let it go again (while not worrying about unshakably blue states), and Biden will be the last Democrat president. Is that scenario, or any part of it, unlikely?

No, that is my opinion also.

They came worryingly close to overturning the election, and a handful of people in a few boring jobs stopped it. Those people have been hounded out and replaced with wild-eyed lunatics so next time an election "disagreement" for Wayne County goes to the election board, it's operated by by nutcases in MAGA hats who will give the answer they want to give.

2020 was like a dry run that exposed the potential failure points in US democracy and nutters have been quietly but determinedly undermining them since.

This kind of stuff (clarifying the role of the VP in counting electoral college votes, all that guff about "alternative state delegates", mandatory neutrality on election boards etc) should have been legislated yesterday, instead Congress is waffling on about what somebody's chief of staffs lawyers assistant thinks they heard 18 months ago. It's ludicrously myopic but oh well.

[Ant Farm Keyboard]

[somersetchris]

They came worryingly close to overturning the election

In what way? They bang on about it endlessly in the media, but when it came to actual court cases which deal in facts and evidence, every single challenge was shot down because they had nothing. Multiple investigations took place, and zero evidence of vote tampering was found.

What they had in Trump was someone disconnected with reality who had no conception of a world in which he couldn't just throw a tantrum and get what he wanted. The problem is if they go for any career politician they will have some idea of how things work, and what is and isn't possible. It did not occur to Trump that him leading a mob of armed supporters on a march to the Capitol in order to seize power was something he couldn't actually do. Even the most demonic Ted Cruz / Ron de Santis understands that limits of behaviour exist and you can't just deny reality when it doesn't favour you. You have to be a special level of stupid to say 'can we just bomb the hurricane?' So they would need to find someone as deranged as Trump who is still able to be manipulated and spout the kind of rhetoric the far right want, which is a tough proposition.

Not suggesting they can't win again or won't go hard MAGA next time, but finding 'the next Trump' is going to be a lot, lot harder than they think it is. 

[Pdine]

In what way? They bang on about it endlessly in the media, but when it came to actual court cases which deal in facts and evidence, every single challenge was shot down because they had nothing. Multiple investigations took place, and zero evidence of vote tampering was found. 

The plan they had (as I learned from these hearings) was to have alternative slates of electors for each of the closely contested states (Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, etc), which they did organise and submit. Then they would get Pence to declare that for those seven states there were no 'appointed electors' (because of the confusion caused by the duplicate sets) and that therefore Trump wins because he has the majority of the uncontroversial counts. When the Democrats inevitably would have complained, Pence was to say: "Fair enough, that means no-one has won and the matter goes to the House" which is apparently the formal protocol. In the House, the Republicans just had the votes to elect Trump if the State counts were declared moot. It was all laid out by John Eastman in his memos:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_memos

It would probably have failed ultimately, as even Eastman recognised in his annotations of the memos. It might have worked though; it wasn't impossible, and it was a better shot than just letting the official counts stand, because they clearly showed Biden had won. What would almost certainly have happened, though, if Pence hadn't been resolute enough to tell Trump to fuck off, was that there would have been serious civil unrest and consequent deaths of protesters and police. If the unrest was serious enough, it could have ended either in actual civil war or martial law. Either way, there was a real threat to the peaceful transfer of power, and Pence was the main reason that failed.

[Ferris]

^yeah, that, plus a lot of other stuff around states approving/rejecting their slates of electors in the first place. If you get a county full of democratic votes (ie any city), if the election board for that county rejects the votes and has them discounted from the state's total, then the republicans likely win the state.

That nearly happened in Michigan and Wisconsin, but for 2 or 3 votes from career bureaucrats. Those bureaucrats have been replaced with MAGA nutters now.

The system is perilously close to breaking - if somebody really made a concerted effort to break it, they could do and the legislature is so benign (and SCOTUS will find a reason to allow it to happen anyway). It's a mess, and a dangerous one.