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Category: electoral college

  • Trump’s Comments This Week Made it “Very Clear What He Was Up To,” Raskin Says

    Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland), a member of the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack, suggested on Tuesday that recent comments by former President Donald Trump “said the criminal part out loud” regarding his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

    Earlier this week, Trump wrongly claimed on his website that efforts to reform the Electoral College prove that his scheme to get then-Vice President Mike Pence to disregard legitimate electors’ votes and count fake ballots instead was somehow legal.

    “Unfortunately, he didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!” Trump said in his statement.

    Legal scholars have rejected that notion — if Trump’s claims were true, some have noted, it would mean that the sitting vice president would have the ability to accept or reject any election outcome, on any basis, without much oversight at all. Instead, proponents of reforming the Electoral Count Act say that change is necessary to prevent the exploitation of existing “ambiguities” in the statutes; this is precisely what Trump loyalists in Congress sought to do in their attempts to thwart the will of voters last year.

    On Tuesday, CBS News asked Raskin whether the commission’s case against Trump had become simpler in light of the former president’s recent statement about trying to overturn the 2020 election results. Raskin said that it did, “in the sense that Donald Trump said the criminal part out loud.”

    “That makes it very clear what he was up to,” he added, referring to Trump’s statement.

    The commission’s investigation has still been challenging, Raskin went on, noting that Trump “has been trying to sandbag and obstruct us by getting his greatest intimates in his entourage — like Roger Stone and Steve Bannon and Mark Meadows — not to testify.” But most people who have been asked to give depositions have done so willingly, he said, even without being subpoenaed.

    The January 6 commission is investigating a number of efforts to overturn the 2020 election results by the Trump White House, including attempts to seize voting machines from states where Trump falsely alleged that fraud had taken place. According to recent reporting from The New York Times, Trump played a larger role in that plot than was previously known, directing his subordinates, including his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, to ask the heads of at least three separate executive branch departments whether they had the authority to remove voting machines.

    Trump loyalists in the White House also drafted an executive order that would have directed the National Guard to seize election equipment. But Trump never signed the order, possibly because he was advised that it would have been illegal.

    Former secretary for the Department of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson said on Tuesday that forcibly seizing election machines from states could have been a criminal offense.

    “It could potentially constitute a crime in my view,” Johnson said. “Certainly conspiring to seize voting machines, conspiring to hijack our election that way, to hijack our democracy, and I hope the January 6 committee and even the Department of Justice are looking at this apparent evidence.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Fake Electors Casting Fraudulent Ballots for Trump Could be Charged by DOJ

    Hundreds of Trump supporters and gather near the Capitol Building for the Stop the Steal Rally in Atlanta, Georgia, on November 21, 2022.

    A former federal prosecutor has suggested that Republicans who took part in the fake electors scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in seven states could face a number of criminal charges.

    Glenn Kirschner, who served in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia for 24 years, suggested that the 59 fake electors could face criminal charges, including obstruction of an official proceeding (the certification of the Electoral College), conspiracy to commit fraud, forgery, and mail fraud, as the fake Electoral College documents were sent through the U.S. Postal Service.

    The most serious of those offenses could potentially result in a 20-year prison sentence.

    “That’s not an exhaustive list,” Kirschner said in an interview with HuffPost, indicating that the fake electors could face charges beyond those listed above.

    The threat of prosecution could incentivize many of the Republicans involved to cooperate with the Department of Justice (DOJ) if a formal inquiry is opened, Kirshner said. He believes that the lawmakers involved in the scheme will eventually be charged.

    “These folks should all be charged yesterday,” Kirschner said.

    Some of the fake electors have sought to distance themselves from the scheme by claiming that their fraudulent votes were accompanied by addendums saying that the votes should only be counted if Trump and his allies were successful in their legal challenges. Such a statement was attached to a fake Electoral College document from Pennsylvania Republicans, for example.

    But in Georgia, where the Republicans involved issued a similar document, electors could face charges because their disclaiming statement wasn’t included with the votes they sent to the National Archives and to Congress.

    Fake electors from other states didn’t include statements acknowledging that their votes should only be counted if court challenges were successful. The fake documents matched legitimate Electoral College certification notices word for word, although they were printed on a different type of paper.

    The fake electors may consider making plea arrangements if they have evidence that members of Trump’s inner circle were pressuring them to help the former president overturn the results of the election. The scheme, which ultimately sought to disrupt the certification of the presidential election on January 6, was reportedly managed by Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s former lawyer, along with members of Trump’s campaign team.

    But it’s possible that other individuals were involved in the plan, including current members of Congress; if this is the case, fake electors could potentially make plea arrangements based on their involvement. Rep. Scott Fitzgerald, a Republican in Wisconsin who was a member of the state legislature at the time, arranged for a room to be reserved for the fake electors at the state Capitol building on the same day that legitimate electors had met there to cast their ballots for Biden, who won the state in the 2020 presidential race. It’s possible that Wisconsin electors with knowledge of Fitzgerald’s actions could arrange a plea deal with the Justice Department by implicating him as a participant in the scheme.

    Although his home state wasn’t one of the seven states involved, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) could also face repercussions for his involvement in the plan. Last month, Jordan confirmed that he was one of several GOP lawmakers who texted Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows encouraging him to convince then-Vice President Mike Pence to recognize the fake electors as legitimate.

    The DOJ has begun to investigate the fake electors scheme following requests from several state attorneys general for the department to do so, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said to CNN on Tuesday.

    “We’ve received those referrals. Our prosecutors are looking at those and I can’t say anything more on ongoing investigations,” Monaco said.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Giuliani, Trump Campaign Coordinated Fake Electors Scheme to Overturn Election

    Rudy Giuliani exits after speaking to the press about various lawsuits related to the 2020 election, inside the Republican National Committee headquarters on November 19, 2020, in Washington, D.C.

    New reporting has revealed that the scheme to use fake electors to disrupt the certification of the Electoral College vote on January 6, 2021, was coordinated by members of former President Donald Trump’s campaign team, including Rudy Giuliani, who was his personal lawyer at the time.

    Giuliani and other campaign associates coordinated the plan on a state-by-state level, sources told CNN. The Trump campaign was directly involved in finding Trump loyalists to participate in the plan in seven states, and ensured that fake electors could have rooms in statehouses to conduct their unofficial business.

