What Trump Hath Wrought
Today, Louie Gohmert, a Texas congressman often cited by “grassroots Republicans” (aka grass-smoking populists) as some sort of constitutional hero, is leading a new lawsuit claiming that Mike Pence has, and should assert, constitutional authority as Vice President of the United States to decide, in direct defiance of the results of the electoral college vote, “which” electoral college voters ought to be counted or discounted. In other words, Gohmert and his friends are trying to get a federal judge to grant Mike Pence the power to directly determine the result of his own election. You know, like the rulers can do in Russia, China, Iran, and the like.
Republican polling organization Rasmussen is adopting the same position, urging Pence to simply refuse to open the electoral votes from “battleground states,” meaning states in which Trump lost by a close margin. Their proposal literally rationalizes this demand on the grounds that “more than 70% of Republicans believe” that the results in those states are fraudulent. In other words, Pence should be allowed to directly decide the result of his own election because a majority of his party’s supporters believe his loss was unfair.
Trump’s cult has “crossed the Rubicon,” as another of Trump’s brilliant allies, Kelli Ward, recently put it. They are directly demanding a Trump putsch, the establishment of nothing less than absolute power — they want Trump to declare a military dictatorship plain and simple, using Pence as his quasi-constitutional instrument of legitimacy.
“Oh, come on,” you object. “They are only trying to correct the election results.”
Right. They are only trying to help Trump establish the authority to decide, unilaterally, which election results should count and which should not. This is how it happens. From “But Hillary” to “Trump Forever” in a New York values minute.
Could someone please just remove all of these people from office, from public life, and from the realm of semi-sane humanity, permanently? Have they not been allowed to destroy enough? Do none of them have spouses, fathers, or old friends to slap their faces and shout, “Wake the hell up, man”?
