2020 Election Results Part 8: Lawsuits, Qualified Biden Nominees, and a Pouty Toddler

[GreyhoundFan]

I guess each Faux host has to come to the reality that Twitler lost at his or her own speed. I'm guessing Hannity, Carlson, Dobbs, and Judge Box O'Whine will come up to speed around the year 2200.

 

[thoughtful]

So, let me get this straight. Joe Biden is the president-elect of the United States?

Just checking.

It's so hard to keep up with the news sometimes.

So, Joe.

Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. - that's the guy. With Kamala Devi Harris as the VP-elect.

OK.

I think I have it now.

Edited December 9, 2020 by thoughtful
damn riffles

[GreyhoundFan]

I hope Joe realizes this quickly: "Any Biden effort to ‘reach out’ to conservatives is doomed"

Quote

President-elect Joe Biden is not giving up on reaching out to the people who didn’t vote for him, even as most of them seem to believe he’s at the head of a plot to steal the election — and a significant portion believe he’s part of a global conspiracy of satanic, pedophile, cannibal, sex-traffickers.

Biden is determined, though, just as so many Democrats were before him. And like them, he’ll probably fail.

Bloomberg’s Jennifer Jacobs reports that the Biden White House will be making a particular point of reaching out:

The Biden administration plans to create a position to find common ground with conservatives, said Louisiana Congressman Cedric Richmond, a senior adviser and director of the Office of Public Engagement for the president-elect.

“Right now I’m trying to set up the office and I’m actually looking at establishing a position that reaches out to conservatives — because it’s about moving forward. We cannot stay where we are,” Richmond said during the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council on Monday night.

It’s possible that Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-La.) is just throwing around ideas, and in the end, there won’t be a Conservative Outreach Czar in the Biden White House. But there’s no doubt that Biden will govern, as he said many times, as the president of all Americans, not just those who supported him.

It’s the right thing to do (and what we assumed all presidents would do, until Donald Trump). He’ll be supporting policies that he believes are good for the whole country, not just the places in the country that supported him. Unlike Trump, he won’t be doing any “victory tours” of just the states he won. But it won’t help.

This is a never-ending obsession with Democrats. How can we get conservatives to like us more? Is there some special strategy we can deploy, or argument we can make, that will open their hearts and minds to what we have to say?

You may have noticed that Republicans — who have now lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections — never bother to ask themselves how they might reach out to liberals. They appoint no people to carry out this task; they publish no essays in their journals about how to go about it; they hold no think-tank forums to explore the problem and consider solutions. They’d much rather dream up new voter suppression schemes to make it more difficult for liberals to cast their ballots.

It’s reinforced by a media double standard: Reporters seldom bother to ask Republicans what they’re doing to reach out to the other side, because everyone knows the answer is “nothing.” That’s despite the fact that in our lifetimes we’ve never seen a president more contemptuous of people who didn’t vote for him than Trump, and he just lost reelection by 7 million votes. You might think it’s a problem the GOP could benefit from considering.

And Republicans are allowed to show utter contempt for liberals and the places they live, while heaven help a Democrat who says anything disrespectful about red states or small towns.

Yet, we constantly scratch our chins wondering why Democrats fail to get more support from conservative white voters, especially in rural areas. Is it their policy choices? The fact that they nominate too many candidates from the Northeast? Are they not showing sufficient “respect”? Should they offer more praise to country music, pickup trucks and other rural conservative cultural markers? Would that do the trick?

The answer, of course, is no.

The truth is that Democrats reach out constantly. They hold forums to show they understand and care about rural issues. They support policies to give people in conservative states better health care and better education and more economic opportunities. They come up with plans to boost rural America. It doesn’t penetrate.

Why is that? The first reason is simply that conservatives are, well, conservative. We live in a time of party polarization and ideological coherence, which means the two parties have profoundly different perspectives and policy agendas. As much as dishonest politicians insist we need to stop all the bickering and find solutions, Washington is full of solutions and bickering is not the problem. It’s that conservatives and liberals have incompatible ideas about what we should do, about taxes, government spending, health care, climate change and almost everything else.

The second reason is that conservatives’ ideas about liberals are created and sustained by an extremely effective propaganda machine. You simply cannot overstate the influence Fox News, conservative talk radio and the rest of the right-wing media universe has over the way conservatives view liberals.

It’s a billion-dollar megaphone blasting in conservatives’ ears every day around the clock, telling them that liberals are arrogant, condescending, immoral, hypocritical, snakes who hate them and everything they stand for, who spend their days plotting the destruction of America and God and all that is good about the world. The idea that a staffer or two in the White House might make an impact on that is ridiculous.

