What are the states going to do with their local election results when the officials in Washington ignore them due to some manufactured state of emergency?
He already tried to get specific states' election outcomes discarded from the count on Jan 6, 2021.
Could you be more specific on who the officials in DC would be that could ignore the election results? The Clerk of the House, I assume? They have a fairly limited role, and it would probably be a short-lived disruption. The members-elect themselves seem to have all of the power, if my civics knowledge is correct.
I've never seen more enthusiasm about US politics than from Europeans (like pavlov there in Finland) and Australians. It makes meaningful discussion very difficult, online.
I lived in the US for years (including Jan 6 2021) and I’ve seen how this playbook was executed in Russia.
From my POV, Americans are hopelessly naive about their institutions holding up when it’s been demonstrated so many times that the guardrails are gone. It’s one of the reasons I left the country - I feel safer living next to Russia than in America.
I think that is a valid point, though I would like to see some meat in these proclamations of doom.
There are more guns than people in the US, and in nobody's wildest dreams does ICE (or the entire federal government, for that matter, including the military) have enough personnel to subdue even 10% of the population rising up. And while I think it is somewhat valid to assume the military leans a bit conservative, in my experience it is more of a true conservatism and not MAGA. I was in the military, and the vast majority of soldiers would 100% refuse to suppress US citizens.
Everyone thinks the adults are not really in charge in the GOP right now, but I think that's absolutely not true. They are just okay with the chaos right now because it's not impeding business and keeps people distracted. If MAGA gets too spicy and causes real civil unrest, we're going to find out very quickly who actually runs the show. And it ain't Donald Trump.
He doesn't, it's literally enshrined in the constitution. If he decides to violate that, it's him violating the constitution yet again, not proof that he has a say.
It would also probably be the last straw for a lot of people who has been limping along on the belief in free elections.
More importantly, this isn’t a “who’s going to stop me?” sort of thing like having ICE violate people’s civil rights. The power isn’t there. ICE does what Trump says because the law puts them under his control and he metaphorically signs their paychecks. If Trump orders state governments to do something with elections, that carries no weight. There’s no legal obligation or tradition to comply, no paychecks involved, nothing that would compel them to do it unless they actually wanted to. He’d have to use force, and it would be a gargantuan effort that would spur great resistance.