    The fake electors’ documents – which were forged but purported to be official – were sent to the National Archives.

    The second part of the plan required involvement from former Vice President Mike Pence, who oversaw the certification of the Electoral College. In order for the plan to come to fruition, Pence had to either accept the fraudulent electors’ votes as real, or say that he couldn’t count any of the votes out of supposed confusion over which were actually legitimate. But despite a campaign to get Pence to participate in the plan, the former vice president refused to do so.

    While the fake electors scheme was materializing, Giuliani forwarded letters to Pence from Republican state legislators across the U.S., urging him to accept the false documents as legitimate. The former vice president’s legal team reportedly reviewed the requests but were unswayed, noting that there wasn’t a legal basis for accepting the illegitimate votes.

    The scheme to present fake electors and their forged documents as legitimate may become a new focus of the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol building. Some members of the commission have expressed an interest in discerning whether or not Trump was involved in the scheme along with his campaign team.

    Although Trump vocally supported overturning the 2020 election in the weeks after President Joe Biden was announced the winner, the extent to which the former president was involved in the fake electors scheme is unclear.

    The committee expects to receive hundreds of documents from the National Archives in coming days, as the Supreme Court recently dismissed a last-ditch appeal by Trump to keep his presidential records hidden from the January 6 commission. It’s possible that these documents will reveal more information about the extent of Trump’s involvement in his campaign team’s plan.

    “We want to look at the fraudulent activity that was contained in the preparation of these fake Electoral College certificates,” committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) said. “And then we want to look to see to what extent this was part of a comprehensive plan to overthrow the 2020 election.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Fake GOP Elector Refuses to Explain Involvement in Electoral College Plot

    Trump supporters attend a Stop The Steal rally just hours after Joe Biden was named President-elect on November 7, 2020, at the State Capitol in Phoenix, Arizona.

    A Republican lawmaker who helped forge election paperwork in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election has refused to answer questions about how he was recruited to participate in the plan.

    In a video captured by KPNX in Phoenix, Arizona, this week, Arizona Republican State Rep. Jake Hoffman was asked why he agreed to sign a forged document in which he and others falsely purported to be the true electors for the state. In the document, the fake electors cast their votes for Trump, even though President Joe Biden won the state by a slim margin.

    Hoffman claimed he participated because he believed that there had been fraud in the 2020 election — disinformation that has been repeatedly proved false.

    “In unprecedented times, unprecedented action occurs,” Hoffman told a reporter. “There is no case law, there is no precedent that exists as to whether or not an election that is currently being litigated in the courts has due standing, which is why we felt it appropriate to provide Congress and the vice president with dueling opinions.”

    Although Trump and his allies have filed dozens of lawsuits to block election results from being certified in a number of states that Trump lost — including Arizona — judges haven’t sided with the former president in a single case. Arizona certified its election results in early December, well before Hoffman and other Republicans produced the forged document.

    When asked whether he and the other fake electors had been recruited to take part in the scheme, Hoffman said that he was not “in charge” of the electors who took part. “You would need to ask the party chair that,” he said.

    “How did you know to show up that day?” the reporter pressed on.

    “As I said, you can go ahead and ask the party chair,” Hoffman said.

    “Do you not know how you arrived at a place?” the reporter asked. Instead of answering the question, Hoffman promptly walked away.

    Hoffman’s evasion of local reporters in Phoenix follows reporting from MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow earlier this week, when the host detailed how fake Republican electors in at least five states produced forged documents alleging that they were the true electors. The fake electors submitted these documents to the National Archives in hopes of securing additional Electoral College votes for Trump, Maddow noted, even though the fake electors were all from states that Biden had won.

    “It’s not like they created these documents to like, hold close to their chest and fantasize that this had been the real outcome. It’s not like they created these documents just to keep [for] themselves as keepsakes,” Maddow said on her show. “They sent them into the government, as if they were real documents.”

    The actions appeared to be coordinated, as the documents “all match, exactly,” and have the “same formatting, same font, same spacing, almost the exact same wording,” Maddow went on.

    Several documents released over the past year have revealed schemes by Trump and his allies — some within the Department of Justice — to use “forged slates of electors” in order to create confusion in the Electoral College, Maddow noted. Had these measures gone as planned, the House of Representatives would have decided on the election, likely resulting in Trump being appointed as president for another four years.

    Maddow then speculated whether there was coordination to overturn the election results among Trump’s White House and Republicans elsewhere.

    Did the Trump DOJ help “Republicans in those states do it?” Maddow asked on her program, referring to the forgeries. “We don’t know, but somebody helped them do it, because they all filed the exact same document.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Republicans in 5 States Forged Electoral College Documents, MSNBC Host Says

    Trump supporters demonstrate outside of the TCF Center to protest the counting of votes for the 2020 general election on November 6, 2020, in Detroit, Michigan.

    Loyalists of former President Donald Trump attempted to certify the Electoral College in favor of the defeated candidate with forged documents, according to new reporting by MSNBC host Rachel Maddow.

    Trump loyalists forged documents in at least five states where Joe Biden had defeated Trump and submitted them for certification, according to Maddow.

    The forgeries do not look like the uniquely printed paperwork that states submit, Maddow noted, but they used very specific language purporting that those who signed it were the “duly elected and qualified Electors for President and Vice President of the United States of America” — even though they were not.

    “It’s not like they created these documents to like, hold close to their chest and fantasize that this had been the real outcome,” Maddow said. “It’s not like they created these documents just to keep [for] themselves as keepsakes. They sent them into the government, as if they were real documents.”

    Maddow also said that the effort to flip the election in Trump’s favor appeared to be coordinated. The faked documents “all match, exactly,” Maddow observed. “Same formatting, same font, same spacing, almost the exact same wording. All of them.”

    Later in the program, the MSNBC host connected these documents to a draft letter, written by a Department of Justice (DOJ) official loyal to Trump named Jeffrey Clark, which “explicitly describes these forged slates of electors from multiple states” as part of a plan to keep the former president in office. It was unusual, Maddow said, that Clark was aware that these states had made these types of moves before he suggested the idea to Trump and his allies.

    “How did [Clark] know that, two weeks earlier, Republicans in at least five states had in fact created these forged electoral documents?” Maddow asked. “Did the Trump Justice Department know about it because they helped Republicans in those states do it? We don’t know, but somebody helped them do it, because they all filed the exact same document.”

