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January 6, 2025: Suppose Biden Loses?

February 7, 2022
by Peter Feinman
County-level secession in New York, February 3, 2022 (https://www.wivb.com)

Civil war talk is in the air. It is in books. It is in articles. It is on talk shows. Whole cable show series may be dedicated to the prospect of the new American Civil War. In fact, the question seems to have moved from being a debating point to being a fait accompli.

On one hand, such talk is good. After years of writing about America’s third civil war, it is gratifying to see that people in the know now are taking seriously the possibility that the 2024 election could be our last one as a free country with the current 50 states…. our ranking as a free society already has deteriorated significantly among the nations by people who track such things.

On the other hand, it also is quite fearful to realize that the end of days for our country as we now know it may be occur before a student who entered college in the 2021/2022 school year may graduate.

So to put the scare talk aside for a moment, in the real world what actually may happen on January 6, 2025, when Congress meets to certify the election results.

NO GETTYSBURG/WASHINGTON DC SHOWDOWN

The chances of a military showdown comparable to the battle at Gettysburg or any other National Park Service site in the Confederacy are slim. True both sides are more than capable of deploying forces in the tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands at the national capital. Realistically, will that happen?

As we are seeing in the Russian massing of forces to invade the Ukraine, there are logistical challenges to assembling large-scale forces. First, it takes time to do it. Second, it is a highly visible process. Third, someone needs to be in charge of the effort. So while on paper one can envision large-scale forces targeting the Capital, there are numerous problems along the way.

Both sides will be traveling on the same roads.

Both sides will be flying to the same airports.

Both sides will be making reservations at the same hotels and motels.

None of this will be done in secret. There will be news coverage of the prospective participants marching off to battle.

The military is well-aware of the possibility of another January 6 and will be prepared for it.

The commander in-chief will not be welcoming the tourists exercising their second amendment rights to legitimate political discourse at the Capital to kiss and hug cops.

The possible participants know the legal problems currently faced by the participants from the 2021 assault.

Some of the Trump militias may have been weakened by the arrests from the last attack.

In short, the overall odds for a repeat of January 6, 2021, on January 6, 2025, seems low.

STATES SECESSION

Another possibility sometimes talked about is that states that object to the final outcome of the presidential vote will voice that displeasure as South Carolina did in the last Civil War. There has been talk of succession or in the new term, “divorce.”

The state most frequently associated with this path is Texas. The possibility of “Texit” has been around for several years now (The Texas Secession: Legally Dividing America, December 14, 2020).  Let’s say, for example, Texas or any other Confederate state or any of the other six states with the illegal Electors decided it did not accept the results of this second stolen election and therefore declared its independence. What would that mean in practice?

No state is pure. Every Confederate state contains Unionists. In the 2024 election, a Confederate state might vote 60% or more against Biden but that is about the limit. When the states seceded in the last Civil War, each state could be reasonable sure that it had the support of the white males who had voted. The electoral demographics are quite different know. Even the white people in the South include descendants of people who fought on the Union side. If a Governor seeks to arbitrarily assert independence or does so through the state legislature, the result would be successions within the state. In other words, a state that secedes will immediately face the reality of internal secession.

My recommendation has been that he Confederate states need to divide into their Union and Confederate components anyway. That still remains the only political solution even though it has zero traction nationally. However, if any state attempts to secede, it would lead to the division of the state into its distinct parts. At that point, the people bellowing for withdrawal will have to eat their words when they see how little of the state would actually join them.

STEVE BANNON

So far, the most practical action Trumpicans can and are taking is following the playbook of seditionist Steve Bannon. His calls for a grassroots effort to control the country already is occurring. He has identified local elections as the point of vulnerability. Few people run for these offices such as school boards and election officials. An organized voting bloc can propel their candidates to victory. Indeed, that is precisely the purpose of the off-election year non-November elections in the first place. Don’t let local elections get caught up in the hullabaloo generated by state and federal elections. Keep them under the radar so the established leaders and their friends can dominate them.

Bannon proposes a tried and true method for winning local elections. Of course, the opposition is quite capable of catching on to what is happening. Still, the national effort to coordinate a local takeover is something only Communists have been accused of in the past. Whether or not it can swing a national election remains to be seen. The more likely result is incessant confrontations at school board meetings.

Bannon’s local strategy mirrors what the Hitman has called for.

If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere because our country and our elections are corrupt.

One logical outgrowth of the Bannon strategy as reflected in this call for nationwide protest, is that January 6, 2025, will be a day of nationwide protests similar to what happened after the murder of George Floyd. While such demonstrations and counter-demonstrations at the local level will tax and exhaust local law enforcement and National Guard, it seems unlikely that they would cause a reversal in the certification vote in Congress.

COULD NANCY PELOSI BECOME THE FIRST FEMALE PRESIDENT?; A CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS

That was the title of my blog on April 3, 2020. The question asked in the blog was:

Is it possible that as of January 20, 2021, that the Electoral College will not have elected anyone to the two highest offices in the land?

