monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Do you really think that electors would defy the will of the mob?

I'm not a member of the Electoral College

Thank Keerist for that, though I'm not sure if you were making a point there.

By continually attacking your president's actions, that is what you're doing.

How would that actually work? Say some demagogue were really popular and managed to win an election with a significant majority of the popular vote. Do you really think that electors would defy the will of the mob? I don't. Like the 2nd Amendment, this is another constitutional anachronism.

Unlike the 10th Circuit, the Washington state Supreme Court said the Constitution “gives to the state absolute authority in the manner of appointing electors. ... The power of electors to vote comes from the state, and the elector has no personal right to that role.”

By an 8-1 vote, the state court rejected a constitutional claim brought on behalf of Levi Guerra and two other Democratic electors from Washington who were fined $1,000 because they did not cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton, who had won the state.
[...]
If the Supreme Court receives an appeal in the weeks ahead in either the Washington or Colorado case, the justices are not likely to act on it for several months. They could opt to steer clear of the issue, but some legal experts said the specter of another Bush vs. Gore election dispute case could prompt them to decide the issue as soon as possible.

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration is moving to erase Obama-era rules on methane emissions from the oil-and-gas business, saying the federal government overstepped its authority when it set limits on what scientists say is a significant contributor to climate change.

We are now at the point where President Trump’s own officials are basically admitting that he has dangled pardons to underlings, as part of an apparent effort to get them to build his border wall in time for reelection.
But they are qualifying this. Or at least they think they are: They are claiming Trump is “joking."

But how exactly is this a defense? It’s actually an admission — and can we please recall that Trump has repeatedly dangled pardons before, in a manner that had no joking aura around it whatsoever?

The New York Times is now the second news organization to report this pushback, after The Post reported on it Tuesday. A senior administration official told the Times that Trump never seriously offered any pardons: “He winks when he does it.”

These supposed joke-pardon offers have come after he has instructed aides to “aggressively seize private land and disregard environmental rules,” as The Post puts it, adding the crucial detail that Trump has offered pardons when aides object that such directives are illegal.

Trump raged on Twitter that any suggestion he offered pardons is “totally fake.” But his own aides, by allowing he has done this as a “joke,” have partially undermined this claim.

Let’s walk through the ways this isn’t actually a defense. First of all, as I’ve noted, it puts Trump’s underlings in the position of having to decide whether to interpret Trump’s apparent demand that they break the law, and his offer of a pardon, as a real directive and offer.

Bolstering this point, we now have it straight from a senior official that Trump “winks” when he says this. If that sounds familiar, that’s because it calls to mind former Trump fixer Michael Cohen’s arresting description of Trump’s M.O. when it comes to communicating nefarious directives to his consiglieri.

As Cohen testified to Congress, Trump doesn’t “directly” issue such instructions, because “that’s not how he operates.” Instead, Cohen said, Trump would “look me in the eye” and ostensibly state the opposite of what he really intended, a device Cohen came to understand perfectly well. This is unquestionably very plausible on its face.

I cannot prove Trump is doing something similar when he dangles a pardon with a “wink.” But would it be unreasonable for officials (or indeed the rest of us) to at least wonder whether he might be? And isn’t putting those officials in that position itself a flagrant abuse of power?

Officials are mum about this

Second, administration officials who are in a position to shed light on Trump’s habit of dangling pardons — jokingly or not — are clammed up tight.

Recall that the Times reported in April that Trump privately urged Kevin McAleenan, the acting head of the Department of Homeland Security, to close the border to migrants entirely — then said he’d pardon McAleenan if he encountered legal trouble. This, too, was explained away as potentially being a joke, but it “alarmed” officials, though DHS denied it.

Subsequently, House Judiciary Committee Democrats requested that McAleenan provide a list of all employees present at the meeting at which that reportedly happened, with an eye toward fleshing out the truth about the episode.

Yet now a spokesman for the Judiciary Committee tells me that on this issue, they have received “no response and no documents.” This is newly significant in light of the latest reports that Trump has again dangled pardons.

Trump has done this repeatedly

Third, we know Trump is capable of dangling pardons in a deadly serious manner — indeed, with corrupt intent — because he’s done it before. The special counsel’s report concluded Trump’s public statements about former campaign chair Paul Manafort “suggested that a pardon was a more likely possibility if Manafort continued not to cooperate” with the government.
Crucially, the special counsel also concluded that these statements were “intended” to induce Manafort not to cooperate. That’s improper intent.

Thus, Trump is perfectly capable of nakedly abusing the pardon power. And this is no small thing: as Benjamin Wittes put it, this was a “grotesque abuse of power for impeachment purposes,” and indeed “one of the most singular abuses of the entire Trump presidency.”

The unabashed, openly contemptuous nature of Trump’s misconduct is key here. He cheerfully flaunted it; he delighted in advertising his willingness to use it. For Trump to dangle pardons as a “joke” inevitably shades into this kind of flaunting, albeit of a private sort: I’m only joking, but as I direct you to skirt laws and rules, maybe you should keep in mind that I really do have this power.

Trump’s underlying directives

Which leads to what most of us aren’t even talking about here: the very orders Trump is issuing that might ultimately require a pardon — just kidding, not really! — which he obviously isn’t joking about.

It’s still vague what precisely he has ordered. But here’s what we do know: that Trump wants the project sped up primarily so he can boast about more wall completion as part of his reelection campaign.

As law professor Laurence Tribe points out to me, this raises its own issues, constitutional and otherwise, because it in effect concedes that Trump’s concern in ordering these “takings” of land “isn’t even the public interest but his private political prospects.”

In a sense, that’s yet another kind of flaunting, one we’ve seen a great deal of from Trump: the undisguised relish he takes in using the presidency to serve his own interests, the blithe disregard of any obligation to even pretend that isn’t what he’s doing.

Some Democrats on the Judiciary Committee want Trump’s dangling of private pardons to be examined as part of their effort to determine whether Trump merits articles of impeachment. For all the above reasons, that seems like an easy call.

he is serious.

Do you argue with people after a football game that the team with the most yards and not points should have won the game?

I took advantage of the sale the Washington post is having on their subscriptions. I noticed lately that you can't read anything on their clicks unless you have a prescription. I guess they figured out most people were just using their 10 free articles and waiting for the next month if they run out.

Fox host Jeanine Pirro pushes white supremacist “great replacement” conspiracy theory

Echoing the El Paso shooter, Pirro says to Fox Nation host Todd Starnes that “It is a plot to remake America, to replace American citizens with illegals who will vote for the Democrats”

In a fundraising letter, the president’s campaign informed its supporters that “Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dialed up the crazy to a whole new level recently when she called for abolishing the Electoral College” and that “The President is calling on you at this critical time to remind AOC and Democrats that this is our country, not theirs.”

Like the 2nd Amendment, this is another constitutional anachronism.