    Other documents unearthed in the past year have detailed similar strategies designed by Trump allies to overturn the election. In one such document, Trump’s former lawyer John Eastman devised a six-point plan that relied upon “multiple slates of electors” being used to create confusion in the Electoral College certification process. Former Vice President Mike Pence could then use that confusion to force a vote in the House of Representatives, where Trump would then win the presidency, Eastman said.

    Weeks after the election was called for Biden, Trump aide Stephen Miller also said in December that the campaign’s next step to challenging the election’s outcome was to submit false certificates of ascertainment stating that Trump won in states where he hadn’t.

    “An alternate slate of electors in contested states is going to vote and we’re going to send those results up to Congress,” Miller said at the time. “This will ensure that all of our legal remedies remain open. That means if we win these cases in the courts, that we can direct that the alternate slate of electors be certified.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Jan. 6 Committee Issues 6 Subpoenas, Including to Michael Flynn, John Eastman

    Former National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn leaves after the delay in his sentencing hearing at U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., December 18, 2018.

    The select committee investigating the January 6 breach of the United States Capitol building has subpoenaed six more individuals, including a lawyer for Trump who helped craft a scheme to upend the Electoral College and the former president’s first National Security Advisor.

    The January 6 commission believes these six individuals — all of whom were associated with Trump’s campaign and his so-called “Stop the Steal” movement — can provide insight into Trump’s motivations in the days leading up to a mob of his loyalists attacking the Capitol.

    The subpoenas were issued to:

    The January 6 commission is asking for documents from these six individuals and requesting that they give closed- door testimony to commission investigators starting at the end of November through mid-December.

    The activities of these six individuals are key to understanding what led up to the attack on the Capitol, commission vice chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Mississippi) said.

    “In the days before the Jan. 6 attack, the former president’s closest allies and advisers drove a campaign of misinformation about the election and planned ways to stop the count of Electoral College votes,” Thompson said in a statement. “The select committee needs to know every detail about their efforts to overturn the election, including who they were talking to in the White House and in Congress, what connections they had with rallies that escalated into a riot and who paid for it all.”

    This latest round of subpoenas brings the total number of subpoenas issued to 25, although more than 150 witnesses have testified before investigators so far, most without the need for such orders. The six individuals subpoenaed on Monday seem to indicate that the commission is focusing on strategy sessions held by Trump and his inner circle to overturn the election results.

    “They are really honing in on this strategy at the Willard Hotel,” Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney and current law professor at the University of Michigan, said to The New York Times. “If it’s a campaign war room, that’s one thing. But the question is: To what extent are they looking at blocking the certification of the election?”

    Eastman’s testimony about his scheme to help Trump overturn the Electoral College results will be of great concern, McQuade added.

    “The Eastman memo is a real smoking gun. It really appears to be a concerted effort here,” she said.

    It’s likely that the subpoenas will be challenged, either by Trump himself or by those receiving them, as the subpoenaed individuals represent some of Trump’s most loyal confidantes. Flynn, for instance, was steadfast in his refusal to cooperate with the Mueller investigation, even when facing the possibility of a long prison sentence.

    The matter will likely be tied up in the courts, as Trump has already sued to have other former aides’ testimonies blocked by making dubious claims of executive privilege — a right conferred to presidents that many legal experts believe Trump no longer has as a former chief executive.

    Although the lawsuits may not rest on sound legal ground, many say that isn’t the point. Rather, challenging the ability of Trump associates to testify is likely a delay tactic meant to “run out the clock” on the January 6 commission’s work up to the 2022 midterm elections, when Republicans may take control of Congress.

    Trump is using the courts “to delay, try to prevent the country from learning about his corruption,” commission member Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California) said last month. “Donald Trump will lose this litigation, and he knows he’ll lose the litigation. The point isn’t winning, the point is delaying.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Memo Uncovered Showing Trump’s 6-Step Plan for Pence to Overturn the Election

    Donald trump looks at mike pence

    A newly released memo, never seen by the public until this week, details how former President Donald Trump and his legal team had planned to convince then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

    Current President Joe Biden won that election with an Electoral College count of 306 votes to Trump’s 232. But a scheme hatched by John Eastman, a lawyer helping Trump devise ways to remain president after his loss, sought to discount seven states Biden had won in order to make Trump the victor.

    A memo authored by Eastman was released this week as part of the promotional campaign for a new book about the final days of the Trump presidency titled Peril by Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. In his memo, Eastman explained how Trump and his allies could convince Pence to undo the election results, as part of his constitutional role as president of the Senate.

    On January 6 — the day of the certification of Electoral College votes (as well as the day when a mob of Trump loyalists violently breached the Capitol building in an effort to disrupt that certification) — the memo suggested that Pence should begin the process of opening and counting ballots. When he reached Arizona, however, Eastman suggested he could announce that the state had sent in “multiple slates of electors” and that he would not count those votes until after he finished tallying the remainder of the Electoral College.

    Pence would do the same with other states that had Republican state legislators send in alternative electors. Eventually, seven states in total, numbering 84 votes for Biden, would be deemed undetermined by the vice president. At this point, the memo argued that Pence could say he wouldn’t count those ballots and that the discrepancy couldn’t be resolved.

    Although the suggested action by Pence would violate the Electoral Count Act, Eastman said it was okay because, in his opinion, the law was unconstitutional, a point that Trump could argue if the matter reached the courts.

    By discounting those seven states, Pence could argue one of two things. First, he could say that Trump had won the majority of Electoral College votes that could be counted (Trump would still have his 232 votes in place, with Biden only attaining 222 votes because of the discounted seven states). And if Democrats in Congress challenged his edict, Pence could still help Trump out in a second way by saying that no candidate had attained the 270 Electoral College votes needed for an election victory.

    That would result in the election being decided in the House of Representatives, with each state’s delegation of lawmakers receiving one vote. As it so happened, 26 state delegations were in Republicans’ control at the time of the certification, all but guaranteeing reelection for Trump.

    However, the plan was incumbent upon Pence going along with it — which he ultimately said he wouldn’t do — and claiming authority to violate the Electoral Count Act.

    “The main thing here is that Pence should do this without asking for permission — either from a vote of the joint session or from the Court,” Eastman’s memo said. “Let the other side challenge his actions in court.”

