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That the administration that is now OPENLY waist deep in criminal behavior...

DO YOU REALLY THINK that this administration is going to allow elections that would open the gates to their arrests and prosecutions?

Do you really think this?

If so, please contact me for information regarding a bridge I want to sell......

DO YOU REALLY THINK that this administration is going to allow elections that would open the gates to their arrests and prosecutions?

Do you really think this?

No. But I would challenge your assumptions:

1) The administration doesn't have a ton of control over the elections. Elections are run by the states. Virtually none of the toss-up elections in the midterms are in purely red state. Most are in swing states. The competitive House races are in: Arizona, California, Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin. Of those, only Iowa, Ohio and Texas are completely red - only 5 of the 18 seats are in those states. The Administration at best can try to influence those elections, but they don't get the choice of whether to "allow" them to be held - or held in a given manner.

2) The results of this election won't open the gates to their arrests and prosecutions. Republicans will control the DOJ for the next two years after the election. They'd rather win the midterms than not, of course - but no one is going to face a materially higher risk of prosecution if the Democrats take the House in 2026.

3) From points #1 and #2, because even federal elections are implemented by states, under state law, the risk to everyone in the Administration is far higher if they try to unlawfully tamper with the state elections than if they just sit back. For federal crimes, they've got a two and a half year delay and a President with pardon power. For state crimes, they have very little protection. So even if they'll use every legal means at their disposal to tilt the playing field in their favor, self-preservation counsels towards letting the elections happen rather than doing anything material to try to change the outcome.

Elections are run by the states.

A clip of a Fulton County elections official was shown on the noon news. He said words to the effect that the 2020 ballots had been safe in their care. Now, he has no idea what will happen to them. iirc, one of the moves Trump considered in 2020 was to have the Army seize the ballots in districts where he didn't like the outcome.

Steve

A clip of a Fulton County elections official was shown on the noon news. He said words to the effect that the 2020 ballots had been safe in their care. Now, he has no idea what will happen to them. iirc, one of the moves Trump considered in 2020 was to have the Army seize the ballots in districts where he didn't like the outcome.

All true - but not very effective ways of changing the outcome of an election prospectively, much less cancelling one.

No. But I would challenge your assumptions:

I would challenge your challenge. The law and historic precedent don’t count for much any more. They will bend it or break it enough to prevent losing control of Congress. There are several scenarios I can think of.

1. Gerimandering a victory. I doubt that will work but it will tilt.

2. Voter suppression. Still not enough but another tilt.

3. Sending federal agents into key congressional districts on Election Day to suppress or cancel the vote. Whatcha gonna do?

4. If it all seems to be failing before the election, manufacture a major crisis, declare an insurgency and invoke the insurrection act. The Supreme Court will give it the nod, and the election will be postponed indefinitely.

5. If all this fails, declare another emergency and physically prevent the new Congress from being sworn in January 2027.

All these things are illegal, and they are all possible, even probable.

All true - but not very effective ways of changing the outcome of an election prospectively, much less cancelling one.

But what if...the feds seize the ballots, say they conducted their own count and announce that the results as given by Fulton County for the 2020 election were "horseshit" (to use the immortal word of wzambon), what then...? Couldn't that create a path by which the feds, either directly or indirectly through the State, could, with the right sycophants in the right places, monkey with the 2026 election results to suit themselves? Keep in mind what federal Administration and Supreme Court we have in place here.

1. Gerimandering a victory. I doubt that will work but it will tilt.

2. Voter suppression. Still not enough but another tilt.

3. Sending federal agents into key congressional districts on Election Day to suppress or cancel the vote. Whatcha gonna do?

4. If it all seems to be failing before the election, manufacture a major crisis, declare an insurgency and invoke the insurrection act. The Supreme Court will give it the nod, and the election will be postponed indefinitely.

5. If all this fails, declare another emergency and physically prevent the new Congress from being sworn in January 2027.

All these things are illegal, and they are all possible, even probable.