I did not factor the January 6 certification into my calculations. It was not something I had really given any thought to back then.

The issue raised was suppose there were so many legal challenges that they could not all be resolved in time for the scheduled inauguration (or certification). If there was no duly certified winner, then the incumbent does not get to stay in office until everything is resolved. Even Rudy Giuliani had to step down as mayor after 9/11 because his term was up. So too at the presidential level. On January 20, the term expires and if there is no duly certified President then the Speaker of the House becomes President. Hello, Nancy Pelosi, the first female President.

Of course she would pick Joe Biden to her Vice President. Once confirmed by the Senate, Pelosi would shortly afterwards retire and Joe Biden would become the President.

This rumination presumes Democratic control of the two Houses. It is also quite possible that both Houses will be awash in legal challenges of their own. Next time, an attack on the Presidential vote means an attack on the whole ballot and not just the top one. The legal turmoil would extend not only to the House of Representatives and the Senate but to the state level. Both Governors and state legislature results would be on hold until the validity of vote is certified. Who knows what state governments would even be in place or who would be in Congress as of January 1, 2025? In short, there could be a complete meltdown. I am not saying this will happen. I am saying it is a possibility. The legal civil war could be far more extensive than a physical civil war.

And then there is the 14th Amendment. On February 1, 2022, Bruce Ackerman and Gerard Magliocca published “Biden vs. Trump: The Makings of a Shattering Constitutional Crisis.” They also proposed a sequence of events whereby the (unnamed) Speaker of the House could be President. Specifically, they focused on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment called the Disqualification Clause. It expressly bars any person from holding “any office, civil or military, under the United States” if he “engaged in insurrection” against the Constitution after previously swearing to uphold it “as an officer of the United States.” Could it be applied in 2024?

Right now we are witnessing its application in North Carolina at the Congressional level with Rep. Madison Cawthorn. The authors suggest the same technique could be used in 2024 against the chief insurrectionist. One may add that the more the House Select Committee and the Department of Justice use that term “insurrectionist” the more individual states are likely to do the same to disqualify the Hitman. One possible outcome is that his name will not appear on the ballot in all fifty states.

The article proceeds to describe various scenarios with massive demonstrations if the disqualification is applied. Realistically, there are too many variables to factor to know what will happen. For example, the authors assume that there will be a Congress in place. That well may be true for representatives from unchallenged states and holdovers in the Senate but who knows what will have been resolved by January 1 in the challenged states. The authors propose some remedies in anticipation of this imbroglio just as a bipartisan group is working on revisions to the Electoral College law.

But in all these configurations, one obvious one is being overlooked – suppose Biden legitimately loses the election, what if Trumpicans do not need to rig the election to win? What will Democrats do then? How will you know if the results are legitimate or not? Should Biden vacate the White House then? What will the impact of the House Select Committee and the criminal investigations be? When I first started writing about political action thrillers on January 3, 2020, I had no idea that Hollywood could not match the real world and at this point no one really knows what will happen.

The Texas Secession: Legally Dividing America

December 14, 2020
by Peter Feinman
Why he fights so hard

This report on America’s ongoing Third Civil War is being conducted through The Atlantic time capsule issue from December 2019 entitled: “How to Stop a Civil War.” The initial blog covered Editor Jeffrey Goldberg’s explanation for the issue and David Frum’s Dispatch from the electoral front-lines as he saw it back in 2019. The world has changed a lot since then.

Moving though the magazine, the next article is “The Secessionist” by Graeme Wood. It was based on interviews with Daniel Miller, the leader of the Texas Nationalist Movement. He wanted to divorce Texas from the Union once and for all. Now here we are a year later and the called for secession has moved from a magazine article to a national event. The change now has been the extension for the call for a single state to a broader secession involving all the states that had joined in the unsuccessful coup to steal the 2020 presidential election.

In The Atlantic article, Wood cites a claim of membership of 300,000 for the Texas Nationalist Movement. That seems like a significant number. The goal was for there to be a referendum in Texas on secession. Miller called the movement “Texit” based on the action in Britain. Left unmentioned were two related possibilities:

1. a referendum by the other 49 states on whether they (we) want to kick Texas out of the country regardless of how Texas voted.
2. dividing the state into the portions that wanted out from the portions that wanted in somewhat as Virginia had divided at the onset of the Second Civil War into West Virginia and Virginia.

If option #2 is taken, then even if portions of Texas vote to secede, the pro-American citizens can remain part of the country. That way, there could two Texases: one an independent country and one a state in the United States. There was no indication what Miller thought about these options.

Miller proposed a new country which would be the tenth largest economy in the world. He favored a cordial uncoupling with a largely undefended border with the United States (no mention of a wall with Mexico). He expected that the border between the United States and Texas would be like that between the United States and Canada. The key would be the independence of Texas where it would now be in charge of its own political decisions. And it would accept the consequences of those decisions as well.

