monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

The state legislature has the plenary right when it comes to electors

The Electoral Count Act, a 19th-century law, sets up the mechanism for how that takes place. It directs governors to certify both the election results and a slate of presidential electors to represent the will of the people. In general practice, governors certify electors chosen by the party of the presidential candidate who won their state.

The Electoral Count Act also says that in the event of “failed elections,” in which voters have not made a choice for president, state legislatures are empowered to step in and appoint electors. The 1887 law is ambiguous about what constitutes a “failed” election. But the law does contain a deadline for states to certify elections: the “safe harbor” date, which this year is Dec. 8. Electors chosen before that date cannot be challenged by Congress.


A flurry of lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign, most of which have been defeated in court, appear aimed at slowing down states’ certification timelines and possibly providing a pretext to declare a “failed” election.

Coronavirus continues to devastate the country, with official deaths topping 281,000 today, but it turns out that the Trump administration did not actually have a plan for distribution of vaccines. Federal officials have drastically slashed the amount of vaccine they promised to states before the election. Instead of the 300 million doses the administration had promised before the end of 2020, the plan is currently to distribute 35 to 40 million doses. Even those, though, are plagued by bottlenecks in parts of the production process, as well as manufacturing issues. This means a longer struggle with the disease than many had come to expect.

Trump continues to refuse to acknowledge his loss in the November election. This morning, before a scheduled rally in Georgia for two Republican senators facing runoffs against their Democratic challengers, Trump called Georgia Governor Brian Kemp to pressure him to overturn Biden’s win in the state. Trump asked Kemp to convince the state legislature to ignore Biden’s victory and appoint their own slate of electors who would give the president the state’s votes in the Electoral College. Biden won Georgia by about 12,000 votes, and Georgia law does not permit the legislature to submit alternative electors. When Kemp, who is a Republican, declined to do as Trump asked, Trump took to Twitter to attack him.

Trump also asked Kemp to demand an audit of the signatures on mail-in ballots, which Kemp does not have the power to do. Georgia’s governor may not interfere in elections. Instead, the state secretary of state has jurisdiction, and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, has defended the existing signature match process and says there is no evidence of fraud.

At tonight’s rally, Trump continued to insist he had won the election and to assure attendees they are all victims of the Democrats’ plot to steal the election. The rally was nominally about the senate candidates, but Trump treated it pretty much as he treated his rallies before the election. He is convincing his supporters that the election was rigged, and that President-Elect Biden will be an illegitimate president.

Trump loyalists at the Pentagon continue to refuse to let Pentagon officials communicate with Biden’s transition team. According to an official, the Pentagon chief of staff Kash Patel, a former staffer for California Representative Devin Nunes appointed after the election, has rewritten policy descriptions to reflect well on Trump before letting Biden’s people see them. He has also stopped communications. He “told everybody we're not going to cooperate with the transition team,” an official said, and he has "put a lot of restrictions on it." He is “controlling the information flow.” This will put the Biden camp behind on getting up to speed on sensitive foreign policy issues with Iran, Afghanistan, Russia, and North Korea, hurting national security.

Also today, the Washington Post printed the results of its query to all 249 Republicans in the House and Senate, asking them who won the 202 presidential election. Only 27 of them are willing to acknowledge that Biden won. Two Republicans insist that Trump won the election, all evidence to the contrary. The rest of them—220 of them—refuse to say who won.

This is a big deal. This was not a close election. Biden currently has over 7 million more votes than Trump, and has won by 306 to 232 in the Electoral College. And yet, Republican leadership is permitting Trump to undermine our democracy. Try to imagine any past Republican president doing what Trump is doing, and you can’t. But today’s Republican lawmakers are standing to the side, permitting Trump to poison our democracy.

To what end? Why are Republicans accepting this anti-American behavior from Trump?