Gerrymandering is not illegal. Many things that we might regard as "voter suppression" are not illegal (indeed, many things we all accept as part of the voting process end up having some suppressive effect, but we think it's okay relative to the benefits). Outside of legal measures that suppress the vote (like passing a statute requiring voter ID, for example), the effect of voter suppressive measures that might be possibly illegal is going to be limited. You can send some armed "election monitors" to stand in the parking lot of some voting districts....but even in close races, nearly all of them are decided by more than several thousand votes, and those types of little measures aren't likely to swing the results.

I do not believe that the Administration has any incentive to do 3, 4, or 5. I don't think they're really within the realm of possibility, and absolutely not probable. Losing the House just isn't that large a loss to make any of the above worth trying - it's not worth risking the 2028 election by doing something that far outside the norm.

But what if...the feds seize the ballots, say they conducted their own count and announce that the results as given by Fulton County for the 2020 election were "horseshit" (to use the immortal word of wzambon), what then...? Couldn't that create a path by which the feds, either directly or indirectly through the State, could, with the right sycophants in the right places, monkey with the 2026 election results to suit themselves?

What would the path be? There are no competitive races in Georgia this year. At all. Cook Political Report, as an example, has every race as either Solid D or Solid R:

https://www.cookpolitical.com/ratings/house-race-r...

Trump lost most of his election cases in the SCOTUS, and has lost most of the cases he's brought on various matters in the lower federal courts now. Even with judges he appointed. The judiciary may be more favorable to Republicans and conservatives on the whole than it used to be, but there's zero indication that any of these judges have moved into the "anything goes for our guy Trump!" category.

That's why you have an independent judiciary. Not only do none of these judges depend on Trump, or the continued favor of the Presidency in general - they all have their power only as long as we don't lose free elections.

All true - but not very effective ways of changing the outcome of an election prospectively, much less cancelling one.

Putin doesn't cancel elections either.

But he uses every lever he can to control the outcome- and succeeds in doing so.

Almost every autocrat in the world allows elections, but controls the outcome by employing every force in his or her power to keep people he doesn't like away from the polls, or to disallow their votes if they manage to cast a ballot.

If all this fails, declare another emergency and physically prevent the new Congress from being sworn in January 2027.

We were afforded a sneak peak of this tactic when Mike Johnson, citing the shutdown as the reason, refused to hold a special session in order to seat an elected Democratic member for weeks.

But he uses every lever he can to control the outcome- and succeeds in doing so.

Almost every autocrat in the world allows elections, but controls the outcome by employing every force in his or her power to keep people he doesn't like away from the polls, or to disallow their votes if they manage to cast a ballot.

Yes, and almost every country in the world has their national government run their elections. Which means whoever is in charge of the national government has all the levers.

Our country is different, because we don't give the national government any of the levers. The levers are all manned by different people. We also have an independent judiciary (which no autocrats do), so the people that adjudicate disputes over the levers are also not under the control of the person in charge of the national government.

Checks and balances, natch. The Founders were pretty smart. Things like the Electoral College and the inefficiencies of a patchwork national system are pretty annoying at times, but they do have their perks...

albaby1: The administration doesn't have a ton of control over the elections. ... Republicans will control the DOJ for the next two years after the election.

You sound like you believe that Trump will act rationally, with careful consideration.

That's a hoot and a half.

This morning, in just one hour, the president posted 56 times.

Did you miss the tweet shared by Trump yesterday?

TRUMP retweet: Maria Zack testified about the stolen 2020 Election operation connected to Obama when he diverted $400 million from the infamous pallets of cash sent to Iran, funneling through the Dubai Embassy to operatives in Italy and Merrill Lynch in Geneva, Switzerland.

In return, Italian officials at Leonardo SpA used military satellites to help hack U.S. voting machines, flipping votes from Trump to Biden using CIA-developed tools like Hammer and Scorecard. Along with numerous other methods of fraud and manipulation.

China reportedly coordinated the whole operation...

In short, it's a national security issue.

Maybe it's time to believe the administration will do anything and everything to subvert the 2026 Midterms.

I mean, c'mon, the guy incited a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol. Now he's suggesting there was a global effort to remove him from office involving his own government, China, Italy, former president Obama, satellites, and technology companies.

