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The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel reports from Wisconsin where the wingnuts have completely lost their minds:

When Wisconsin State Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R) arrived at Saturday’s Republican caucus, he drove past a half-dozen protesters with “Toss Vos” signs, playing Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” on a karaoke speaker. When he walked inside, a four-page resolution condemning him was being passed around the room. And when he stood up to address fellow Republicans, Vos was standing a few feet away from his primary challenger.

“Within one month of a Republican governor being sworn into office in January of 2023, we are going to have election integrity, where we don’t have unsecured drop boxes at all in the state of Wisconsin,” Vos promised. “We need to make sure that our candidates running in 2022 focus on who our real adversaries are. And that’s not us. It’s the other guys!”

After that, the anti-Vos resolution was crushed — but it wasn’t the first, and it didn’t end the primary challenge. Fifteen months after the 2020 election, conservative anger at Donald Trump’s loss, and the idea Republicans could still wipe it off the books, has dominated local GOP politics. It’s not enough to question whether the election was fair, or whether Biden should be in the White House. 

“I would like for the Wisconsin Legislature to take a roll-call vote and determine whether the assemblymen and women stand with the people,” said Adam Steen, a conservative challenger to Vos. “The decertification is not to pull back the presidency. It’s almost a litmus test.”

In just the last four weeks, a state legislator who believes the election can be decertified has jumped into the race for governor; former lieutenant governor Rebecca Kleefisch (R), who has led in polls of that primary, would not say if she would have certified the 2020 election; and a Vos-appointed special counsel told the legislature that it “ought to take a very hard look” at decertifying President Biden’s 10 electoral votes in the state.

“Theyare leapfrogging over each other to get the far, far right,” Wisconsin’s Gov. Tony Evers (D) said in an interview. “They may want to forget about that, when whoever wins the primary runs against me. But we won’t let them forget about that.”

In other states, especially after the filibuster-assisted death of federal voting rights legislation, Democrats have been wary about focusing on election issues at the expense of inflation, gas prices or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

But in the states where the presidential election was closest, where the Trump campaign and conservative groups went to court to stop Biden’s victory, the topic is inescapable. Evers has made “democracy” one of the pillars of his reelection campaign, running as a bulwark against Republican election reform plans that would ban drop boxes, restrict absentee voting and abolish the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission — created by Republicans seven years ago.

The demands have grown louder and more numerous since last June, when Vos appeared at the state GOP’s convention and announced that he would answer concerns about the election by appointing Michael J. Gableman, a former state Supreme Court justice, as a special counsel with the power to investigate it.

“This is not a partisan effort,” Gableman told the Republican audience. Nine months later, Gableman is still investigating the election, on a contract that was just extended through the end of April. His report on the election, issued last month and presented to legislators at a March 1 hearing, suggested that the election had been compromised, by everything from the election commission lifting a rule that required monitors to witness votes cast by nursing home residents, to election management grants from the Center for Tech and Civic Life. 

The Gableman investigation, demanded by conservative activists, had kept pressure on election officials and generated explosive headlines — and were interpreted, in some conservative media, as breakthroughs on the way to a full-scale election audit leading to decertification. That, say Democrats, has made it easier for them to motivate their base and open donor wallets, in a midterm cycle when that’s traditionally hard to pull off. In 2021, said Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler, the state party raised more than $10 million, obliterating the fundraising record in an off-year.Advertisement

“The Republican strategy of having highly public fights about the most extreme ideas that would be the most dangerous to democracy has been a menace to Constitution, but a gift to the Democratic Party,” Wikler said in an interview. “The really dangerous foes are the ones who keep their plans secret until they execute them. But the GOP is publicly debating whether they have the legal authority to decertify the 2020 election. Every time they come up with a plan to jail mayors or dismantle the elections commission, it says this is a five-alarm fire.”

At Republican events this week, there was brimming enthusiasm for wins in 2022, and plenty of discussion about 2020. In Racine, before Vos spoke, state Sen. Van H. Wanggaard (R) told the audience that “my personal feeling is that our previous president should have won the election,” though he didn’t “believe that there was widespread fraud that occurred” in Wisconsin.

“They didn’t bring in buckets full of ballots and shove them through in the middle of the night,” said Wanggaard, pointing to a debunked story from Georgia — that a box of ballots in one counting room was actually a suitcase of fraudulent ballots added to the count. “They may have done other things, I believe, that caused the Democrats — who have been sitting there for the last decade looking at what areas of our election law can they exploit — to take advantage.”Advertisement

On Friday, at a meeting of the conservative Rock River Patriots in Fort Atkinson, activists and candidates, including Steen, asked why their leaders in Madison had not acted in 2020 to prevent the election changes that Gableman was now calling illegal. Their special guest, rallying after losing his voice, was state Rep. Timothy S. Ramthun (R), who had entered the race for governor after Vos had undermined his report — which preceded Gableman’s — urging for the election to be decertified.

“The actions legislators are taking right now are Band-Aid approaches at best. It’s layering bureaucracy on top of existing bureaucracy,” said Ramthun. The audience of more than a hundred activists, meeting at a church, booed at mentions of the Republican “establishment,” and cheered when Ramthun said that he’d raised the $100,000 necessary to compete for the party’s endorsement at this summer’s convention.

“As a nation, we have to stop saying it’s unconstitutional to reclaim the electors, because constitutional experts are saying it is,” Ramthun, 65, said in an interview. “I think that the excuse makers are running out of excuses.”