But Biden and Richmond should go ahead and try if they want. I’m sure that part of their theory — as it was for Barack Obama before them — is that even if your reaching out doesn’t accomplish much in the way of tangible benefits, at the very least it’s good to be seen reaching out, so you can say you tried in good faith.

That and five bucks will get you a nonfat soy latte at one of those high-falutin’ cafes liberals have so many of in their decadent, crime-ridden cities. But it won’t get you much else.

 

[fraurosena]

7 hours ago, AnywhereButHere said:

https://apple.news/AAPd5DnG0SaGuYDTK08-P5g

And he’s losing his pet Supreme Court too. Someone’s going to have a pissy fit soon!

The best part about the SC’s 9-0 no dissent, no notes, order is the brevity.
It is precisely one whole sentence long.

The application for injunctive relief presented by Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court is denied.

[Marshmallow World]

5 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

The best part about the SC’s 9-0 no dissent, no notes, order is the brevity.
It is precisely one whole sentence long.

The application for injunctive relief presented by Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court is denied.

*chef's kiss* Just perfect. 

[AmazonGrace]

Jenna Ellis is claiming that a petition for cert is still pending but Law Twitter is saying they haven't filed one. Cert was mentioned in the application that was denied.

In the meantime in another SC case they're trusting the drunk lady.

 

[AmazonGrace]

About Paxton's own legal woes.

The Nevada SC agreed with the lower court in an appeal so no joy for Trump there. 

 

 

[AmazonGrace]

There is someone in Arkansas who wants a pardon too?

 

 

[kpmom]

I love how for a month now they've said they have soooo much proof of fraud, and yet when they get into court...nothing.

You would think even the most gullible would be getting tired of this.

I know Trump has said he wants to run again in 2024 (?), but surely all of this has got to turn off all but the hardcore base?

If Biden, or any Democrat, behaved like this, I would imagine most of us would be looking for another candidate??

[Xan]

8 minutes ago, kpmom said:

I love how for a month now they've said they have soooo much proof of fraud, and yet when they get into court...nothing.

You would think even the most gullible would be getting tired of this.

Every day this drags on and Trump just yells louder.  I honestly don't think he can imagine that they'll make him leave the White House.  Maybe some tiny part of his brain acknowledges it but the vast part of his thinking is still "They can't do this to me!"  He knows how crooked he's been.  And he's aware that the NY AG will be after him.  He still thinks that people will magically pull something out of their collective Republican asses to save his sorry hide.

He's giving away pardons and government appointments right and left.  Maybe he think someone will be so grateful that they'll do something to help him out.  Who knows?

I did read that Russian opinion writers are suggesting that Putin should welcome Donny and his family of crooks to move there.  I think it will depend on whether Putin thinks Trump will still be able to sway the Republican party after January.

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

You guys voted differently and we lost and it's so unfair!

[fraurosena]

56 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

My first reaction was: They voted 4-3?  That means there were three who voted to grant relief?  
But then I saw the second tweet:

 

 

[clueliss]

I worry about our collective intelligence levels.

 

[Xan]

This is an interesting read on one reason that Trump won't concede.  He still wants to control the Republican party.  It's by Jonathon V. Last and is in "The Triad" at The Bulwark blog.

Spoiler

1. Achievement Unlocked

Over the past year I’ve been insisting that Trump is Forever.

TL;DR is Trump won’t leave politics and the Republican party won’t be able to move on from him because its voters are bound to him.

The counterargument to this—often expressed by Republican friends who hated Trump, but went along with things—went something like this:

Voters hate losers. After Biden crushes Trump, the GOP will turn its back on him and move on. This is the cycle of defeat and renewal which is constant in American politics. Five years from now, you won’t be able to find a single Republican who admits to having voted for him.

This wasn’t a crazy argument, but I think we can now say with rough certainty that it was incorrect.

And yet I think it’s an interesting lens through which to view the last five weeks.

Everyone laughs at how stupid the Trump lawsuits are. Can you believe these morons? They lose everywhere! Even Republican judges keep slapping them down! How embarrassing for Trump!

But that’s the wrong way to think about Trump’s actions since November 3. Because his goal hasn’t been to keep the office of the president. It’s been to keep the Republican party.

On the morning of November 4, Donald Trump faced two problems. The first was that he was going to lose the power of the presidency. The second was that this loss endangered his ownership of the GOP.