The man has flipped his wig. He's f*cking nuts.

Right now, the administration is using force on U.S. streets against Americans. If you don't believe they'll use force at polling sites during state elections, you're not paying close enough attention.

Checks and balances, natch. The Founders were pretty smart. Things like the Electoral College and the inefficiencies of a patchwork national system are pretty annoying at times, but they do have their perks...

Yup. We used to think our system was pretty foolproof. Now, we are discovering how much the entire system relied on politicians, fundamentally, being people of good will.

Steve

What would the path be? There are no competitive races in Georgia this year. At all. Cook Political Report, as an example, has every race as either Solid D or Solid R:

I'm thinking that regardless of polling, wouldn't the calculus of the outcomes change if the feds took over the counting of the votes--and let's just say, for the sake of argument, that the feds are corrupt and crooked? (Far-fetched, I know.) Or if the feds aren't directly counting the votes, what if there's someone at the State in charge who, when Trump calls them and says "I need you to find me 10,000 more votes", instead of saying "Sorry, they're not there", says "Sure, no problem"? This could also be about 2028 if not 2026.

The bottom line is if the feds seize the 2020 ballots and then come out with a significantly different count than what the State did, that creates more chaos and lack of trust in the institution of our elections. This, to go along with their existing efforts to erode trust in our courts, law enforcement, the Fed, the medical community, the scientific community, rewriting of history, international relations, et al.

Which then gives them (our current Administration) a pretext--law or no law--to exert still more control over our institutions to bend them to their own ends. I'd like to think that we have laws in place to prevent that, but our laws seem to be turning out to be only as good as the people in charge of enforcing them are, and that's where I have a lot of concerns right now, to put it mildly. There are wildly different interpretations of laws happening these days from what they have been previously, and basic humanity ("Do the right thing") seems to have been thrown out the window.

You sound like you believe that Trump will act rationally, with careful consideration.

I don't. I just believe that nearly everyone else in the system will act far more rationally.

Remember, the wisdom of our system is that the President has very, very little role in elections. There's no federal department of elections, there's no direct federal control over elections processes, and not a ton of federal influence on the actual mechanics of voting. It doesn't matter very much whether the President acts rationally or not, because most of the people who are important to how elections are actually run are state officials or have lifetime appointments.

The bottom line is if the feds seize the 2020 ballots and then come out with a significantly different count than what the State did, that creates more chaos and lack of trust in the institution of our elections.

Then Spankee will have stuck his neck into the MAGA gallows.

Why?

Because the paperwork/bureaucracy for the state count was already done and public.

Whoever CLAIMS "major changes due to a federal recount" will HAVE to document each and every change--which they will not be able to do. Georgia could pull the level to hang Spankee. NOT something he wants--but COULD happen if THEY decide Spankee's lies stop NOW!

Yup. We used to think our system was pretty foolproof. Now, we are discovering how much the entire system relied on politicians, fundamentally, being people of good will.

I don't think anyone thought (or should have thought) the system was foolproof. Political power can never be eliminated or controlled - it can only be set against itself. So our system is set up not to assume that people are of good will, but to give people separate areas of power and different political incentives from each other.

Take a step back a moment. Trump has generated a massive amount of noise and furor. But the most important thing about Trump is that, above all else, he is very good at appearances and very short on substance. If you're favorably inclined to him you call that a showman, if you're disfavorably inclined towards him it's that he's a con man.

I recommend reading this interview, "Has Trump Achieved a Lot Less Than It Seems?," and you'll see that Trump has largely not been able to make substantive changes to "the entire system." In fact, he's been able to do very little to "the system" at all:

https://archive.ph/XrD95

Sure, he's managed to wreak more havoc on colleges and in the parts of the government that do things that conservatives hate than most prior Presidents, but only because he's heedless and thoughtless and uninterested in politics other than his own self. And he's managed to stuff his dealings with petty venality that make the featherbedding of the old Tammany Hall bosses seem quaint. But for the most part, he's been unable to effectuate any durable change to very much at all. Not because people are of good will, but because the President's power (while immense) is still structurally limited.