Ramthun’s decision to run for governor, which he announced at a rally with MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, didn’t dramatically alter the GOP’s view of that race. Kleefisch — who won two statewide races as the running mate of former governor Scott Walker (R) — was by far the best-known GOP gubernatorial candidate in this month’s Marquette Law poll of the race. Just 15 percent of Republican voters could identify Ramthun, and just 5 percent started out with a favorable view of the two-term legislator. And while Trump had praised the Gableman report, his statements urging Republicans to decertify the election didn’t mention Ramthun.

“I feel confident that Robin will exercise his moral duty to follow up on Justice Gableman’s findings,” Trump said in a statement last week. “I would imagine that there can only be a Decertification of Electors.” Other Republicans would not go as far as that. But Ramthun had, and spoke plainly about how voting to pull back Biden’s electors, even if it did not restore the presidency to Trump, would put Wisconsin on record that the president did not win the state.

“He goes from 306 electors to 296, right?” Ramthun said in an interview, shortly before Gableman issued the report. “If it becomes a constitutional crisis, that’s what they deserve. They’re the ones who cheated, not me.”Advertisement

After the report came out, Ramthun said that he had been vindicated. It had been impossible to imagine a special counsel being appointed to study the election, until conservatives pushed Vos to do it. It seemed unthinkable that mayors who presided over high turnout that Republicans called suspicious would be held accountable, until Gableman threatened them with jail time. The people who considered decertification to be impossible now had to confront a special investigator, whose term had just been extended, telling them that it wasn’t.

“I’m not the only one getting the scrutiny and criticism anymore,” said Ramthun, who was greeted with news stories calling him a “conspiracy theorist” when he launched the campaign. “Now there’s two ‘conspiracy theorists’ in the same foxhole. It’s nice to not be alone.” 

I have been wondering what in the world Trump is thinking with his daily email updates of 2020 election “fraud” allegedly being found in the swing states. Apparently, it’s feeding the cult what they want to hear.

You know it’s going to result in chaos in November. That, of course, is the plan.

The WSJ has the first report on what he’s saying. And it’s as self-serving as you might imagine:

Former Attorney General William Barr writes in a new book that former President Donald Trump has “shown he has neither the temperament nor persuasive powers to provide the kind of positive leadership that is needed,” and that it is time for Republicans to focus on rising new leaders in the party.

The release of the former attorney general’s 600-page book, “One Damn Thing After Another,” is coming as Mr. Trump, who remains the GOP’s dominant figure, contemplates another presidential run. Mr. Barr writes that he was convinced that Mr. Trump could have won re-election in 2020 if he had “just exercised a modicum of self-restraint, moderating even a little of his pettiness.”

“The election was not ‘stolen,’ ” Mr. Barr writes. “Trump lost it.” Mr. Barr urges conservatives to look to “an impressive array of younger candidates” who share Mr. Trump’s agenda but not his “erratic personal behavior.” He didn’t mention any of those candidates by name.

A spokesman for Mr. Trump didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Mr. Barr’s book. Last summer the former president called his former attorney general “a disappointment in every sense of the word.”

Mr. Barr’s memoir adds to a growing list of books by senior Trump administration officials and journalists about the former president. It is scheduled for release March 8 by the William Morrow imprint of HarperCollins. Both HarperCollins and The Wall Street Journal are owned by News Corp.

The recollections and conclusions by Mr. Barr are notable because he was one of Mr. Trump’s most powerful cabinet secretaries and was once such a close ally that Democrats accused him of acting more like the president’s defense attorney than an apolitical law-enforcement official.

Mr. Barr, a respected figure in Washington conservative circles, returned to head the Justice Department in February 2019 after Mr. Trump ousted his first attorney general, former Sen. Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican. Mr. Barr served in the same post at the end of the George H.W. Bush administration and was a corporate lawyer in between.

During much of Mr. Barr’s time in the Trump administration, some said he protected the president at the expense of the Justice Department’s independence, especially over his handling of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Mr. Barr issued his own summary of Mr. Mueller’s investigative report depicting the results in a way that Mr. Mueller and others described as misleading or overly favorable to Mr. Trump. He also worked in the ensuing months to undermine some of the prosecutions spawned by the Mueller investigation. An example was his decision to drop the criminal case against Michael Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser.

Mr. Barr has said that he intervened to correct what he saw as overreach by the prosecutors and flaws in the department’s approach to those cases, a stance he maintains in his book.

“Predictably our motion to dismiss the charges led to an election-year media onslaught, flogging the old theme that I was doing this as a favor to Trump,” Mr. Barr writes. “But I concluded the handling of the Flynn matter by the FBI had been an abuse of power that no responsible AG could let stand.”

Mr. Barr also describes times when he was privately frustrated by Mr. Trump’s aggressive style and constant comments on the Justice Department’s work.

He provides the details of a contentious meeting on Dec. 1 in the Oval Office hours after Mr. Barr said publicly that there wasn’t evidence of widespread voter fraud in the presidential election that could reverse Joe Biden’s victory, contradicting Mr. Trump’s claims.