Miller claims the right of self-determination. It is a right the United States supposedly supports in locations throughout the world. Now it is time to do so at home. He feels that if Americans see that the second largest state in the country declares that it was participating in the union under protest that the request could not be ignored. Apparently he is anticipating if not a 100% Texan support for secession at least a landslide. There is no indication in the article in what if any is his cutoff point for secession. As noted above, what if self-determination for a significant number of people means they want to remain American. Miller did not address this issue in the article although it is possible he has elsewhere.

As mentioned, this article was last December. What has happened this December? First the Texas Attorney General led the unsuccessful coup attempt to overturn the presidential election of 2020. This action does not comport with Miller’s expression of seceding because he does not want Texas to be governed by others. Now the Texas Attorney General was seeking to tell four other states what to do. How would Miller like it if other states petitioned the Supreme Court for Texas and other states to end voter suppression, end gerrymandering, and end the one drop-off location per county for early voters as a violation of the civil rights of Texans? I suspect Miller would not like such interference in Texas affairs even as his state sought unsuccessfully to interfere in the voting of other states.

Following the decision of the Supreme Court, the Texas GOP acted

Austin, TX, Release: December 11, 2020. For Immediate Release

Below is Chairman Allen West’s statement regarding the decision by the Supreme Court to dismiss Texas’ constitutionally legitimate and critical lawsuit.

“The Supreme Court, in tossing the Texas lawsuit that was joined by seventeen states and 106 US congressman, has decreed that a state can take unconstitutional actions and violate its own election law. Resulting in damaging effects on other states that abide by the law, while the guilty state suffers no consequences. This decision establishes a precedent that says states can violate the US constitution and not be held accountable. This decision will have far-reaching ramifications for the future of our constitutional republic. Perhaps law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the constitution.”

The Texas GOP will always stand for the Constitution and for the rule of law even while others don’t.

This is not the place to attempt to unravel the workings of the mind of Allen West or the place he is trying to carve out for himself in Texas politics. So far I am not aware of Miller or any Texas officials jumping on the Texas secession bandwagon either alone or with the other “law-abiding states.”

Still there are consequences to voicing out loud thoughts you never should have had in the first place. For example, Rush Limbaugh said the “US is ‘trending towards secession’ and there can’t be ‘peaceful coexistence’ between conservatives and liberals. It can’t go on this way. There cannot be a peaceful coexistence of two completely different theories of life.” Immediately afterwards he was forced to backtrack his comments. Limbaugh pretended he was echoing other people’s opinions rather than advocating for secession himself. It is quite possible he was a victim of his own rash impulsiveness. He just blurted out what felt good without thinking of the consequences just like the impulsive President.

While what Miller advocates is not significant, when the GOP Chair of a major state voices secession talk, it is more serious. Don’t be surprised to quietly see him disappear after the New Year.

The Supreme Court has punctured the hot-air balloons of the hothead traitors. The backlash has already started. The Orlando Sentinel has apologized for endorsing one of the Trump Traitors in the recent election:

We had no idea, had no way of knowing at the time that Walz was not committed to democracy… During our endorsement interview with the incumbent congressman, we didn’t think to ask, “Would you support an effort to throw out the votes of tens of millions of Americans in four states in order to overturn a presidential election and hand it to the person who lost…Our bad.

The paper vowed to ask such questions in the future.

Rep. Paul Mitchell, Michigan, has left the Republican Party. He was retiring so it doesn’t amount to much.

Smartmatic, the voting technology company that has been attacked by the various Trump networks has struck back. It “demands a full and complete retraction of all false and defamatory statements and reports published by Fox News. This retraction must be done with the same intensity and level of coverage that you used to defame the company in the first place.” Obviously that is not going to happen. Smartmatic is reserving its legal right to pursue possible defamation claims against Fox News, One America News, and Newsmax. There is a financial price to pay for simply making things up unless you are the President of the United States. How many pardons will have to be issued to protect his networks?

Now suppose in 2022, you are the daughter of the Sore Loser and you are asked in your Senate race: “Do you think Joe Biden got away with a rigged election in 2020?” How will you answer that? “What did you do to stop the attempted coup?” How will you answer?

The shell-shocked Trump Traitors who are in silence now will not be able to remain in silence forever. They can expect their efforts to overturn the election will be part of the attack on them in the 2022 elections. Representative Adam Kinzinger who did not participate in the attempted coup, instead tweeted:

[T]he Supreme Court is not part of the deep state… Complaining and bellyaching is not a manly trait, it’s actually sad. Real men accept a loss with grace.

Our immature-child President is not a real man and cannot accept a loss with grace. Instead America’s biggest baby has put all his children who want to be Senators and/or President on the spot. He has put Mike “sold his soul” Pence, Mike “sold his soul second Trump term” Pompeo, Nikki “sold her soul” Haley, and Ted “sold his soul” Cruz on the spot as well. What will they say about their failure to resist the attempted coup in 2020 or even to abet it? What will they say about their willingness to accept the vote in 2024?

The irony of the secession talk of like-minded states is that the Sore Loser would be perfectly willing to accept the United States dividing into two if he could be President for life in one half and there was no extradition to the other half.