    In several parts of his memo, Eastman claimed that his actions had the backing of esteemed Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe, and that the scheme was something Tribe had imagined in the past a vice president could do. However, responding to news of the memo on Twitter, Tribe said Eastman’s postulations about the law professor’s views on how to game the Electoral College were falsely asserted.“This Eastman memo pretends to be based on my analysis but in fact takes snippets of my work wholly out of context and spins a totally fake web of ‘law’ that no halfway decent lawyer would take seriously,” Tribe wrote. “No wonder it couldn’t fool even Mike Pence.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • As House Requests Docs on Capitol Breach, Trump Downplays Violence of Mob

    Trump supporters clash with police and security forces as people try to storm the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    A broad new investigation into the federal government’s response to the January 6 mob attack on the U.S. Capitol is afoot. Democratic House leaders from seven different committees have sent 16 letters to agencies and officials across the federal government requesting detailed records of communications from Trump administration officials and others from both before and after the Capitol breach.

    The committees are requesting all materials relating to the certification process of the Electoral College, discussions of Trump loyalists’ plans leading up to the mob attack, and communications in the wake of the violence.

    “Should the documents make their way into public view, communications by those employees could be monumental,” writes Whitney Wild on CNN. “Little is known about the Trump White House’s intentions and expectations for January 6 … or the internal discussions about the aftermath of the insurrection.”

    Shortly after reports about the House leaders’ requests started circulating on Thursday, Fox News aired a new interview in which former President Donald Trump sought to vastly minimize the violence that took place on January 6 after loyalist participants in the rally he had spoken at went on to break into the Capitol.

    Arguing that there was “zero threat” from his supporters when they descended upon the Capitol building, Trump added, “Look, they went in, they shouldn’t have done it. Some of them went in, and they are hugging and kissing the police and the guards, you know, they had great relationships. A lot of the people were waved in, and then they walked in and they walked out.”

    In reality, several individuals were injured and five people died as a result of the mob of Trump loyalists breaking into the building on the day that Congress was convened to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election, which President Joe Biden had won. During the attack, dozens of his supporters engaged in chants calling for the killing of elected officials, including Trump’s then-Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

    Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives in January, while he was still president, for his role in inciting the mob of his supporters to go to the Capitol after wrongly insisting that the election had been stolen. Although a majority of senators voted for his indictment, he was eventually acquitted in the Senate trial.

    Hundreds of participants of the Capitol breach have been charged by the Justice Department, including dozens who are accused of conspiracy to interfere in the certification process.

    Pelosi has been trying to create a bipartisan 9/11-style investigation of the Capitol breach within Congress, but thus far her effort has not come to fruition.

    Earlier this week, Pelosi suggested that Republican leaders, including Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) had been receptive to the idea of a commission. But that changed after he made an appearance on the Senate floor decrying the idea.

    “When I asked him if he was serious about wanting to do this he said, ‘Yes, it depends on the scope,’ and I said, ‘Well let’s discuss that,’” Pelosi said at a press conference on Thursday. “The next morning he went to the floor and just dumped all over — forgive my crudeness — the fact that we would be investigating January 6.”

    In this context, the record requests sent by seven House committees on Thursday signal House Democrats’ interest in pushing forward with a more sweeping investigation, whether or not their Republican colleagues will agree to a bipartisan inquiry.

    Most Americans believe that Trump bears much of the responsibility for what happened on January 6. An Economist/YouGov poll from early February noted that, when asked whether Trump bore “some” or “a lot” of responsibility for the attack of the Capitol, 51 percent of respondents answered in the affirmative, while just 40 percent said he only had “a little” or no responsibility for the events of that day.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Failure of Trump’s “Coup”: A Victory for the US Empire

    The Democrats’ second trial of Trump ends like the first: the outcome known in advance, the entire process designed to sell to the anti-Trump masses that the Democrats were leading some progressive counter-attack. Both impeachments enabled these politicians to present a national diversion to avoid addressing real issues the US people suffer from: the pandemic, lack of vaccines, no national health care program, increasing homelessness, closed schools.

    The Democrats’ first impeachment over Trump’s phone call to Ukraine aimed to sully his name for the benefit of the 2020 Democratic presidential campaign.  They purposely did not address Trump’s actual crimes: his cruelty to Latino immigrants on the border, his indifference to  police abuse of Blacks and Latinos, his racist attacks on non-white US citizens and residents, his neglect of the threat of global warming, funding the genocidal war against Yemen, bombing other countries, such as Syria, illegal and cruel sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela.

    The second impeachment, for the vague charge of “incitement of insurrection” sought to permanently ban Trump from “holding any office,” removing him as an election opponent in 2024. The Democrats reduced themselves to presenting as “evidence” of inciting insurrection Trump’s statement “’if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.” However, this insubstantial statement could easily be used to indict any progressive social change movement, much as the Smith Act of 1940 had been used against leftists. The Democrats conveniently avoided mention that Trump in his January 6 speech explicitly told protesters to “peacefully march to the Capitol.”

    The second impeachment also charged Trump with refusing to accept the November 2020 election results. However, the Constitution states Congress must officially certify the Electoral College votes and the presidential victor, giving Trump the constitutional right to challenge these votes in Congress. The articles of impeachment concluded “Donald John Trump, by such conduct, has demonstrated that he will remain a threat to national security, democracy, and the Constitution”. Whatever our opinion of the man, this only continues the Democratic Party-national security state McCarthyite campaign against Trump begun in earnest in 2016. Trump’s second acquittal marked a setback for this McCarthyism the Democrats have been pushing.

    Trump’s “coup” and the Democrats’ “coup”

    Trump’s attempt on January 6 pales in comparison to the Democrats’ well-orchestrated lawfare coup operation set in motion in 2016. As Consortium News, The Grayzone, Stephen Cohen, Glenn Greenwald have documented,  by late 2015 the Democrats were working with national security state officials to paint Trump as beholden to Putin – including stories of Putin’s alleged ownership of “pee tapes” of Trump with prostitutes in Moscow hotels. The Democrats funded the Steele Dossier fabrication, beginning a years-long fact-free story of Trump collusion with Russia to steal the election.