“This is killing me—killing me. This is pulling the rug right out from under me,” Mr. Trump shouted at Mr. Barr, according to the book. “He stopped for a moment and then said, ‘You must hate Trump. You would only do this if you hate Trump.’ ”

Mr. Barr writes that he reminded Mr. Trump that he had “sacrificed a lot personally to come in to help you when I thought you were being wronged,” but that the Justice Department had not been able to verify any of his legal team’s assertions about mass voter fraud.

Mr. Trump then launched into a list of other grievances he had with his attorney general: that the federal prosecutor Mr. Barr ordered to review the origins of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Russia probe that preceded the Mueller report hadn’t released his findings before the 2020 election, and that Mr. Barr declined to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey after a department watchdog rebuked him for sharing memos that contained sensitive information about his interactions with Mr. Trump, a complaint brought up repeatedly by the president.

Mr. Barr countered by offering to submit his resignation, according to the book. “Accepted!” Mr. Trump yelled, banging his palm on the table. “Leave and don’t go back to your office. You are done right now. Go home!” White House lawyers persuaded Mr. Trump not to follow through with Mr. Barr’s ouster.

Mr. Barr resigned a few weeks later, bringing a tumultuous end to his time in office.

After the election, Mr. Barr said that Mr. Trump “lost his grip” and that his false claims of voter fraud led to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters trying to thwart the certification of Mr. Biden’s November, 2020, victory.

“The absurd lengths to which he took his ‘stolen election’ claim led to the rioting on Capitol Hill,” Mr. Barr writes.

That’s good. It’s better to have Republicans arguing against Trump’s restoration than for him. Huzzah. Better late than never.

But for all of his alleged heroics in this story, he actually makes a damning admission. He says he “sacrificed a lot personally to come in to help you when I thought you were being wronged” by which he clearly means the Russia investigation. Setting aside the fact that he came into the office with a preconceived belief in its legitimacy, there was a Special Counsel running that investigation which was done explicitly to take it out of the realm of normal political influence. And here he is openly admitting that he took the job in order to protect the president — and he did! He acted as the president’s lawyer over and over again. He was the worst Attorney General in history and that includes Ed Meese, which I didn’t think was possible.

There is no excuse for Bill Barr. He swallowed the Fox News poison and jumped at the chance to help that orange monster evade responsibility. He knew Trump was inept and unfit but he thought it was worth it to advance his own agenda. In the end he finally just jumped ship like the rat he was when he realized it had all gone way too far.

This piece by David French is making the rounds and for good reason. This is just creepy:

On Thursday night in Castle Rock, Colorado, a group called “FEC United” (FEC stands for faith, education, and commerce) held a “town hall” meeting that featured a potpourri of GOP candidates and election conspiracy theorists. Most notably, the event included John Eastman, the Claremont scholar who authored the notorious legal memos that purported to justify the decertification and reversal of the 2020 election results.

During the meeting, a man named Shawn Smith accused Colorado secretary of state Jena Griswold of election misconduct. “You know, if you’re involved in election fraud, then you deserve to hang,” he said. “Sometimes the old ways are the best ways.” 

“I was accused of endorsing violence,” he went on. “I’m not endorsing violence, I’m saying once you put your hand on a hot stove, you get burned.” As soon as he said, “you deserve to hang,” an audience member shouted “Yeah!” and applause filled the room. You can watch the moment here. 

The moment, almost entirely ignored by the national media, is worth noting on its own terms, but perhaps the most ominous aspect of the evening was its location—a church called The Rock. 

If you think it’s remotely unusual that a truly extremist event (which included more than one person who’d called for hanging his political opponents) was held at a church, then you’re not familiar with far-right road shows that are stoking extremism in church after church at event after event. 

Last week, the New York Times’s Robert Draper wrote a must-read profile of former President Donald Trump’s one-time national security adviser Michael Flynn. Before January 6, Flynn advocated military intervention, including martial law, to assist in overturning the election results.

During the Biden administration, he’s taken his show on the road, launching a “ReAwaken America” tour that features conferences that combine “elements of a tent revival, a trade fair and a sci-fi convention.” It is striking to see Flynn’s use of Christian channels and venues to spread his apocalyptic message of election corruption and national doom.

Draper caught up with the tour at Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona, where 3,500 people had shown up to see Flynn and his collection of speakers. Flynn, Draper says, is “the single greatest draw besides Trump himself” in the “parallel universe” of the Make America Great Again movement.

Intrigued by the Dream City Church reference in Draper’s article, I went to the ReAwaken America tour page to see where Flynn was headed next. The first thing you notice is that the tour is sponsored by Charisma News, a charismatic Christian outlet. The next thing you should notice is the list of upcoming venues: Trinity Gospel Temple in Ohio, Awaken Church in California, The River Church in Oregon, and Burnsview Baptist Church in South Carolina.

I wish I could say that this surprises me. But the Christian right has been a toxic influence on this country’s politics for many a year. I’m not even sure it’s about religion anymore. I think it’s just pure tribalism at this point and the only ideology driving them is loathing for “the other” whoever that may be. And they are losing touch with reality.

That kind of blows his co-conspirators defense that they were just “sending it back to the states” doesn’t it?

In any case, Pence never had the power. They’re trying to reform the Electoral Count Act because Trump pretended that he did and incited an insurrection:

The bipartisan reform of the Electoral Count Act would make it more difficult for members of Congress to object to certification. (Of course, what will probably happen is that some GOP state legislature will overturn the will of the voters and certify bogus electors but I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it?)

Trump admitted what we’ve known all along. He wanted Mike Pence to overturn the election. As usual, he just said the quiet part our loud.