Now, owning a major political party isn’t as useful as being president. But it’s not nothing, either. In a two-party system, you can exert a great deal of power by being the head of a party. You have businesses and foreign governments that will pay tribute to you. You have capos spread across the country, ready to do your bidding. You have an audience of something like 40 million partisans who can be mined for contributions and mobilized as a flash mob whenever you need them.

A political party is, to paraphrase El Blago, a valuable forking thing. Why would anyone willingly let go of it?

So for Trump, the lawsuits, the posturing, the couping—yes, it would be nice if he wound up as president on January 21. But that’s the secondary objective. The primary objective was to stop the Republican party from leaving him and, if possible, tighten his grasp on it.

And while everyone laughs at how incompetent Trump’s Elite Strike Force has been as a matter of law, they miss how effective it’s been as a matter of politics.

Mission: Accomplished.

2. Count the Ways

How does a party move on from a defeated leader? It’s a routine process that occurs after a choreographed series of steps from the stakeholders.

The defeated leader concedes and steps away from public view.

The base voters melt back into the countryside for a short period—usually a few months—until they reemerge to begin fighting against the opposing party’s new regime.

The partisan media immediately start a fight over What Went Wrong, as the various factions try to blame each other in order to gain advantage in the bid to find a new leader.

Ambitious elected officials begin to put themselves forward as the face of the opposition in the hopes of eventually taking over the top position in the headless party.

Trump’s post-election fight has been designed to short-circuit each of these steps.

Trump will not leave the public eye.

His insistence that he won increased the activation of the Republican base.

The base’s acceptance of his claim forced the partisan media to toe his line and even created demand for more partisan options when Fox wavered in its willingness to deny reality. (The explosion of Newsmax and OAN as they went full-2020 Truther can only force Fox further away from the mainstream and into outright propaganda.)

This entire dynamic has stopped cold any questions of blame assigning or intra-party fighting.

Consider: It is the Democrats—who won a large victory!—who are engaged in recriminations and the re-thinking of their electoral pitch. There has been absolutely none of this—zero—on the Republican side. You can’t ask “what went wrong” when you’re not allowed to admit that you lost.

The next generation of ambitious elected Republicans isn’t just frozen in place. They’re subjugated. They’ve looked at the voters and realized that the best path forward is demonstrating absolute fealty to Trump. Which means that their incentive is to outbid their peers in expressing support for Trump’s claim of victory.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: For anyone who wants a future in Republican politics, the price of admission is not admitting that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. You have to either skirt this reality, or outright deny it.

But this isn’t just a question of a fact, it’s a mindset. Because it means that the minimum ante for Republican politics is now support for an insane conspiracy theory.

And once you’re embracing “The guy who lost by 7 million votes actually won in a landslide, because Deep State,” then “Hey those QAnons have some interesting ideas” is only the next step. And not a very big one.

The election is over. Trump lost.

But the battle for the soul of the Republican party is over, too.

And Trump won.

 

[fraurosena]

53 minutes ago, Xan said:

The election is over. Trump lost.

But the battle for the soul of the Republican party is over, too.

And Trump won.

I agree that it's an interesting read, and the theory it posits has its merits. But there is something fundamentally flawed in its premise: it assumes that Trump actually has the mental acuity to plan this and then execute it perfectly. I simply can't suspend my disbelief on that part. His querulous tantrums, his narcissistic need for adoration, is absolute corruption and abject stupidity and propensity to constantly undermine himself negate the notion that Trump planned this. Did someone whisper it in his ear? Maybe. Is someone who wants a behind the scenes grip on the GOP orchestrating this? I don't know. That's going a bit too far into the realm of conspiracy theories for me.

[Cartmann99]

I'm booked for an appearance on Newsmax tonight to explain how Richard Nixon's ghost is trying to steal the election away from Trump.

[clueliss]

Sooooooooo by that logic - ONLY the states of Florida and Ohio should ever vote and the rest of us just go with that?  Oish. 

[clueliss]

And 17 states agree with the idiot in Texas (including my state AG)

 

[formergothardite]

19 minutes ago, clueliss said:

And 17 states agree with the idiot in Texas (including my state AG)

 

How terrified should I be by this. Do they have any chance?

[clueliss]

Oh please - we're at unconstitutional levels here.  I suspect the response from SCOTUS is going to burst into flames when they read it. 

[AnywhereButHere]

32 minutes ago, formergothardite said:

How terrified should I be by this. Do they have any chance?

The below I got off of Facebook. I'm somewhat of a tech idiot, so I can't figure out how to do anything but copy and paste. It's from Jay Kuo. I like how he breaks down the legal stuff to where even I can understand it. I also like how he makes me feel better about all of it!