    While Democrats charge Trump with propagating his Stop the Steal story, they have not renounced their own fake Trump-Putin collusion story. In fact, it set the stage for their first impeachment. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi even tweeted – after Congress certified the 2016 Electoral College vote “Our election was hijacked. There is no question. Congress has a duty to #ProtectOurDemocracy & #FollowTheFacts.”

    The continuous Democratic Party double standard and hypocrisy in relation to Trump explains a great deal of his supporters’ anger. As Scott Ritter noted, “For the supporters of Donald Trump, the events of Jan. 6 did not occur in a vacuum but were rather the culmination of what they believed to be a four-year campaign to undermine the legitimacy of the president they voted for and, by doing so, disenfranchising not only their vote, but by extension their role as citizens.”

    The second impeachment show intended to divert the 81 million Biden voters from their expectations and demands for progressive change, given the Democrats have won the presidency and both houses of Congress. It stifled any budding movement demanding the Democrats take action for a national health care program, a bailout for the people, a jobs program, a Green New Deal, etc. Their impeachment spectacle sought to vilify Trump and his supporters, as well as solidify what Glenn Greenwald describes as the new alliance of the national security state, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Bush era neo-cons, and mainstream corporate media with the neoliberal Democratic Party.

    Who were the Trump voters

    Central to the Democratic Party – and even leftist – spin is that Trump supporters are racist, sexist white men, the “deplorables.” This prejudiced stereotype hardly explains why 9 million Obama voters switched to Trump in 2016. Nor explain why, after four years of hostile mainstream media coverage, he won 10.5 million more votes in 2020.  A look at the 2020 election voter breakdown contradicts their condescending stereotype.

    In 2016, Trump won the white women vote by a margin of 9%, even though his opponent would have been the first woman president. In 2020 this vote margin increased to an 11% margin. In 2016, Trump won 28% of the Latina vote; in 2020, 31%. In 2016, Trump won 5% of the Black women vote; in 2020, 9%, despite Kamala Harris being on the Democratic ticket.  In 2016, he won 13% of the Black male vote; in 2020 it rose to 19%. Overall, comparing 2016 and 2020, Trump’s vote share rose 4% with Blacks, 3% with Latinos, and 5% with Asian Americans. Of the LGBT community, Trump was said to have won 28% of the vote, double his 2016 percent. In sum, people of color, LGBTs  the very ones said to be central to the Democratic coalition, shifted toward Trump.

    The group where Trump lost vote share involved white men, even though he won 35% more of the white working class vote than Biden. In 2016, Trump won 65% of the white men vote; in 2020 it fell to 61%. This hardly squares with liberal and pro-Democrat mythology that a Trump supporter is a racist white man.

    The US leftist movement co-opted by the Democratic Party

    Despite the November election choice coming down to two corporate neoliberals disliked by the great majority of the US population, more than 159.6 million Americans turned out to vote. The corporate rulers’ effort to neutralize popular opposition to their two parties and lure in social movements was so successful that the election turnout marked the highest percent of  voter population in 120 years, 66.7%. Even leftist groups capitulated, dressing this up as “fighting fascism” as they climbed aboard the two corporate party bandwagon.

    Typically, every four years the liberal-left, in order to justify a vote for the corporate Democrat presidential candidate, tries to paint the Republican candidate as a herald of fascism. In Fascism? First Two Months in Power: Hitler vs. Trump, I wrote:

    Leftists recognize corporate America owns the two parties, yet many still vote Democrat. Every four years, we must first defeat the fascist, then build our movement. So is the story we are told. This has been an effective strategy to trap us in the Democratic Party. It has worked for generations. Not only does it reinforce our domination by corporate America, but it seriously miseducates people about fascism.

    Needless to say, so long as corporate America has the liberal-left tied to their two party system, they have no need for fascism. They need fascism only when their customary method of rule breaks down and they face a very direct threat of losing control to revolutionary forces. The historic function of fascism is to smash the radicalized working class and its allies, destroy their organizations, and shut down political liberties when the corporate rulers find themselves unable to govern through their charade of democracy.  No such problem here.

    This capitulation to the corporate Democrats, including by self-described leftist groups, was hard to imagine just earlier in 2020, with the massive Black Lives Matter protests and the anti-neoliberal Bernie Sanders movement.

    While the vast majority of voters for both parties voted for their version of the “lesser evil,” the record election turnout for this charade was a great victory for corporate America irrespective of who won.

    A successful Trump coup would be a worse outcome for the corporate rulers

    The Democratic Party, liberals and leftists claimed Trump was planning a coup, a fascist coup even, on January 6. We are supposed to be grateful this alleged fascist insurrection was put down. But to play along with this coup story, if it were successful, the result would ignite massive nationwide protests by anti-Trump voters. After Trump’s election in November 2016, there were large “Not My President” protests in over 20 cities and many universities around the country. In 2020 between 15-26 million are said to have mobilized in Black Lives Matter rallies. Between 3-5 million participated in the anti-Trump Women’s Marches in 2017. Trump and his supporters have also shown they can turn out their base not only in large rallies but in armed protests.

    Murders by individuals in both camps have already occurred in Charlottesville, Portland and Kenosha. Both anti-Trump and pro-Trump protesters firmly believe they are the ones defending US democracy and freedom against their opponents, that their own candidate legitimately won the presidential election. Right wing Trumpers fear socialists will take over the US, while the anti-Trump left fear fascists will.

    Nationwide confrontations and mobilizations by these opposing forces following a successful Trump coup could seriously damage the overall political stability of the US system for some time. This would weaken the US empire’s ability to sell its “freedom and democracy” image and political leadership role abroad. It would undermine US capacity to assert its military and world cop ideological power around the world.

    Consequently, the best result for the US empire would be for Trump to lose the election, his “coup” to fail, and he be banned from running for political office. The US rulers achieved almost all that agenda. US leftists, declared opponents of the empire, must ask themselves why this very agenda was also their own agenda.

    Stansfield Smith, Chicago ALBA Solidarity, is a long time Latin America solidarity activist, and presently puts out the AFGJ Venezuela Weekly. He is also the Senior Research Fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs. Read other articles by Stansfield.