This is had to be done, I’m afraid. We may have the most notorious case of election fraud in American history on our hands:

The congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob has issued subpoenas to 14 individuals who cast bogus electoral votes for the former president in seven states won by Joe Biden in 2020.

The move comes as two Democratic attorneys general have asked federal prosecutors in recent days to investigate whether crimes were committed in assembling or submitting the “alternate” Trump slates. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco this week confirmed prosecutors’ consideration of what she termed the “fraudulent elector certifications.”

In a statement Friday, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the select committee investigating the Capitol attack, said the panel had obtained information that multiple advisers to former president Donald Trump or his campaign had used the actions of the bogus electors to “justify delaying or blocking the certification of the election during the Joint Session of Congress on January 6th, 2021.”

“The Select Committee is seeking information about attempts in multiple states to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including the planning and coordination of efforts to send false slates of electors to the National Archives,” Thompson said. “We believe the individuals we have subpoenaed today have information about how these so-called alternate electors met and who was behind that scheme.”

He encouraged the 14 individuals to cooperate so that the committee can “help ensure nothing like that day ever happens again.”

Ten of the subpoenaed individuals had gathered Dec. 14, 2020, the day of the electoral college vote, in the capitals of five states that Biden had won: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin. They declared themselves “duly elected and qualified” and sent signed certificates to Washington purporting to affirm Trump as the actual victor.

The remaining four individuals cast “alternate” electoral votes for Trump in Pennsylvania and New Mexico and sent certificates explicitly stating that they were to be considered only if the election results were upended.

At the time, Trump’s allies claimed that sending rival slates to Washington echoed a move by Democrats in a close race in Hawaii six decades earlier. They said they were merely locking in electors to ensure they would be available if courts determined that Trump had won any of those states.

But election experts have noted that unlike the Democrats in Hawaii in 1960, Trump had no plausible basis for challenging Biden’s clear and legitimate win in 2020. Multiple courts, recounts and audits have found no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

Here’s the story of the Hawaii situation back in 1960, which shows that Richard Nixon had much more integrity that Donald Trump:

— John F. Kennedy barely edged Richard Nixon in the 1960 popular vote, winning by fewer than 117,000 votes, or less than two-tenths of 1 percentage point. He won enough states, though, that when Congress convened on Jan. 6, 1961, to officially certify who would be inaugurated two weeks later, Kennedy had an undisputed lead of nearly 100 votes in the Electoral College.

That meant three disputed electoral votes from Hawaii, which could have been a source of controversy in a close contest and tested our political system, didn’t really matter.

How Nixon handled those disputed votes is worth remembering, however, at a time when President Donald Trump is telling his supporters that the only way he loses is if there’s rampant fraud, and lawyers around the country are scrambling to brush up on the intricacies of the Electoral Count Act of 1887.

Hawaii was a new state in 1960 holding its first presidential election — a concept that’s also worth remembering as the possibility of adding Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia to the union is portrayed as somehow outrageous. 

Turnout topped 93 percent in Hawaii. The state’s result was close, just as the nation’s was overall. Nixon initially appeared to be the winner by 141 votes, and the Republican governor declared him the winner. But a judge granted the Kennedy team’s request for a recount. As it dragged on, the judge rejected GOP attempts to stop the count. When the mid-December date came for the Electoral College to meet — this year it’s Dec. 14 — both Republican and Democratic electors sent their votes to Washington to be counted. 

Kennedy eventually was declared the winner in the Hawaii recount by 115 votes, but the two sets of certifications were waiting when the joint session of Congress convened. Democrats, including Rep. Daniel K. Inouye, were ready to lodge an objection if the GOP slate was counted, but the presiding officer — the Senate president, who also is the vice president: i.e., Nixon — pushed the issue aside.

“He resolved it in a rather statesmanlike way by using parliamentary procedure,” State University of New York professor James A. Gardner said in a recent webinar organized by the New York State Bar Association. “He asked for unanimous consent that the votes of the Democratic electors would count. So he resolved this against himself.”

Nixon wasn’t the first vice president who had to preside over the opening of electoral votes that declared his opponent the winner, and he wasn’t the last. The most recent was Al Gore, who had conceded the 2000 election after the Supreme Court stopped a recount in Florida, effectively handing the state’s electoral votes, and the presidency, to George W. Bush. At that joint session in 2001, House Democrats in the Congressional Black Caucus tried to object to the acceptance of Florida’s electoral votes. But their complaint did not have a Senate co-sponsor as required by law, and it was dismissed by Gore.

Bush’s victory hinged on 537 votes in one state also, as you’ll recall. Gore won the popular vote by over 500,000 votes.

Donald Trump lost by tens of thousands of votes in the states he was contesting and he lost the popular vote by 7 million votes. He has had to create the fantasy of a massive national conspiracy encompassing thousands of people at all levels of government, including members of his own party, to justify his claims that the election was stolen. And yet he has managed to convince tens of millions of his followers that it’s true. Some of them are now facing subpoenas for what they did, as they should. A few are already in jail.

When is it going to occur to these people that this man does not care about anyone but himself?

Greg Sargent spoke to an expert on the Electoral Count Act and the news isn’t good:

Here’s the unsettling reality: If the ECA isn’t revised, under certain scenarios, all it would take for a future effort to succeed is a single corrupt GOP governor and a GOP-controlled House of Representatives.