It seems to me they are unwilling to risk losing Trump’s voters in the future because they are determined to regain power. They don’t much care about our democracy, so long as they have a shot at keeping Trump’s people on their side. But then, again, to what end? If Republicans regain power in 2022 or 2024, what will that look like? Do we have any reason to think they will then begin to defend our democracy? Do we have any reason to think they are interested in anything but even more legislation that moves wealth upward?

We have been in a spot much like this before. In 1884, Americans turned against the Republican Party because it had abandoned its support for ordinary Americans in favor of the industrial leaders who put money into Republican lawmakers’ political war chests, as well as into their pockets. Voters put Democrat Grover Cleveland into the White House, the first Democrat to hold the presidency since James Buchanan was elected in 1856.

Horrified, the Republicans flooded the country with stories of how Democrats were socialists who would attack the rich by ending the legislation that protected businesses. If Democrats continued to control the government, Republicans said, they would destroy America. In 1888, they suppressed Democratic votes and created modern political financing as they hit up businessmen for major donations. Despite their best efforts, voters reelected Cleveland by about 100,000 votes, but Republicans managed to eke out a win for their candidate, Benjamin Harrison, in the Electoral College. Harrison promised a “BUSINESSMAN’S ADMINISTRATION,” and indeed, in office, he and his men did all they could to cement the Republican Party into power so it could continue to defend business (among other things, they added six new states to the Union to pack the Electoral College).

But voters still didn’t like the Republicans’ platform, which seemed more and more to funnel money from hardworking Americans upward into the pockets of those men who were increasingly portrayed as robber barons. In 1892, they voted for Cleveland in such numbers they couldn’t be overridden in the Electoral College. Voters also put Democrats in charge of Congress, both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

And that is the moment I cannot help thinking about today. Faced with a legitimately elected Democratic government, Republican leaders deliberately sabotaged the country. They swamped the media with warnings that Democrats would destroy the economy and that men should pull their capital out of stocks and industries. Foreign capital should, they said, go home or face disaster. Money began to flow out of the country and stocks faltered. When financiers begged the Harrison administration to shore up the markets in the face of the growing panic, administration officials told them their job was only to keep the country afloat until the day of Cleveland’s inauguration.

They didn’t quite make it. The economy collapsed about ten days before Cleveland took the oath of office, saddling the new president with the Panic of 1893 and very few ways to combat it. Republicans had deliberately sabotaged the country in order to discredit Cleveland, then demanded he honor the demands of financiers to stabilize the economy. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Cleveland tried to work with moneyed interests to combat the depression and promptly split his own party. The country roiled as out-of-work Americans despaired, some of them marching on Washington, D.C., to demand the government do something to address their plight.

The Republicans went into the 1894 midterm elections blaming the Democrats for the crisis in the country. They won the midterms in what remains the largest seat swing in the history of the House of Representatives. Then they claimed that, with Republicans back in power, the economy was now safe. They papered the country with media announcing that the panic was over and people should reinvest. The panic was over, and a Republican president won in 1896, once again insisting the Democrats were socialists, but this time adding that the past four years had proved the Democrats could not run the economy.

There is no excuse for the silence of Republican lawmakers as their president attacks our democracy. But there might be a precedent.

If lock downs did not stop Covid the first time why would they work now.

In July and August, the Australian state of Victoria was going through a second Covid-19 wave. Local leaders set an improbable goal in the face of that challenge. They didn’t want to just get their Covid-19 numbers down. They wanted to eliminate the virus entirely.

By the end of November, they’d done it.

They have seen no active cases for a full four weeks. Melbourne, the state’s capital and a city with about as many people as the greater Washington, DC, area, is now completely coronavirus-free.

Australia enjoyed plenty of advantages over the United States in containing Covid-19. It has no land borders to speak of. Its population density is very low (though the population is concentrated on the coasts). Its outbreak never got nearly as bad as the US’s did. On its worst days, Victoria saw about 700 new cases; Missouri, with (very roughly) a similar population and landmass, is currently averaging more than 3,000. Some of the Australian states also closed their borders to the others, which lowered the risk somebody might bring Covid-19 from one part of the country to another.