    This article was posted on Monday, February 22nd, 2021 at 3:34pm and is filed under Coup, Democrats, Disinformation, Donald Trump, Elections, Electoral College, Hillary Clinton, Hypocrisy, Joe Biden, Lesser Evilism, Media, Neoliberalism, Politics, President Vladimir Putin, Propaganda, Protests, Racism, Republicans, Russia, The “Left”, US Congress, US Corporations, Vote.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Failure of Trump’s “Coup”: A Victory for the US Empire

    The Democrats’ second trial of Trump ends like the first: the outcome known in advance, the entire process designed to sell to the anti-Trump masses that the Democrats were leading some progressive counter-attack. Both impeachments enabled these politicians to present a national diversion to avoid addressing real issues the US people suffer from: the pandemic, lack of vaccines, no national health care program, increasing homelessness, closed schools.

    The Democrats’ first impeachment over Trump’s phone call to Ukraine aimed to sully his name for the benefit of the 2020 Democratic presidential campaign.  They purposely did not address Trump’s actual crimes: his cruelty to Latino immigrants on the border, his indifference to  police abuse of Blacks and Latinos, his racist attacks on non-white US citizens and residents, his neglect of the threat of global warming, funding the genocidal war against Yemen, bombing other countries, such as Syria, illegal and cruel sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela.

    The second impeachment, for the vague charge of “incitement of insurrection” sought to permanently ban Trump from “holding any office,” removing him as an election opponent in 2024. The Democrats reduced themselves to presenting as “evidence” of inciting insurrection Trump’s statement “’if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.” However, this insubstantial statement could easily be used to indict any progressive social change movement, much as the Smith Act of 1940 had been used against leftists. The Democrats conveniently avoided mention that Trump in his January 6 speech explicitly told protesters to “peacefully march to the Capitol.”

    The second impeachment also charged Trump with refusing to accept the November 2020 election results. However, the Constitution states Congress must officially certify the Electoral College votes and the presidential victor, giving Trump the constitutional right to challenge these votes in Congress. The articles of impeachment concluded “Donald John Trump, by such conduct, has demonstrated that he will remain a threat to national security, democracy, and the Constitution”. Whatever our opinion of the man, this only continues the Democratic Party-national security state McCarthyite campaign against Trump begun in earnest in 2016. Trump’s second acquittal marked a setback for this McCarthyism the Democrats have been pushing.

    Trump’s “coup” and the Democrats’ “coup”

    Trump’s attempt on January 6 pales in comparison to the Democrats’ well-orchestrated lawfare coup operation set in motion in 2016. As Consortium News, The Grayzone, Stephen Cohen, Glenn Greenwald have documented,  by late 2015 the Democrats were working with national security state officials to paint Trump as beholden to Putin – including stories of Putin’s alleged ownership of “pee tapes” of Trump with prostitutes in Moscow hotels. The Democrats funded the Steele Dossier fabrication, beginning a years-long fact-free story of Trump collusion with Russia to steal the election.

    While Democrats charge Trump with propagating his Stop the Steal story, they have not renounced their own fake Trump-Putin collusion story. In fact, it set the stage for their first impeachment. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi even tweeted – after Congress certified the 2016 Electoral College vote “Our election was hijacked. There is no question. Congress has a duty to #ProtectOurDemocracy & #FollowTheFacts.”

    The continuous Democratic Party double standard and hypocrisy in relation to Trump explains a great deal of his supporters’ anger. As Scott Ritter noted, “For the supporters of Donald Trump, the events of Jan. 6 did not occur in a vacuum but were rather the culmination of what they believed to be a four-year campaign to undermine the legitimacy of the president they voted for and, by doing so, disenfranchising not only their vote, but by extension their role as citizens.”

    The second impeachment show intended to divert the 81 million Biden voters from their expectations and demands for progressive change, given the Democrats have won the presidency and both houses of Congress. It stifled any budding movement demanding the Democrats take action for a national health care program, a bailout for the people, a jobs program, a Green New Deal, etc. Their impeachment spectacle sought to vilify Trump and his supporters, as well as solidify what Glenn Greenwald describes as the new alliance of the national security state, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Bush era neo-cons, and mainstream corporate media with the neoliberal Democratic Party.

    Who were the Trump voters

    Central to the Democratic Party – and even leftist – spin is that Trump supporters are racist, sexist white men, the “deplorables.” This prejudiced stereotype hardly explains why 9 million Obama voters switched to Trump in 2016. Nor explain why, after four years of hostile mainstream media coverage, he won 10.5 million more votes in 2020.  A look at the 2020 election voter breakdown contradicts their condescending stereotype.

    In 2016, Trump won the white women vote by a margin of 9%, even though his opponent would have been the first woman president. In 2020 this vote margin increased to an 11% margin. In 2016, Trump won 28% of the Latina vote; in 2020, 31%. In 2016, Trump won 5% of the Black women vote; in 2020, 9%, despite Kamala Harris being on the Democratic ticket.  In 2016, he won 13% of the Black male vote; in 2020 it rose to 19%. Overall, comparing 2016 and 2020, Trump’s vote share rose 4% with Blacks, 3% with Latinos, and 5% with Asian Americans. Of the LGBT community, Trump was said to have won 28% of the vote, double his 2016 percent. In sum, people of color, LGBTs  the very ones said to be central to the Democratic coalition, shifted toward Trump.

    The group where Trump lost vote share involved white men, even though he won 35% more of the white working class vote than Biden. In 2016, Trump won 65% of the white men vote; in 2020 it fell to 61%. This hardly squares with liberal and pro-Democrat mythology that a Trump supporter is a racist white man.

    The US leftist movement co-opted by the Democratic Party

    Despite the November election choice coming down to two corporate neoliberals disliked by the great majority of the US population, more than 159.6 million Americans turned out to vote. The corporate rulers’ effort to neutralize popular opposition to their two parties and lure in social movements was so successful that the election turnout marked the highest percent of  voter population in 120 years, 66.7%. Even leftist groups capitulated, dressing this up as “fighting fascism” as they climbed aboard the two corporate party bandwagon.

    Typically, every four years the liberal-left, in order to justify a vote for the corporate Democrat presidential candidate, tries to paint the Republican candidate as a herald of fascism. In Fascism? First Two Months in Power: Hitler vs. Trump, I wrote:

    Leftists recognize corporate America owns the two parties, yet many still vote Democrat. Every four years, we must first defeat the fascist, then build our movement. So is the story we are told. This has been an effective strategy to trap us in the Democratic Party. It has worked for generations. Not only does it reinforce our domination by corporate America, but it seriously miseducates people about fascism.