This pathway to a subverted 2024 election is spelled out in the new paper by legal scholar Matthew Seligman, who has written extensively about the ECA’s history and weaknesses, and the ways Trump tried to exploit them in 2020.

There are several routes for a future effort to succeed. Considering the likelihood of each is central to getting ECA reform right. Right now, efforts in Congress to revise the ECA are focused mainly on the possibility of a rogue House and Senate refusing to count legitimate electors, as Trump attempted to pull off in 2020.

This new paper offers another possibility. This one would simply require Republicans to capture the House and for the right Trumpist Republican to win a key swing-state governorship. Imagine that former senator David Perdue becomes Georgia governor, after winning a GOP primary against Gov. Brian Kemp, who is under fire from Trump supporters precisely because he refused to overturn the 2020 results. Imagine Speaker Kevin McCarthy controlling the House on Jan. 6, 2025.

If a Democrat won the state by a slim margin, and the election came down to it, Perdue could send a rogue slate of electors based on a fake pretext of election fraud, and the GOP-controlled House could simply count those electors. A Democratic Senate might object, but under the ECA, both chambers must object to a slate of electors to invalidate it, so it would stand.

Would courts intervene? Yes, they might command Perdue to send the rightful electors. But the paper suggests that at such a point, someone like Perdue — already far down the road of lawlessness — might ignore the court’s command and send the fake electors anyway. The GOP House could count them regardless of the court’s command, the paper posits. At that point the Supreme Court could decide this is a political question and decline to intervene. Game over.

Is this far-fetched? True, a lot would have to fall into place. But note that Perdue has explicitly said he wouldn’t have certified Joe Biden’s electors in 2020. That means he’s campaigning on an implicit openness to such a scheme. Given that implicit promise, the pressure on him to carry it out would be immense.

Also note that in swing states such as Pennsylvania, GOP candidates for governor are campaigning explicitly on their willingness to side with Trump’s lies about 2020. Would one execute such a scheme where GOP legislatures refused to before? We don’t know, but it’s certainly plausible. And do you want to rely on someone like Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis to do the right thing?

Similarly, well over 100 House Republicans already voted to invalidate Biden’s electors. Some are currently vowing to turn a GOP House into a 24/7 circus of insurrectionist conspiracy-mongering. Can anyone doubt the plausibility of a GOP House counting the fake electors? Still, the point here is not to argue this scenario is likely. It’s to understand the weaknesses in the system in order to reform it. And it’s obvious such glaring weaknesses are not tenable.

Here’s the conclusion that emerges: Reform must thwart corruption at both the state and congressional ends. At the state end, one emerging solution in the Senate would trigger heightened judicial review when a state government fails to follow preexisting procedures in appointing electors.

But as noted, a GOP governor could ignore this, and a GOP House could play along. So Seligman suggests a second backstop: In an ECA reform bill, Congress could explicitly direct the Supreme Court to review Congress’ count after the fact, making it less likely to decline to intervene. Other reforms to the state certification process are also worth considering. The imperative is to take potential corruption of the certification of electors seriously.

Meanwhile, at the congressional end, reform must address the other possible scenario floated above: a corrupt House and Senate refusing to count the correct electors sent by a non-corrupt governor and legislature.

Guarding against that requires raising the threshold for Congress to object to and invalidate electors, and making it ironclad that Congress must count electors that were legitimately certified.

Ultimately, getting ECA reform right will require balancing efforts to address all these threats. This is an extremely difficult problem. Some pundits are having a grand old time mocking those who are thinking through such scenarios. Their time would be more productively devoted to figuring out how to fix the system to avert such a meltdown, however unlikely it seems.

I don’t know how likely this is to happen either but I think one of the lessons of the past few years is that the Republicans have been poking at the weaknesses of our electoral system and they have found the holes. Maybe it will take Donald Trump to actually break through but they’re preparing the ground for his attack throughout the country at various levels. I would not be surprised in the least if they attempt this.

We have seen some tepid proposals to fix the ECA from some Republicans so it’s not entirely impossible that the Senate might be able to pass this. Maybe on some level even Mitch McConnell and his henchmen understand just what a threat this is and they will push reforms through. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

There have been so many unprecedented and weird goings-on in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election that I think everyone’s overwhelmed, so we sometimes miss the forest for the trees. The whole Kraken sideshow between Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, with the rivulets of black dye and shrill accusations that the long-dead former president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, had rigged the election, was so comically outlandish that I don’t think we fully understood the full scope of the danger the country was in during that period. For all of the public clownish antics by Giuliani and company, the plotting that was going on behind closed doors was even worse.

We now know about the attempt to fire then-acting attorney general and replace him with a Trump toady who was willing to strong-arm state legislators into delaying the certification of votes, a plan which was met with such resistance from both the Department of Justice and the White House Counsel’s office that several staffers threatened to quit en masse, calling it a “murder-suicide pact.” We also now know that the military was so concerned about the president’s erratic behavior that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley gathered the top brass to remind them of the protocols in place in the event of an order for a nuclear strike and he felt compelled to call his Chinese counterpart to reassure him that the U.S. was not contemplating an attack.

