“Just say that the corrupt election leaves the rest to me and the members of Congress R. . “
That’s what President Donald Trump told Justice Decomponentment officials as part of his insistent crusade of tension to claim the 2020 election as “corrupt” so that he and his Republican acolytes in Congress can also simply cancel the effects and keep him in power, according to notes from a verbal statement. exchange released Friday by a House committee. We might be used to this happening in other countries, yet many Americans think it can never happen here either. This is shocking, but unfortunately it’s not surprising, at least to us. .
In March 2019, we wrote a column for USA TODAY titled “A trump shot if you lose in 2020?With all the criteria that have been broken, don’t rule it out. We hate to say, “we’ll tell you,” but we did – at a time when most people rejected the concept as too far-fetched to be considered. It’s not that we’re so prophetic. It’s just that we understood the authoritarian nature of Trump and the weaknesses of our electoral system.
After last November, Trump’s coup attempt took many forms: He summoned election officials from Michigan and Pennsylvania to the White House to force them to replace the effects in their states; begged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes to cancel Joe Biden’s victory there; and demanded that Vice President Mike Pence block the last level of the election: the ceremonial recount of Electoral College votes in Congress.
He also incited insurgents to make a typhoon at the U. S. Capitol. U. S. To physically save him from this most recent step on January 6. You may just see videos taken that day over and over again and gasps of horror. And while all of this is going on, Trump is harassing Justice Department officials. for believing his “big lie” that the election had been stolen from him.
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The guy who knew Trump best, his former lawyer Michael Cohen, tried to warn us and testified before Congress more than a year and a part before the election: If Trump loses, “there will never be a nonviolent transition of power. “Only a handful of us have taken this seriously, after all, there were 10 outgoing presidents before Trump who had lost their re-election and passed the keys to the Oval Office.
But Trump evidently doesn’t respect constitutional norms. That’s why we’ve tried to sound the alarm. Those who mocked the prospect of Trump’s refusal to settle for defeat have been lulled by patriotic notions of American democratic traditions.
Let’s be clear: the challenge is no longer just Trump. Even after the Invasion of the Capitol, when their lives were threatened, 8 Republican senators and 139 Republican House members voted against confirming unequivocal election school vote totals in one. or more states. And despite what the world has noticed and heard, Republican leaders are now selling an incredibly distorted picture of what happened on January 6.
Goldfeder and Mitchell: A win shot if you lose in 2020?With all the criteria you broke, they exclude you
The cumulative result of Trump’s incessant lies about the election and the GOP’s distortion of the insurgency is the absurd trust he gained among many Trump supporters, leading us to our current concerns. the motion in several states to impeach experienced and fair election officials and put the final word in the hands of partisan lawmakers.
Take Georgia as just one example. Republican state lawmakers are conducting an “investigation” into Fulton County’s election directors. Fulton, the city of Atlanta, has a massive Democratic electorate. Is it conceivable that in the upcoming presidential or governoral elections, the state’s electoral council, whose members are now appointed through the Republican legislature, will simply declare fraud and nullify the totals in that county?It turns out that the post-2020 law gives them the strength to do so.
We are also concerned that January 6 is just the prelude to 2024, there is no explanation as to why domestic terrorists will not attempt to borrow the upcoming elections by attacking, for example, various state capitals while counting the electoral college votes. The attack on the Capitol was foreshadowed through armed actions in the halls of the Michigan Legislature through very similar crowds several months earlier. As complicated as January 6 is, multiple insurgencies in various states may simply disappoint the upcoming presidential election.
Connie Schultz: On January 6th, I feared for my country, my colleagues, my husband, I had no idea how serious he was.
In these circumstances, the prospect of free, fair and democratic elections in the long term in the United States is not guaranteed, although we are not by nature alarmists, we must recognize the seriousness of this permanent risk to the republic. I hope we are wrong, as we had hoped in our original article two years ago, but we are not dependent on the idealism of apple pie. maintain our democracy.
Jerry H. Goldfeder (@jerrygoldfeder), a nationally identified election lawyer who teaches election law at Fordham Law School, was chairman of the New York State Bar Association task force on the 2020 election and a representative of cnn’s 2016 miniseries “Race for the White House. “Lincoln Mitchell (@LincolnMitchell) teaches at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and is the one in several books, adding” The Paradox of Democracy Promotion”.
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