A serious attempt by legislators or a candidate to invalidate a plainly valid election to install someone who plainly lost the election as president is not a "legal hack" or "finalizing results". It is treason. It is a treason against the United States and its citizens. We shouldn't dance around it.
The founders would have understood it as treason, and would resort to war against someone who attempted it, and punish it with hanging. Other countries would prosecute it as treason. That is what it is. Folks should be clear eyed on it.
I mean, maybe. Most of the Founders didn't trust popular democracy at all, which is why they inserted all of these little veto points for elites to have the chance to "correct" its assumed excesses. I'm sure they'd be like "but not like this!" about a figure like Trump, but the fact remains.
In the course of becoming an actual universal suffrage democracy we turned most of those things into formalities, but we didn't get rid of them like we should have. And here they are, lying around like unexploded bombs, waiting to be triggered. The attempt to do so in 2020 was improvised & chaotic.
The "treason" part depends on whether the courts, the people with guns, and the media accept it or not. The 2000 they did, in 2020 they mostly didn't. Most of the energy for 2024 seems to have gone toward propaganda and planning to make sure it will be accepted this time around, if necessary.
And of course, little to no energy and political capital has been expended on actually disarming the fucking bombs and countering the propaganda and planning. Hence the growing pit in everyone's stomach.