Quote

Earlier this week, I posted about why the Texas AG’s case is unlikely even to be heard by SCOTUS, let alone adjudicated in his favor. Because so much of Trumpworld (including Dear Leader himself) seems so hellbent on this latest and most desperate of attempts, and many of you are probably flooded with their baffling posts about this being the final blow to Biden, I am fleshing out the reasons for why this is absolutely junk drawer material (though it’s more like a wind up toy inside of a junk drawer, which will continue banging around until it runs out of spring action...)

So, some background. The Texas AG (who himself is under investigation for multiple crimes—can you say “pardon me please, Trump?) is suing four others states for allegedly having permitted state election officials to usurp the power of state legislatures to make the rules on how presidential electors are chosen in a state. In short, he just doesn’t like how these four states carried out their elections (by making mail-in voting easier, e.g.) so he’s asking SCOTUS to step in after the election to change the outcome.

If that sounds absurd, it’s because it is. Very. The remedy he is seeking is to throw all the electors in those states over to the Republicans, effectively disenfranchising millions of voters in those states as well as nullifying the electoral win of tens of millions of other voters. The remedy, to be blunt, is extreme.

Texas will face an initial issue of whether the Court will take the case at all. While SCOTUS has what’s called “original jurisdiction” (meaning, it hears the case directly) in cases between states, this is not mandatory but discretionary. The reason for this is simple: If it were mandatory, SCOTUS would have zero time to handle any other case, especially around election time. Imagine if any state were allowed to sue any other claiming that it didn’t like how the other conducted its election, and that were enough to invoke SCOTUS. It’s an absurd result that would clog the court’s docket. SCOTUS can decline original jurisdiction when, as here, the matters being litigated already have appropriate fora. Indeed, the state courts and lower federal court cases address all these issues, with 51 losses to date racked up by Trump and his allies.

So out the gate, the Court may say no thanks, but even if for some reason it took the case, there’s a big problem of STANDING, meaning the right to sue. Generally you have standing if you have been injured in some way that the court can remedy. But Texas is somehow claiming it has been injured by the elections held in GA, PA, WI and MI. This is the tail wagging the dog; it would take incredible legal acrobatics to find that Texas has standing to sue. More likely, they would toss the case on standing because then the justices don’t have to reach into the thorny mess of election fraud allegations.

Then there’s the problem of LACHES, which is a fancy way of saying prejudicial delay. Why did Texas wait until after the election was over and the state results were certified to sue, if it could have done so even before the election were held if it didn’t approve of how mail-in ballots were being handled in other states? Courts hate it when a case is brought so late that the remedy is far worse than it had to be. SCOTUS could toss it on laches, or because Texas missed the December 8th safe harbor deadline through its delay.

If the Court still wanted to inflict serious pain on itself and address the merits, then to throw out elections held by four states it would have to find some kind of constitutional violation bigger than the remedy it is being asked to undertake. Having SCOTUS undo the will of the voters by fiat is so anthithetical to our system that there would have to be evidence so powerful and so incontrovertible as to require the Court to step in and do this.

But we already know they have nothing. If they did we would have seen it now. Instead what they have are claims of statistical improbability. That’s right! They believe it was simply statistically unlikely that Biden got this many votes. This is so jaw-dropping a thing to use as a basis for invalidating an election, by asking the court to flip the votes of four states to the other side, that it ought to be grounds for sanction. Penalties likely won’t happen here because it is a political matter, but for goodness’ sake, they are really grasping at straws.

These are just some of the reasons this case is going nowhere. I could probably come up with four more. So if you have Trumpers who are crowing about the Texas AG suit, you can just smile, pat them on the hand, and say it’s all going to be over soon.

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[Xan]

3 hours ago, fraurosena said:

I agree that it's an interesting read, and the theory it posits has its merits. But there is something fundamentally flawed in its premise: it assumes that Trump actually has the mental acuity to plan this and then execute it perfectly. I simply can't suspend my disbelief on that part. His querulous tantrums, his narcissistic need for adoration, is absolute corruption and abject stupidity and propensity to constantly undermine himself negate the notion that Trump planned this. Did someone whisper it in his ear? Maybe. Is someone who wants a behind the scenes grip on the GOP orchestrating this? I don't know. That's going a bit too far into the realm of conspiracy theories for me.

I agree that he's not smart enough or organized enough to do it on purpose.  I just think that he's always been able to boss everyone around and he's still doing it.  He's still trying to maintain control.  Think of him as an idiot savant of dictatorships.