Even Republicans are shutting down Trump’s desperate efforts
There are basically three American institutions preventing a far-right uprising to install Boss Trump as president-forlife. You know, like Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un. They are the U.S. military, state and federal courts, and most important, local election officials — many Republicans — holding firm against a Trumpist coup d’etat.
Trump may huff and puff, but he can’t blow the house down.
About the military, there’s blessedly little to say. Career soldiers have taken an oath to defend the Constitution, not the Current Occupant of the White House. Maybe the best evidence of his sanity — in the medical sense — is that Trump hasn’t ordered the Pentagon to back his play. Presumably because he knows they would disobey an illegal order.
Or maybe he just hasn’t thought of it yet.
Otherwise, if the Current Occupant were your grandpa, it might be time for a family intervention. Since the election, I’ve responded to all threatening and insulting emails — nobody even attempts a substantive argument anymore — with the same friendly advice. I include it here as a public service:
Just don’t send Trump any money. It’s a scam.
In pivotal Pennsylvania, scene of a couple of Rudy Giuliani’s “Gong Show” press conferences — both the Four Seasons plant nursery farce and the leaky hairdye folly — the state supreme court dealt summarily with a bizarre lawsuit filed by an obscure GOP congressman.
“Petitioners sought to invalidate the ballots of the millions of Pennsylvania voters who utilized the mail-in voting procedures. ... Alternatively, Petitioners advocated the extraordinary proposition that the court disenfranchise all 6.9 million Pennsylvanians who voted in the General Election and instead ‘direct the General Assembly to choose Pennsylvania’s electors.’” The ruling was unanimous. Federal judges likewise displayed little patience with the Trump team’s effort to halt certifying Pennsylvania’s vote. U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann reminded the Giuliani team that actual evidence was required to win a lawsuit. A Republican and former Federalist Society member, he ruled that the Trump campaign had made “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations ... unsupported by evidence. ... Our people, laws, and institutions demand more.”
The Third Circuit Court of Appeals also ruled unanimously against Giuliani’s efforts. Trump-appointed Justice Stephanos Bibas wrote that “the Campaign cannot win this lawsuit. It conceded that it is not alleging election fraud. It has already raised and lost most of these state-law issues, and it cannot relitigate them here.” Goodbye, Pennsylvania. Then there was Michigan, where Trump subjected Republican election officials and legislative leaders to extraordinary harassment. Trailing by more than 150,000 votes, he appeared to believe the key to victory was disenfranchising African American citizens altogether. One GOP official actually suggested refusing to certify all ballots from Detroit, because ...
Well, because why?
She soon regained her senses, leading Boss Trump to summon Michigan’s Republican House Speaker Lee Chatfield and Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey to the White House to get their arms twisted. Just to be nice, the two men accepted the invitation, but issued a joint statement on the way out: “We have not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome of the election in Michigan.”
They dismissed the idea of the state legislature sending a pro