    Needless to say, so long as corporate America has the liberal-left tied to their two party system, they have no need for fascism. They need fascism only when their customary method of rule breaks down and they face a very direct threat of losing control to revolutionary forces. The historic function of fascism is to smash the radicalized working class and its allies, destroy their organizations, and shut down political liberties when the corporate rulers find themselves unable to govern through their charade of democracy.  No such problem here.

    This capitulation to the corporate Democrats, including by self-described leftist groups, was hard to imagine just earlier in 2020, with the massive Black Lives Matter protests and the anti-neoliberal Bernie Sanders movement.

    While the vast majority of voters for both parties voted for their version of the “lesser evil,” the record election turnout for this charade was a great victory for corporate America irrespective of who won.

    A successful Trump coup would be a worse outcome for the corporate rulers

    The Democratic Party, liberals and leftists claimed Trump was planning a coup, a fascist coup even, on January 6. We are supposed to be grateful this alleged fascist insurrection was put down. But to play along with this coup story, if it were successful, the result would ignite massive nationwide protests by anti-Trump voters. After Trump’s election in November 2016, there were large “Not My President” protests in over 20 cities and many universities around the country. In 2020 between 15-26 million are said to have mobilized in Black Lives Matter rallies. Between 3-5 million participated in the anti-Trump Women’s Marches in 2017. Trump and his supporters have also shown they can turn out their base not only in large rallies but in armed protests.

    Murders by individuals in both camps have already occurred in Charlottesville, Portland and Kenosha. Both anti-Trump and pro-Trump protesters firmly believe they are the ones defending US democracy and freedom against their opponents, that their own candidate legitimately won the presidential election. Right wing Trumpers fear socialists will take over the US, while the anti-Trump left fear fascists will.

    Nationwide confrontations and mobilizations by these opposing forces following a successful Trump coup could seriously damage the overall political stability of the US system for some time. This would weaken the US empire’s ability to sell its “freedom and democracy” image and political leadership role abroad. It would undermine US capacity to assert its military and world cop ideological power around the world.

    Consequently, the best result for the US empire would be for Trump to lose the election, his “coup” to fail, and he be banned from running for political office. The US rulers achieved almost all that agenda. US leftists, declared opponents of the empire, must ask themselves why this very agenda was also their own agenda.

    The post The Failure of Trump’s “Coup”: A Victory for the US Empire first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Bryan Bruce: The hope that arises in spite of the chaotic pro-Trump storm

    COMMENTARY: By Bryan Bruce

    On Wednesday, from behind a wall of bulletproof glass, outgoing US President Donald Trump told a crowd of his supporters to be brave and incited them to march on the Capitol Buildings where the electoral college votes were being counted.

    They stormed it and in the chaos many were injured and five people – including a police officer – died.

    The mayhem Trump encouraged and the grandstanding of some Republican senators on the floor of the Senate, however, only delayed the inevitable.

    The votes were finally counted. Joe Biden will be the next President of the United States come January 20 and charged with the responsibility of governing a nation politically divided and ravaged by a deadly pandemic.

    Why should we, here in New Zealand, concern ourselves with what happened this week in America?

    Three answers
    The answers to that deceptively simple question could fill a book, but this is a Facebook post so I’ll offer you just three.

    1. What happens to the US economy has a direct impact on the world economy and therefore on our own immediate economic future.
    2. The longer covid-19 remains uncontrolled in the USA the longer international travel will be disrupted and that does not bode well for us as an island nation geographically isolated as we are from Northern Hemisphere markets.
    3. The huge issue of climate change requires immediate action to be taken on the dire warnings of science about global warming and not the conspiracy ramblings of social media.

    So where is the hope?

    It lies in what also happened earlier that day in the USA.

    When the votes were counted in the Georgia run-offs, Raphael Warnock became the first Black American in that state to be elected as a senator for that state and, along with Jon Ossoff, it gives the Democrats the control of the Senate as well as Congress.

    Mandate for progressive policies
    So the Biden administration now has a mandate to introduce progressive policies that will improve the lives of a great many of his fellow Americans.

    Here in New Zealand Jacinda Ardern leads a government that has a mandate to introduce progressive policies in our own country and narrow the gap between the rich and the poor and thereby improve the lives of the majority of New Zealanders.

    We can’t do anything about what happens in America but we can do everything about what happens in our own country.

    We need to accelerate our thinking about how to be more self-sustaining as a country and foster the idea of sharing the nation’s wealth instead of the selfishness promoted over the last 30 years of neoliberal economic policies.

    And we need to keep the Ardern government on task by giving praise when praise is due and speaking up when we see fault and injustice.

    Bryan Bruce is an independent filmmaker and journalist. Asia Pacific Report is publishing a series of occasional commentaries by him with permission.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • What the US Constitution Specifies about Choosing the New President

    Regardless of the traditional bluster about the Founding Fathers and the world historic nature of the US Constitution, the electoral system it set up to choose a new president is far from democratic. We now find Trump attempting to use the Constitution as written to be “re-elected.” Those who laud “our great democracy,” claiming Trump is maneuvering in an illegal manner to stay in office, even alleging a “fascist coup,” base their assertions to no small extent on illusions about the US electoral system.

    The first illusion we must discard is that the people’s vote determines the winner of the US presidential election. That is not true, as many were unpleasantly reminded in 2016 when, for the second time this century, a loser of the popular vote was declared president.

    Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution states the winner of the Electoral College vote determines who will become the new president. Each state and the District of Columbia choose several Electors based on their population. According to the Constitution, these Electors gather at the Electoral College after the election to choose the new president.

    The second illusion is that the winner of the popular vote in each state wins the state’s Electors for the Electoral College. In fact, the Constitution states that Electors are under no obligation to honor the majority vote of the people of their state. Our vote for president is no more than a recommendation.

    The Constitution Grants Full Authority to the Electoral College; Our Vote is a Suggestion

    The state legislatures are given the entire right in the Constitution, under the 12th Amendment, to choose the Electors themselves. They heed the popular vote out of choice, not because it is mandated or even suggested in the Constitution. Neither does the Constitution specify that Electors must pledge their vote to any candidate. Nothing in the Constitution or federal law binds an Elector’s vote to anyone. Therefore, the people’s vote for president is not binding on the Electors, it is a suggestion.