We now know all about John Eastman’s coup plot for GOP members of Congress to object to the certification of the electoral votes and have vice president Mike Pence throw the electoral count to the House of Representatives, where Trump would automatically win because the GOP has more state delegations (which, for some reason, made sense to someone at one time.) And we have recently had confirmation that Trump associates, led by Giuliani, coerced local Republicans in swing states to fraudulently sign electoral college ballots as fake Trump electors and send them in as if they were legitimate.

But of all the wild reports that emerged over the past few months about the ongoing insanity in the White House during Trump’s lame duck period, there was always one story that I found so incredible that I wondered if it might not have been exaggerated.

Back in December of 2020, the NY Times reported that a late-night meeting took place in the oval office in which the president proposed that Sidney Powell be made a Special Counsel and be given security clearance to pursue her insane claims of massive election rigging. Even Giuliani opposed that idea but the meeting concluded without anyone knowing if Trump would follow through or not.

Retired General Michael Flynn was also present as was, for some unknown reason, Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com. Jonathan Swan at Axios later reported that these people had actually somehow sneaked into the White House (which I didn’t think was possible) to convince the president to “invoke emergency national security powers, seize voting machines and disable the primary levers of American democracy.”

This meeting went on for many hours with people coming and going throughout, arguing and yelling back and forth as the president pressed for these conspiracy theorists to be given more power while the staffers pushed back. It eventually ended up in the residence with arguments going back and forth and no resolution all the way up until midnight.

Powell insisted that the real story was that the election had been stolen by Venezuela, Iran, China and others, in cahoots with the voting machine manufacturers, all of which was a total fantasy. Flynn was pushing for the military to seize the voting machines. Byrne was babbling that he knew how these things worked because he’d bribed Hillary Clinton with 18 million dollars in an FBI sting which nobody understood. It was, in other words, completely unhinged nonsense.

According to Swan, Powell kept referring to an Executive Order from 2018 which was written to impose sanctions on foreign interference, as if it gave Trump some sort of authority. But the New York Times had earlier reported that there was another Executive Order they were bandying about which has remained vague until now, but which we knew was supposed to authorize the seizure of the voting machines. Last Friday, Politico reported that they had a copy of that proposed Executive Order.

Nobody knows who wrote it, but it’s a good bet that Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell herself had a hand in it. The document would have authorized the Special Counsel to investigate the 2020 election. Flynn had been the first to float the idea of having the military seize the voting machines a few days earlier, and that too appeared in this draft Executive Order. Curiously, however, the order mentions a couple of classified orders, one of which had never been made public and therefore must have come from someone with a security clearance.

This document is now in the hands of the January 6th committee which is no doubt trying to run down who wrote the draft. Subpoenas have gone out to Powell and Giuliani although I doubt anyone expects them to comply. Dominion Voting Machines has sued Powell and a number of media companies for defamation for spreading these lies and there’s a good chance that they will lose since her claims were total fabrications.

But after reviewing the reports of this strange meeting in which three crackpots found their way into the White House and commanded nearly six hours of the president and his staff’s time in the middle of the worst public health crisis in a hundred years, I couldn’t help but reflect on the fact that today the vast majority of Republicans are convinced that the election was stolen and the Party has done nothing to disabuse them of that fact.

And the same delusional former president who took those ridiculous proposals to defy the peaceful transfer of power and fraudulently overturn the election seriously is the front runner for the Republican nomination in 2024. How is it even possible that such a person could be let anywhere near the White House again?   

Salon

Ron DeSantis is now trafficking in COVID conspiracy theories. He’s complaining about health care workers being required to get vaccinated and suggesting that the vaccines cause infertility.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), a foe of vaccine mandates, appeared to suggest Thursday that getting a shot to protect against the coronavirus could cause infertility.

“Think about how ridiculous it is what they’re doing by trying to force the nurses” to get immunized, he said in a speech announcing funding for nursing certification programs. “A lot of these nurses have had covid. A lot of them are younger. Some of them are trying to have families.”FAQ: What to know about the omicron variant of the coronavirus

But there is no evidence that getting vaccinated against the coronavirus makes it harder to conceive, according to a study released Thursday of heterosexual couples trying for pregnancy. DeSantis could not be immediately reached for a comment on his remarks.

By contrast, men infected with the coronavirus showed signs of a short-term decline in fertility, according to the research, which was led by an epidemiologist at Boston University and published in the peer-reviewed American Journal of Epidemiology. It was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

The researchers studied more than 2,000 people between the ages of 21 and 45, all of whom identified as women, in the United States and Canada between December 2020 and September 2021. (Their male partners were also invited to fill in a questionnaire.) Some 73 percent of the women had received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine during the study, with 74 percent of the men also having been administered at least one shot.

“Recent [coronavirus] infection has been associated with poor sperm quality, including … decreased concentration, lower motility,” the authors wrote. But “we found no adverse association between vaccination and fertility.”

Apparently he has decided that his political future depends upon him pushing the envelope on anti-vax conspiracies, putting him to the right of Donald Trump. It’s quite strategy…

I sure hope DeSantis doesn’t get this unfortunate side-effect:

A man’s agonizing penis pain was blamed on COVID infection, as docs warned of the rare side effect.

Writing in a medical journal, the Iranian team described how the virus led to blood clotting in the poor man’s shaft.  

The unnamed male had suffered penile pain for three days before being seen by a urologist in Iran, who referred him for tests.

The discomfort began following an erection while having sex, the 41-year-old married man told doctors.

If anything getting COVID seems to cause more trouble with men’s reproductive system’s than women. Maybe that ought to be publicized more. I’ll bet it would get a whole lot of men vaccinated if they knew.

