Tim Wirth was one of the finest senators ever to serve in the Senate. When he says something, I listen closely. He is near the top of my list, along with Al Gore and Hillary Clinton of people who will never go down in history as great presidents because we live in a society that is too apathetic to hold their responsibility to be informed citizens sacred. I’ve heard Mr. Wirth tell the story of how he and I think Al Gore would turn up the thermostat in the hearing rooms in the first senate hearings on Global Warming in the late 80’s so the cameras would see people sweating.
He has written a newseek article that is really scary. I still maintain that we are continuing to underestimate the evil, danger, and treachery of Trump, Barr, the fascists on the Supreme Court, and the entire GOP fascist cult. The demonstrations in the streets we’ve seen recently will need to be dwarfed by the demonstrations we will have to hold if this possibility of how they can lose the election and still hold on to power comes to pass. This is nothing less than a coup.
From the article:
… 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.
… 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...
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….
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….
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...
12 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….
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….
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."
We can not hide in the corner and hope this doesn’t happen. By exposing this possibility before it happens we lessen the chance they can pull it off.
Keep in mind this is a broken glass election. We all must be prepared to crawl over broken glass covered in Coronavirus to vote and to get everyone we know to vote against the GOP fascist cult that so threatens the future for all of us.
RESIST!