But the Australian epidemic has also mirrored America’s in important ways. Once the coronavirus arrived in the spring, the country went into lockdown. When cases abated, some of those restrictions were eased — and, before too long, Covid-19 cases were spiking again. Each state was responsible for its own response, with the federal government playing an advisory role outside of obviously national issues like foreign travel.

In the second wave, Victoria was by far the hardest-hit state. Its case numbers were dwarfing those in every other state including New South Wales, home to the country’s other great metropolis, Sydney.

Policymakers dreaded an endless cycle of lockdown-reopening-lockdown — exactly the situation the US finds itself in. They realized that amorphous goals of “slowing the spread” or “flattening the curve” had been ineffective in mustering public support for the stringent mitigation measures that would be necessary to contain the virus.

So they went big. The state’s roadmap largely followed a policy proposal laid out in September by the Grattan Institute (a nonprofit think tank supported by the state and federal governments): “Go for zero.”

The goal was not just to slow Covid-19 down. It was to eradicate the virus. The state had gone into a stage 4 lockdown — most businesses closed, there was a nightly curfew, and residents were ordered to stay within five kilometers of their home — in August, and it was then extended in September, with the explicit goal of eventually reaching zero new cases.

“Ideally, lockdowns are only done once and done well,” the proposal’s authors, Stephen Duckett and Will Mackey, explained. “The benefit of zero is to reduce the risk of ‘yo-yoing’ between virus flare-ups and further lockdowns to contain them.”

They treated the threats to public health and the economy as intertwined, which most experts agree they are. The Australian states that contained Covid-19 best also saw the strongest economic recoveries. Victoria, with the worst outbreak among the states, was lagging behind in consumer spending and business revenue.

People will stay home and spend less if they are worried about the virus. The Grattan authors cited a study comparing Denmark (which established a lockdown) and Sweden (which took a more relaxed “herd immunity” strategy) and found that their economies suffered about the same in the early months of the pandemic. But later in the year, when Denmark had its outbreak under control but Sweden did not, unemployment claims were almost back to pre-Covid levels in the former but remained elevated in the latter.

“Without elimination, the third, fourth, or fifth wave is an inevitability. This will either involve more lockdowns or the government will lose the social license to do lockdowns and the virus will spread indiscriminately,” Duckett told me over email, perhaps unwittingly describing the very challenge before the United States during this winter surge. “A hard lockdown in the early stages of the virus gives a chance for elimination, and that gives the chance for business certainty and a full recovery.”

Melburnians are now enjoying the benefits of their sacrifices. Duckett said he had just gone to lunch with a few friends before responding to my email.

The US probably cannot achieve zero Covid-19 cases anytime soon. But it could embrace the spirit of the Victorian model: a clear goal, support for the proven mitigation strategies, and a commitment from the public.

“Having a clear, uniform goal — that everyone could work toward — was critical to Victoria’s success,” Jennifer Kates, director of global health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told me. “But they didn’t just have a goal. They established the underlying components that were needed and provided strong social support.”

“All of this,” she continued, “has been mostly absent in America.”

There is no secret sauce to Covid-19 containment. It just takes commitment.

There was nothing particularly novel about Victoria’s containment strategy. They just dedicated themselves to what works.

They expanded testing, including random pooled testing and testing for workers in essential industries and of people attending schools or other indoor events. They achieved 24-hour turnarounds for test results, so if a person tested positive, they could quickly isolate. Once cases reached zero, the state was planning to start testing sewage for Covid-19 to get a head start on any resurgence.

The Grattan Institute also recommended ramping up contact tracing, another established part of an effective Covid-19 response, and mandatory isolation. Australia had problems earlier in the year with international travelers breaking their quarantines and introducing the virus into the community. The experts advised having people scan QR codes if they entered any public venues, so they could be contacted if a related case was detected. They also noted that other Australian states had police do spot checks of people who were supposed to be in isolation.