I thought the example of NIH funding illustrated the con man/showman/"sound and fury" quite well. Trump didn't want to spend the money, and tried hard not to spend the money. But they ended up spending the money. Because at the end of the day, Trump is constrained:

N.I.H. looks very different. In the first six months of the year, N.I.H. spending was far behind its 2024 levels. There seemed to have been a decision made to withhold spending, to redirect spending, and I would argue, even to force a confrontation over impoundment — the president just ignoring Congress and not spending appropriated money on N.I.H. money.

Then in June or early July, you see a sudden acceleration of N.I.H. spending. Clearly, there was some decision made that the money had to go out the door by the end of the year.

They did that in a way that deformed or distorted some of that spending. They decided to spend multiyear money all in one year, on a broad range of federal grants, in order to be able to get the money out the door so that 100 percent of the appropriated amount would be spent by the end of the fiscal year.

That’s going to create problems down the road because with these multiyear grants, the institutions that receive them are not really equipped to spend them all in one year.

But in any case, a decision was made — I think it’s unavoidable, from looking at the numbers — to avoid an impoundment fight and to spend all the money. And by the end of the year, N.I.H. had spent 100 percent of its appropriated money for the year.

You forgot tactic No. 6:


6. Encouraging and inviting millions upon millions of illegal immigrants to settle in the United States, have children here, provide billions in government benefits to them (while accepting the requisite direct or indirect political contributions to themselves or their cronies); and ultimately to grant them all amnesty to create a permanent electoral majority in exchange for the largesse.

Oh fuck! It's the DEMOCRATS who are trying to do that, not the Republicans.

Sorry I got confused, my bad.

You forgot tactic No. 6:

6. Encouraging and inviting millions upon millions of illegal immigrants to settle in the United States, have children here, provide billions in government benefits to them (while accepting the requisite direct or indirect political contributions to themselves or their cronies); and ultimately to grant them all amnesty to create a permanent electoral majority in exchange for the largesse.

Oh fuck! It's the DEMOCRATS who are trying to do that, not the Republicans.

Sorry I got confused, my bad.

Does the name RONALD REAGAN (i.e. "Raygun Ronnie") RING A BELL?

"President Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) on November 6, 1986, granting legal status to nearly 3 million undocumented immigrants who met specific requirements, including continuous residence since January 1, 1982. It was designed to balance amnesty with employer sanctions for hiring illegal workers."

So, precedent set:

1. About 4.5 yrs of continuous residency in US,
2. No other requirements stated.

So, about 4.5-million aliens granted legal status TODAY would be close to the same proportion allowed relative to the total US population. Or would we need to allow MORE ???

ROFLMAO !!!

Let Barron Trump work in the fields picking lettuce, tomatoes, beans, and so on. It would be SO "morals building" for HIM. And it gives him a REAL job, learning the real world.

A global effort to conspire against the Cheeto, mmmkay.

When I run across conspiracy theorists, I ask them if their roads are good (nobody answers yes). I ask them what the oldest pothole on their most commonly traveled routes are - they know it. We all know the potholes, conspiracy theorist or not.

Then I tell them that the government can't even conspire to fix *potholes*, let alone [Named Absurd Conspiracy].

I do not believe that the Administration has any incentive to do 3, 4, or 5. I don't think they're really within the realm of possibility, and absolutely not probable.

No sense in arguing this. My experience has been that people who generally agree with me politically, family and friends, mostly called me an alarmist back in 2020 and over the last year. And every time, real events turned out worse than I ever imagined. We shall see.

When I run across conspiracy theorists

Do you back up and run over them again? Or just once? Maybe you need a MUCH heavier vehicle.

Try an asphalt roller.

the oldest pothole on their most commonly traveled routes are - they know it.

They can't fix the potholes in their irrational beliefs. We know, self-created and irreparable.

Then I tell them that the government can't even conspire to fix *potholes*, let alone [Named Absurd Conspiracy].

Ah, but that's only because it's the government that's creating the potholes. It's a vast far reaching conspiracy I tells ya!

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