    All laws pledging Electors to vote for their party’s chosen presidential candidate originate at the state level, not the national level. The Supreme Court upheld the legality of these state laws in its 1952 ruling Ray v. Blair.

    Just this year the Supreme Court ruled in Chiafalo v. Washington that states may choose to enforce state laws that bind Electors to voting for the winner of the state’s popular vote. The Supreme Court recognized that “such promises of candidates for the Electoral College are legally unenforceable because violative of an assumed constitutional freedom of the Elector under the Constitution, Art. II, section 1, to vote as he may choose in the Electoral College,” but added “it would not follow that the requirement of a pledge is unconstitutional.”

    Electors not Voting as Pledged

    As of 2020, only 33 states and the District of Columbia have laws requiring Electors to vote for the candidate they pledged to vote for. However, in half of these jurisdictions no legal mechanism enforces this. Only 14 of the 50 states have voided votes contrary to the pledge their Electors and replaced the respective Electors. In two of these states they may also be fined. Three other states impose a penalty on “faithless” Electors but still count their votes as cast.

    In US history, through 2016, there have been a total of 165 instances of “faithless” Electors. Most, 63, occurred in 1872 when the presidential candidate died after the election but before the Electoral College convened. However, “faithless” Electors are not rare: between 1948 and 2016, Electors did not vote as pledged in ten presidential elections.

    In the 2016 presidential election, some Electors in six states (Colorado, Minnesota, Hawaii, Texas, Maine, and Washington) did not vote according to their pledge. Only Colorado, Maine, and Minnesota invalidated those votes. Washington became the first state to ever fine faithless Electors (a mere $1000 each) for their vote.

    The most disputed presidential election occurred in 1876 in which rightwing forces engineered the end of Black Reconstruction, laying the basis for Jim Crow. Samuel Tilden outpolled Rutherford B. Hayes in the popular vote by a margin of 3%. He won 184 electoral votes to Hayes’ 165, with 20 electoral votes in dispute. Each party in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina reported its candidate had won the state amid various allegations of electoral fraud and intimidation of voters. Congress then stepped in and selected the president by handing 20 electoral votes to Hayes, giving him the victory with 185 electoral votes to 184.

    The most recent and scandalous denial of the popular vote occurred in 2000, when the mostly Republican appointed US Supreme Court intervened in the decisive Florida vote. In a 5-4 decision, they upheld the Republican dominated Florida state legislature’s right to stop the vote recount, where “hanging chads” had arisen as a major issue. This left 178,000 votes in mostly Democratic areas yet to be counted, allowing Republican candidate George W. Bush’s 537 vote lead to stand and be selected as president.

    Methods Available to States for Disregarding the Popular Vote for President

    The 12th Amendment to the Constitution establishes the state legislature, not the popular vote count, as the vehicle to choose the Electors and thus the president. While state legislatures are constitutionally entitled to disregard the state popular vote, it would be politically prudent to provide a reason. A state legislature could claim that confusion over the validity of some election day votes or mail-in ballots causes it to question the validity of state popular vote, and it – in practice, the dominant party in the legislature – then directly selects the Electors.

    As CNN reporter Fareed Zakaria recounted before the 2020 election, “Taking account of the confusion” over the vote, whether real, alleged, or fabricated, or claimed mobs and violence at voting stations, “legislatures decide to choose the Electors themselves.”

    It was not only Trump Republicans who have tried to throw out reported state vote totals. In 2016, the CIA, FBI, and NSA concocted stories of Russian interference to favor Trump. Democrats claimed Russia had hacked into voting systems and altered votes. They worked to alter the Electoral College vote just as Trump is now doing. The Atlantic ran an article after election day 2016 and before the Electoral College met, entitled The Electoral College Was Meant to Stop Men Like Trump From Being President. It argued that it was the duty of members of the Electoral College to defy voters and elect Hillary Clinton on national security grounds because of alleged Russian interference. As Greg Palast says, both Democrats and Republicans use “fear of vote fraud to commit fraud.”

    Zakaria continued that in 2020 eight out of nine key swing states have Republican legislatures. “If one or more decide that balloting is chaotic and marked by irregularities, the [state legislature] could send [to the Electoral College] what they regard as the legitimate slate of Electors, which would be Republican.” That would give Trump ample Electoral votes to be declared the new president.

    Or, the leadership of the majority party in a state legislature could question the outcome of the state’s popular vote and claim this forces them to choose their own Electors for the Electoral College. The state minority party could counter and say they respect the validity of the popular vote and send the Electors as decided by popular vote.

    If who are the valid Electors in a state is disputed, when the US Congress validates the Electors on January 6, it could exclude all the Electors from a disputed state. For instance, if in 2020, both Florida and Wisconsin submitted two separate slates of Electors, Congress could invalidate both slates and the remaining Electors from 48 states would choose the president. If this happened, neither Biden nor Trump would gain the required 270 Electors.

    In that situation, the Constitution, Article II, Section 1, explicitly directs the House of Representatives to vote to determine the new president, but it does so with each state casting a single ballot. If this were to happen Donald Trump would be “re-elected” in a constitutional manner, because most state legislatures have Republican majorities.

    What Does This Mean for Our Future?

    This reveals that the “democratic” nature of the US election system is wishful thinking, based on – possibly deliberate – misunderstanding. Nowhere does the original Constitution nor any later amendment specify a citizen’s right to vote for president. Yet, the Constitution does provide many avenues through which to nullify a presidential vote if the winner represented a force outside of the traditional oligarchy. That helps explain why, given the every four-year much heralded “great exercise in democracy” no actual representative of the US people, nor progressive has ever been elected president, no matter how much people try.

    Regardless of the popular vote for president, the two corporate parties have many constitutional maneuvers at their disposal to block a possible future working people’s party candidate who wins the national election from taking office. Given that the two parties, in their struggles even among themselves, have sought to use the Constitution to invalidate unfavorable popular vote counts – in 2000, 2004, 2016, 2020 – it can be expected they will use every means available to block any successful working people’s party.

    This shows that the struggle to build a mass working people’s party would encounter barriers the Founding Fathers rigged in the Constitution to ensure ruling elite control. Unfortunately, the US people are still at the level where most desiring fundamental change think it can come from within the system, within the two corporate parties, within the restrictive constraints of the US Constitution.

    The post What the US Constitution Specifies about Choosing the New President first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.