I’ve been writing for a while about the GOP in disarray over Trump’s Big Lie, but for some reason the press hasn’t been paying attention to me. Can you believe it?

But now that the 2022 campaign season is upon un in earnest, they have belatedly discovered this for themselves:

Former President Donald J. Trump returned on Saturday to Arizona, a cradle of his political movement, to headline a rally in the desert that was a striking testament to how he has elevated fringe beliefs and the politicians who spread them — even as other Republicans openly worry that voters will ultimately punish their party for it.

Mr. Trump’s favored candidate for governor, Kari Lake, is a first-time office seeker who has threatened to jail the state’s top elections official. His chosen candidate to replace that elections official, a Democrat, is a state legislator named Mark Finchem, who was with a group of demonstrators outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 as rioters tried to stop the certification of the 2020 election.

And one of his most unflinching defenders in Congress is Representative Paul Gosar, who was censured by his colleagues for posting an animated video online that depicted him killing a Democratic congresswoman and assaulting President Biden.

Much worse pic.twitter.com/GONJjfWJS2

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 16, 2022

All three spoke at Mr. Trump’s rally in front of thousands of supporters on Saturday in the town of Florence, outside Phoenix. It was the first stadium-style political event he has held so far in this midterm election year in which he will try to deepen his imprint on Republicans running for office at all levels.

Here are a couple of others:

the past six years have somewhat numbed us to the fact it's highly abnormal for a major political party to be as passionate about extrajudicial punishment as the modern GOP is https://t.co/LzxqqnVR67

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 16, 2022

Rogers: Let us never forget the weak-kneed Republicans who sold us out. Always remember them and make sure we vote them out of office. The Crenshaws, the Kinzingers, the Maces… pic.twitter.com/PXyA7bPsrR

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 16, 2022

When Mr. Trump took the stage in the evening, he lavished praise on the slate of election-denier candidates in attendance. And he suggested that perpetuating his grievances about being cheated would be a decisive issue for Republican candidates.

“We can’t let them get away with it,” Mr. Trump said. Then, he added, referring to Ms. Lake and her rejection of the 2020 results: “I think it’s one of the reasons she’s doing so well.”

But as popular as the former president remains with the core of the G.O.P.’s base, his involvement in races from Arizona to Pennsylvania — and his inability to let go of his loss to Mr. Biden — has veteran Republicans in Washington and beyond concerned. They worry that Mr. Trump is imperiling their chances in what should be a highly advantageous political climate, with Democrats deeply divided over their policy agenda and Americans taking a generally pessimistic view of Mr. Biden’s leadership a year into his presidency.

Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, and other senior party officials have expressed their misgivings in recent days about Mr. Trump’s fixation on the last election, saying that it threatens to alienate the voters they need to win over in the next election in November.

Those worries are particularly acute in Arizona, where the far-right, Trump-endorsed candidates could prove too extreme in a state that moved Democratic in the last election as voters came out in large numbers to oppose Mr. Trump. The myth of widespread voter fraud is animating Arizona campaigns in several races, alarming Republicans who argue that indulging the former president’s misrepresentations and falsehoods about 2020 is jeopardizing the party’s long-term competitiveness.

“I’ve never seen so many Republicans running in a primary for governor, attorney general, Senate,” said Chuck Coughlin, a Republican consultant who has worked on statewide races in Arizona for two decades. “Usually you get two, maybe three. But not five.”

At the rally on Saturday, every speaker who took the stage before Mr. Trump repeated a version of the false assertion that the vote in Arizona in 2020 was fraudulent. Mr. Gosar, the congressman, did so in perhaps the darkest language, invoking the image of a building storm, a metaphor commonly used by followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory. And he called for people involved in counting ballots in Arizona in 2020 to be imprisoned.

“Lock them up,” Mr. Gosar told the crowd. “That election was rotten to the core.”

For Republicans who are concerned about Mr. Trump’s influence on candidates they believe are unelectable, the basic math of such crowded primaries is difficult to stomach. A winner could prevail with just a third of the total vote — which makes it more than likely a far-right candidate who is unpalatable to the broader electorate can win the nomination largely on Mr. Trump’s endorsement.

Conservative activists in Arizona have long supplied Mr. Trump with the energy and ideas that formed the foundation of his political movement.

In 2011, when the real estate developer and reality television star was testing the waters for a possible presidential campaign, his interest in the conspiracy theories that claimed former President Barack Obama’s birth certificate was a forgery led him to Arizona Tea Party activists and a state legislator. They were pushing for a state law to require that political candidates produce their birth certificates before qualifying for the ballot. Mr. Trump invited them to Trump Tower.

One of those activists, Kelly Townsend, now a state senator, spoke to the crowd on Saturday and praised those who sought to delegitimize Mr. Biden’s win.

[…]

As speaker after speaker attacked the credibility of the vote on Saturday — those with Mr. Trump’s official imprimatur were announced as “Trump endorsed” — several also called on the State Legislature to retroactively vote to overturn Mr. Biden’s win. Mr. Trump’s allies said they expect the issue to take on more urgency in the coming weeks, even though it would have no legal or practical impact.

Here’s one of the hand-wringing Republicans fretting about the problem:

Senate Minority Whip John Thune said this week that Republicans “welcome” former President Donald Trump’s help in taking back the Senate majority, but repeating his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen “takes our eyes off the ultimate prize.” 

