Just throw them out
A conservative lawyer working with then-President Donald Trump’s legal team tried to convince then-Vice President Mike Pence that he could overturn the election results on January 6 when Congress counted the Electoral College votes by throwing out electors from seven states, according to the new book “Peril” from Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.
Just throw them out, yeah? Simple.
The scheme put forward by controversial lawyer John Eastman was outlined in a two-page memo obtained by the authors for “Peril,” and which was subsequently obtained by CNN. The memo, which has not previously been made public, provides new detail showing how Trump and his team tried to persuade Pence to subvert the Constitution and throw out the election results on January 6.
And how stupid it was, and how many even of Trump allies said so, and how unenthusiastic controversial lawyer John Eastman’s employer was.
“You might as well make your case to Queen Elizabeth II. Congress can’t do this. You’re wasting your time,” [Republican Senator Mike] Lee said to Trump’s lawyers trying to overturn the results in Georgia, according to the book.
…
Under Eastman’s scheme, Pence would have declared Trump the winner with more Electoral College votes after the seven states were thrown out, at 232 votes to 222. Anticipating “howls” from Democrats protesting the overturning of the election, the memo proposes, Pence would instead say that no candidate had reached 270 votes in the Electoral College. That would throw the election to the House of Representatives, where each state would get one vote. Since Republicans controlled 26 state delegations, a majority could vote for Trump to win the election.
Totally fair! Except for the seven states part, where they just made shit up about how they could “throw out” some of the electors.
In the end, Pence didn’t go along with Eastman’s scheme, concluding that the Constitution did not give him any power beyond counting the Electoral College votes. He did his own consultations before January 6, according to the book, reaching out to former Vice President Dan Quayle and the Senate parliamentarian, who were both clear in telling him he had no authority beyond counting the votes.
When Pence refused to intervene, Trump turned on his vice president, attacking him on Twitter even as the insurrection at the Capitol was unfolding on January 6.
Funnily enough, Eastman resigned from his university a week later.
Giuliani and Graham went back and forth on the scheme, with Graham telling Giuliani to give him some substance instead of just because I say so.
Giuliani then sent Graham several memos and affidavits claiming fraud. But when Graham’s chief Judiciary Committee counsel Lee Holmes went over the claims, he found they were sloppy, overbearing and “added up to nothing,” Woodward and Costa write. “Holmes reported to Graham that the data in the memos were a concoction, with a bullying tone and eighth grade writing.”
“Third grade,” Graham responded, according to the book. “I can get an affidavit tomorrow saying the world is flat.”
Giuliani did not respond to a request for comment.
Too busy tucking his shirt in.
What irritates me are the liars and useful stooges who declare “you can’t call this a coup attempt; they had a legal theory.”
I’m not a political scientist or historian, but I feel pretty comfortable asserting that the perpetrators of coups (whether successful or merely attempted) rarely declare publicly “this is a coup! We are taking over control of this country because we want to and we can, and that’s all the reason we need.” They always come up with some fig leaf of legal or constitutional justification.
Imagine how bad your argument has to be to fail to convince Mike Pence to do something he’d desperately like to do.
Eastman’s manifesto is just deranged. He notes that there will be “howls” from Democrats, but that they’ll all just have to shut up because Lawrence Tribe once wrote some things that Eastman claims supports his position. Tribe has shown up on Twitter to dispute that characterization, but more importantly — with all due respect to Tribe, he’s hardly some binding authority. (I’m pretty sure you could find a couple of dozen Famous Conservative Law Professors who would say Eastman’s theories were nonsense.)
@Screechy – yeah, if you are planning a coup, you say “the state is in danger, I and my 10,000 soldiers have come to rescue it.” You don’t say, “I want to seize power, nyaah nyaah nyaah.”
Right, it’s like declaring war. You don’t generally say “that’s some nice land you’ve got there, we’ve decided to take it because we can,” there’s always some pretext about ancestral claims or other casus belli. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t wars started for simple naked conquest, just that it’s usually good P.R. to put another label on it.
I’ve just read a novel called Bear Head by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It has a character who has important parts of his personality missing. In fact, he doesn’t have a personality, really, or anything anyone could call plans or ambitions. He just wants to get what he wants. And he’s spectacularly good at persuading people to get him what he wants. He doesn’t do it through statecraft or brilliant rhetoric, he can’t do either of those things. He just somehow manages to get people to want to please him. He can barely form coherent sentences but everyone around him trips over themselves to perform morally repugnant and highly illegal actions in order to win his approval.
It’s not difficult to imagine who and what Tchaikovsky had in mind when he wrote that character. It’s a good study. The book talks about how, when the character is not actively engaged in something, his features just go slack. He sort of turns off. He has no inner life at all. Remember that?
For the record, the book is quite good. It has educated bears in it.