“A system that relies on self-isolation in which people are unable or refuse to self-isolate cannot succeed,” Duckett and Mackey wrote.

That probably sounds draconian to Americans. Certainly, the harshest lockdown measures taken in Victoria — requiring people to stay within a few miles of their house and stay inside completely at night — would be politically challenging in the US.

But Australians took it in stride because they knew the goal they were working toward.

“I think being obedient is definitely part of the Australian psyche,” Eloise Shepherd, who lives in the Melbourne suburbs (and whom I met for our feature on Australian health care published earlier this year), told me over text. “It was really hard, but I’m so grateful we did it.”

The government there made it easier for businesses and workers by providing subsidies to businesses to keep people employed and by increasing their unemployment benefits — the same policies that the US has let lapse and is now struggling to reinstitute even during this devastating winter wave.

As cases dwindled, the lockdown measures were relaxed in a clear, tiered fashion. The extreme travel restrictions were the first to go. Schools and businesses could reopen with spacing. Masks continued to be required indoors and on public transportation. Eventually, all restrictions except for international quarantine could be lifted.

Things could still go wrong for Victoria and the rest of Australia. The state has started prioritizing having “normal” conditions for the Christmas shopping season over maintaining zero new cases. But it is easier to focus on reopening when community spread is eliminated — rather than pushing forward with reopening in spite of sustained spread, as the US has done.

“We know that we’re going to basically have a much easier life now that the pandemic is under control,” Duckett said. “We still celebrate the fact that we’ve had so many days with no new infections and no deaths. The community is very proud of itself.”

Victoria’s Covid-19 restrictions were controversial with some residents, but Australia in general enjoys more political homogeny than the US does. That must make it easier to build solidarity for these extraordinary measures. America is deeply polarized, and that has been reflected in our scattered policy responses and in the differing attitudes of Democrats and Republicans toward mask-wearing and other restrictions.

But I don’t believe it was impossible for America to execute a similar strategy to the one that has succeeded in Victoria. Polls showed most Americans did support wearing masks and other mitigation measures, even if there was some divide among partisans. They worried that social distancing would be relaxed too quickly, not too slowly, much like the Australians did.

The problem, or one of them, is that the US just never set a clear goal for Covid-19 suppression. It was understandably hard to ask people in Wisconsin to abide by social distancing restrictions back when they thought the coronavirus was just a New York City problem — and when they didn’t know what the plan was.

Today, of course, the pandemic is a very real problem for every American. So as we try to bring the winter wave under control, we might benefit from taking a lesson from the Aussies and coming up with a specific objective that all of us, together, can work toward.

Trump Team Begins Forensic Examination of Dominion Machines in Michigan

President Donald Trump’s legal team began a forensic analysis of Dominion voting machines in Michigan after a judge on Friday permitted the examination.

“Our team is going to be able to go in this morning at about 8:30 [a.m.] and will be there for about eight hours to conduct that forensic examination and we’ll have the results in about 48 hours, and that’ll tell us a lot about these machines,” attorney Jenna Ellis told Fox News on Sunday.

“A judge actually granted our team access … to conduct a forensic audit,” Ellis added.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6Y4XwiLD0o[/youtube]

When I first invoked the ELecroral Count, many pages back, I was not expecting that these court challenges would last this long. Ive heard from a friend who is a CR attorney and is associated w/ ACLU, that should Trump's cabal seek to send this to SCOTUS, the defense (the good guys) would have an immediate reason for relief and a hope that SCOTUS would dismiss with (hopfully) prejudice since all the court hearings were doing was just as you say, " JUST TRYING to slow the electoral process down by filing a series of " pointless evidence-free" cases".

Thats been their entire plan all along.

You should look into that.