“President Trump still has a tremendous following among our supporters across the country and, you know, exercises that influence, or at least attempts to, on a daily basis,” Thune, R-S.D., told Fox News. “But I think ultimately for us as Republican senators our job right now is to try to get the majority back in 2022 and provide that check and balance against this crazy Biden administration agenda.” […]

The minority whip said winning the Senate will be the top marker of a successful 2022 for Republicans. But he said continued arguments over the presidential election are counterproductive to that goal. 

“To the degree that President Trump can be helpful, can contribute to,” taking back the Senate, Thune said, “we welcome that.”

“But I think any time we’re talking about the 2020 election and rehashing that, it takes our eyes off the ultimate prize. And so I think most Republican senators understand that in order for us to be successful as a country that we have to get the majority back in the Senate and that means focusing on the future not the past,” he said. “We welcome the former president’s support of that, but would hope that he would play a constructive role and contribute to helping us win the majority back in 2022.”

You’ll notice that he doesn’t rebut Trump’s Big Lie. Of course, he doesn’t. And if push comes to shove he’ll support the loons Trump is pushing and Trump himself.

And why not? They don’t legislate. Their only agenda is to obstruct Democrats and let the courts deliver for their rich buddies and wingnut freaks. What does it really matter if Trump and his fascist cult take over?

What in the hell went on here? If this isn’t being investigated then I think our problems are even worse that we thought. This is from the Bulwark:

In the weeks after the 2020 election, then-President Donald Trump’s allies sent fake certificates to the National Archives declaring that Trump won seven states that he actually lost. The documents had no impact on the outcome of the election, but they are yet another example of how Team Trump tried to subvert the Electoral College — a key line of inquiry for the January 6 committee.

The fake certificates were created by Trump allies in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada and New Mexico, who sought to replace valid presidential electors from their states with a pro-Trump slate, according to documents obtained by American Oversight.

In other words, what we have here is attempted election fraud on a massive scale.

Some perspective: If an average voter lied on their registration forms or forged an absentee ballot, they would face criminal charges and a world of legal hurt.

But this case is far worse because the forged electoral certificates were coordinated, and part of a larger conspiracy to overturn the presidential election.

And the smoking guns are littered all around us.

Bill Kristol waves the red flag:

The forged electoral certificates show coordination across seven states. Those fake certificates were key to the plan of the Eastman memo and to the Jeffrey Clark DOJ draft letter to Georgia. The conspiracy involved fraud and force. At the head of the conspiracy: Donald Trump.

Why the 7 forged certifications matter: Eastman memo: “Pence…announces because of the ongoing disputes…there are no electors that can be deemed validly appointed in those States…[So] there are 232 votes for Trump, 222 votes for Biden. Pence then gavels Trump re-elected.”

This morning’s Wapo reports that the Biden DOJ “does not appear to be directly investigating the person whose desperate bid to stay in office motivated the mayhem — former president Donald Trump — either for potentially inciting a riot or for what some observers see as a related pressure campaign to overturn the results of the election.”

But attorney George Conway asks the key question: “how there could 𝙣𝙤𝙩 have been a conspiracy or attempt by Trump or Eastman and others to “corruptly … obstruct[], influence[], or impede[]” the electoral-vote count proceedings within the meaning of 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2).

Here’s the statute Conway is citing:

(c)Whoever corruptly—

(1)alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or

(2)otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so,

shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

The forgeries were not a side-show — they were an integral part of Trump’s attempt to overturn the election.

And the plan was widely known.

On December 10, 2020, a group of prominent “movement” conservatives signed an open letter call for swing states to “appoint clean slates of electors to the Electoral College to support President Trump.” They wrote:

There is no doubt President Donald J. Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election. Joe Biden is not president-elect.

Accordingly, state legislatures in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Michigan should exercise their plenary power under the Constitution and appoint clean slates of electors to the Electoral College to support President Trump. Similarly, both the House and Senate should accept only these clean Electoral College slates and object to and reject any competing slates in favor of Vice President Biden from these states.

Here’s a partial list of the signatories:

Look at that list of old time conservative movement luminaries. None of them are stupid. They knew exactly what they were doing. They all got the memo.

A week later, former White House spox Kayleigh McEnany talked about an “alternate slate of electors” that Congress would vote on, when it met on January 6.

Kayleigh says the litigation is ongoing and says in four states there has been “alternate slate of electors voted upon that congress will decide in January”

Around the same time, Trumpists in the Department of Justice were drafting letters to states alleging election fraud, and John Eastman was writing a detailed memo laying out a scheme for overturning the election on January 6.

It was a wide ranging conspiracy. Most of these people knew that the fraud claims were bullshit. They are educated, sophisticated political actors. They were in on the coup. All of them.

Is this going to stand?

And by the way…

Bannon this morning says the purpose of the Trump rally in AZ today is to pressure the AZ legis to decertify the 2020 Biden electors, then PA, WI, and GA will follow suit and make Biden an illegitimate president in the minds of swing voters heading into the 2022 elections. pic.twitter.com/DOj4N8QyS9

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) January 15, 2022

I’m pretty sure that can’t happen. But then I never thought the conservative movement and a bunch of crackpot conspiracy theorists would circle the wagons around an narcissistic, orange game show host to overthrow the the government. Strange things do happen.