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 am very glad that i am in denver rather than northern virginia
january 6th was extra scary because i had worked at the DOL building up until the pandemic and knew the capitol police for being scary because they were less restrained than DC cops
had been involved in many protests of much larger size in DC prior -- most tellingly the women's march in 2021
at none of those marches did the idea let's go assault the capitol come up because in all cases we legit thought the us capitol police would be happy to shoot at protestors
That's exactly what they think.
I follow some of the dvmbfvks on Twitter.
The first date to watch is June 29th.
They plan to "peacefully block all borders ".
To be fair, we did have a massive war in this country to deal with treason on a colossal scale. We punished it with…political rehabilitation and a bunch of statues, and engaged in a unifying project of murderous imperial expansion. Not a great precedent!
I mean, we also killed 258,000 confederates. Tho yes, the attempt to rehabilitate it in the years since should have been stamped out of existence, and everyone is paying the price for not doing that even now
It sure would be nice if federal law enforcement had decided to take the coup attempt seriously, but here we are 4 years later and all the people who planned and carried it out are still walking around free.
Seeing it and being able to counter it are two different things. They're building a legal defense that adheres to the laws *as they are written*. It didn't work in 2020, but armies of anti-democratic attorneys like Eastman and Chesebro have been working to sharpen the attack in the four years since.
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.
At the time I do think it was defensible to decide, look we’ve got the guy contained, he’ll be gone in 2 weeks, let’s not provoke any further escalation. *I* would’ve prioritized impeachment and removal over even completing the election certification, but I don’t think Pelosi was crazy.
I think the founders would have expected the Electoral College to take the situation into consideration during their “deliberations” and thus prevent whatever scoundrel is behind the scheme from becoming President. Those guys would be more likely to consider stealing a House seat “treason”.
What the Presidency is and how the office is filled is so profoundly different from what’s described in the bare text of the Constitution or the Federalist papers that “what the founders would think/say/do” is even more totally irrelevant than usual in that context.
On the other hand, J6 itself would absolutely have been considered treason by the founding generation—the President allowed (or worse, caused) a militia to assemble in his name and to march against the Congress with violent intent. That is surely “levying war against the United States”.
See, here’s the thing. The founding father’s choked on it as well. Aaron Burr shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in the same year he tried a coup d’état. Acquittal because not engaged in ‘overt act’. Marshaling an army wasn’t overt enough for them.
A candidate for President publicly solicited a billion-dollar bribe he is likely to collect and the Attorney General complained about how tough his job is the same week almost. We’re in trouble.
They are going to challenge the results win or lose. The point isn’t “winning” it’s breaking the system so that they can be the new system with absolute authority.
The thing is if you break the system before you capture the army...
An awful lot of their preferred outcomes rely on a handful of high officers choosing to keep their heads down is all I'm gonna say.
I think it's more sedition than treason, at least up until the point where they take up arms to try to install the loser by force. (Metaphorically it's treason either way.)
I'm increasingly of the view that it /does/ fall within the language of the Treason Clause anyway. I think the folks arguing it doesn't are misreading what "levying war" meant at the time
